Scientific Indiana: Purdue University

When I submitted my book Scientific Indiana to The History Press for publication, some of the chapters had to be cut. The blog entry that follows is a chapter on the history of Purdue University.

The story of Purdue University began when, in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant Act which gave public land to any state that agreed to use the money from the sale of the land to establish a college that taught agriculture and engineering. In 1865, the Indiana General Assembly voted to take advantage of the law and began looking for a site. Cities throughout the state put together facility and funding proposals in an effort to coax the new school to their community. The winner was Tippecanoe County which offered $50,000 from the county, $150,000 (equivalent to nearly three million in today’s dollars) from John Purdue, a local businessman and philanthropist, and a hundred acres of land across the Wabash River from Lafayette. In 1869, the legislature named the college Purdue University in honor of its principal benefactor. 

Construction began on the first buildings in 1871 and the next year, Richard Owen was named as the first president. As you may recall, Owen was a professor of natural sciences at Indiana University and the son of Robert Owen, a socialist reformer who created a short-lived utopian community at New Harmony. Owen made several controversial proposals to the trustees including building more comfortable dormitories, emphasizing agriculture over other disciplines, and having disciplinary action for students decided upon by a student jury. The trustees frowned on Owen’s ideas and so in March of 1874, Owen resigned as president without ever receiving a salary. Owen did, however, sell the school a collection of science books that formed the basis of its library. Indianapolis educator Abraham Shortridge succeeded Owen as Purdue’s president. Classes began at Purdue on September 16, 1874 with thirty-nine students and six professors. The next year Purdue awarded its first degree, in chemistry, to John Bradford Harper, who would go on to build the Black Rock Dam in New Mexico.

Emerson E. White, Purdue’s third president from 1876 to 1883, interpreted the Morrill Land Grant Act rather strictly. Instead of copying the classical template of other universities, he argued that Purdue should be an “industrial college” with a curriculum emphasizing science, technology, and agriculture. Part of White’s plan to distinguish Purdue from classical universities was to eliminate the fraternity system, a controversial issue that was ultimately settled by the Indiana Supreme Court, which ruled against White and allowed fraternities on campus. White resigned in protest. Although he lost the argument over fraternities, he won the debate over the direction of the university. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Purdue was organized into schools of agriculture, engineering, and pharmacy. By 1925, Purdue had the largest undergraduate engineering enrollment in the country, a distinction it would maintain for the next fifty years.

Purdue is probably best known for its prodigious production of astronauts earning it the nickname Mother of Astronauts. According to U. S. News & World Report, Purdue has produced more astronauts (the current count is 25) than any other university except the military academies. Over a third of NASA’s crewed missions have had at least one Purdue grad on board. Future astronauts enroll in one of the few schools of aeronautics and astronautics in the country, established in 1945. The best known of Purdue’s alumni astronaut corps is Neil Armstrong, the first person to step foot on the moon. A statue of Armstrong sits in front of Purdue’s Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering portraying him as a student in casual dress with his hand resting on a stack of books and a slide rule. Fittingly, the very last person to walk on the moon, Eugene Cernan, was also a Purdue graduate. Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, also hails from Purdue. Grissom was the second American to fly in space and the first to go up in the Gemini program. Tragically, Grissom, along with fellow Purdue grad Roger Chaffee, died in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967.

Purdue also has a long and illustrious history in the related field of aviation. The school offered the nation’s first class in flight training, the first four-year degree in aviation, and operated the first university airport. One of Purdue’s aviation pioneers is Ralph Johnson, who invented spraying equipment used for agricultural applications, developed a new method of de-icing plane propellers, and creating a standardized checklist of cockpit procedures. Aviator Amelia Earhart served on the Purdue faculty as a counselor for women’s careers for two years before attempting her ill-fated 1937 flight around the world. Purdue funded the airplane she flew, a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, but she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean and was never heard from again.

As a science-oriented university, it is not surprising that Purdue has produced a plethora of faculty and alumni that have made major contributions to science, engineering, and technology. Notable past faculty includes food safety crusader Harvey Wiley, Golden Gate bridge designer Charles Alton Ellis, thermophysics scientist Yeram Touloukian, radio pioneer Reginald Fessenden, and efficiency expert Lillian Moller Gilbreth. Notable current faculty include mathematician Louis de Branges de Bourcia, who proved the Bieberbach Conjecture, biologist Michael Rossmann, who made a genetic map of the virus that causes the common cold, and geophysicist H. Jay Melosh, an expert on impact cratering. 

Many Purdue alumni have also made important contributions to science and engineering. Elwood Mead graduated from Purdue in 1884 and went on to become the chief engineer of the Hoover Dam project. The dam’s reservoir, Lake Mead, is named in his honor. R. Games Slayter was a tuba player in Purdue’s marching band, graduating in 1921 with a degree in chemical engineering. He went on to develop Fiberglass. The Slayter Center of Performing Arts, an outdoor amphitheater facility on the Purdue campus, is named after him.  Among the most famous of Purdue’s alumni is Orville Redenbacher who graduated in 1928 with a degree in agriculture. He went on to develop a delicious gourmet popcorn. Most significantly, Deng Jiaxian earned a doctorate in physics from Purdue in 1950, returned to the newly established People’s Republic of China, his native land, and spent over twenty years secretly working on both atomic and thermonuclear weapons for China. He is now regarded as the “Father of China’s nuclear program,” a dubious distinction from an American point of view.

As for Nobel Prizes, Purdue can boast nine winners among scholars associated with the university as a faculty member, researcher, or alumni. Two faculty members, Herbert C. Brown and Ei-ichi Negishi, won the award for chemistry while at Purdue. Two alumni who earned their bachelor’s degrees at Purdue, Edward Mills Purcell and Ben Roy Mottelson, won the prize for physics. All four of these scientists have a strong connection to Purdue and are portrayed later in this book. Another faculty member, Julian Schwinger, also won the physics prize, but his time at Purdue was interrupted by his WWII work at MIT’s radiation laboratory. Finally, economist Vernon L. Smith, a professor at Purdue from 1955 until 1967, won the economics prize in 2002 for his contributions to behavioral economics.

Three other Purdue-affiliated scientists won Nobel Prizes, but they were only at Purdue for a very short time. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a visiting professor, won the 1945 Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of a law of quantum mechanics called the exclusion principle which states that no two particles can occupy the same quantum state at the same time. Physicist Clinton Davisson, a research assistant, won the 1937 Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of electron-diffraction in the famous Davisson-Germer experiment which confirmed the idea that particles like electrons could behave like waves. Finally, chemist Akira Suzuki, a post-doctoral student, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of an organic chemical reaction. 

Today, Purdue University has an enrollment of over 40,000 students with about 2,500 tenured or tenure track faculty and offers majors in over 200 subjects. The school is ranked as one of the best public universities in the country and has a very active research program. The Purdue faculty maintain hundreds of research laboratories scattered across the campus and the state. The Purdue Research Park Network is a group of four research parks in West Lafayette, Merrillville, New Albany, and Indianapolis where over 260 companies employing about 4,500 people do cutting-edge research in areas such as biology, materials science, and information science. The Discovery Park in West Lafayette is a six-building, 40-acre multidisciplinary research area established in 2001 with funding from the Lilly Endowment and the state of Indiana. It includes a nanotechnology center ranked as among the best in the country.