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ARMOUR INSTITUTE |
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By Walter Hendricks |
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| The merchant and the minister watched
daily their dream taking shape stone by stone. You see, it was a practical
and realistic dream. And as the building grew, so grew their plans. Armour
and Gunsaulus were raising their monument to the practical educational
needs of a new world - a technical college, with departments of mechanical
and electrical engineering, architecture, and library science, and other
departments or schools, of domestic arts, of commerce, of music, and of
kindergartens. On December 1, 1892, Frank W. Gunsaulus took office as the
first president of Armour Institute. A month before the opening, four hundred students had been enrolled, and applications were coming in with every mail. The faculty, all carefully selected, some of the men outstanding in their fields, were busy receiving and installing the various apparatus which, it was claimed, would make the new Institute more complete than any other technological institute in the country. Proudest they were of their mechanical and electrical equipment. The [1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago] had been one of their principal hunting grounds, and nearly anything of value is said to have had the Institute purchase tag attached to it. The initial courses offered in the technical college were mechanical, electrical and mining engineering. The last was discontinued at the end of the first year. Important, permanent additions were civil engineering in 1899; chemical engineering in 1901; and fire protection engineering, the only course of its kind in the country in 1903. |
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| Page last updated on May 17, 2000. |
