An expanding market for thin steel structures (1930’s) created a demand for rational design standards. Dean Solomon Cady Hollister obtained support from industry to conduct required research. George Winter (Pd.D. CEE 1940) and he joined the faculty of the School of Civil Engineering immediately and..Read More
Olin Hall of Chemical Engineering was opened in 1942. Named after Franklin W. Olin (Civil Engineerings, B.S., 1886), it was the first building of the current Engineering Campus
Sidney Kaufman (1930, AB; Physics, 1934, Ph.D.) collected the first off-shore seismic reflection profile. As chief of a water seismic crew that normally operated in bays, marshes, inlets and lagoons, Kaufman in 1937 found a rock formation that extended from a bay near Corpus Christi..Read More
If you’ve been watching the Stanley Cup or baseball lately, chances are you’ve heard a direct descendant of Laurens Hammond’s 1934 invention – the electric organ. Hammond, ’16, created the inexpensive alternative to pipe organs that immediately found a home in churches, ballparks, and ice..Read More
First retractable landing gear for military planes was developed in 1932 by Leroy Grumman, (Mechanical Engineering, 1916). Designed at the request of the US Navy to replace hand-cranked landing gearing, it was first installed on the Grumman FF-1 biplane fight
Pearl Gertrude Sheldon’s (A.B., 1908, M.A. 1909, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Ph.D., 1911) early research into shale fractures in the 1920s laid the groundwork for much of the North American shale gas exploration. Sheldon, a structural geology student spent several years afoot in the region..Read More
The FP-54 Pliotron electrometer was created by Lloyd P. Smith during his doctorate studies at Cornell in the late 1920s. This device was capable of amplifying direct currents as small as 10(-17) amps. Smith would later become the first director of Cornell’s Department of Engineering..Read More
The namesake of the Pew Engineering Quad, Joseph N. Pew, Jr. (Mechanical Engineering, B.S., 1908) and later Vice President of Sun Oil Company developed in 1926 a gyroscopic instrument with a high-speed camera and timing device for preventing the drilling of crooked holes in oil..Read More
A unified College of Engineering combined mechanical and civil engineering, which had been taught since the university’s first day of classes in 1868.
The first synchronous electric clock (Hammond Clock) was created in 1920 by Laurens Hammond (Mechanical Engineering, 1916). Hammond also convinced power station engineers to use a 60-cycle as a standard for electric current. This allowed his electric clock to keep time based on oscillations in..Read More