Perched atop a promontory in Hoboken, overlooking the Hudson River, is the 13-story Stevens Center at the Stevens Institute of Technology. The area on which the building sits was once home to the castle of Col. John Stevens, who is linked with various inventions, with the founding of Hoboken, and with giving birth to a son, Edwin, who founded the institute.
Edwin Stevens sowed the seeds for one of Hoboken’s most prominent historical landmarks by leaving a $500,000 endowment and patch of land worth $150,000 in his will to establish an “institution of learning.” He died in 1867.
A charter for the Steven Institute of Technology was obtained in 1870.
Institute opens
On Feb. 15, 1870, Stevens’ executors – wife Martha Stevens, Rev. Samuel Dod, and relative William Shippen – obtained a charter from the state for the institute. These three trustees selected Dr. Henry Morton, a University of Pennsylvania chemistry professor and former secretary of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, as president of the university. They also hired architects to draw up plans for the buildings.
In the summer of 1871, the school was ready to open.
The first student body contained 21 undergraduates – two juniors, three sophomores and 16 freshmen. There were seven professors on the faculty.
The institute’s first catalog set forth ways in which the institute would provide “general and not merely industrial training.” They included training in mathematics, physics, mechanical engineering, mechanical drawing, chemistry and metallurgy, and French and German, as well as a department of belles-lettres.
Stevens grows
The mechanical lab was built in 1875. The institute was the first school in the country to offer a mechanical engineering degree, and that was the only degree it offered for several decades.
However, civil, electrical and chemical engineering rounded out the curriculum, as well as the economics of engineering.
In 1883, professors of Marine Engineering and Applied Electricity were appointed.
At the school’s 25th anniversary, in 1895, Martha Stevens donated two plots of land at Sixth and River streets. The institute’s second president, Dr. Alexander Crombie Humphreys, was an 1881 graduate of the school. He took over when Morton passed away in 1902, and served until he died in 1927. Humphreys was credited with adding the economics aspect of the curriculum.
Extracurricular activities
The students, of course, had time for fun in between exams.
In 1878, they began the tradition of burning textbooks. First, it was an English book, but they soon preferred calculus books. The “Cremation of Calculus” became an annual ritual that continued for decades, and bills were posted before each cremation to inform students of the impending sentence.
They also founded their first fraternity, Theta Xi, in 1874; a lacrosse team in 1884; a student newspaper – the Stute – in 1904; an Honor Board in 1908 and the Student Council in 1912.
The gymnasium was completed in 1916.
By 1910, about 1,500 students had graduated from the institute. By 1945, the school’s 75th anniversary, 4,700 students had graduated.
In 1958, the school added a science curriculum.
In 1971, the school began admitting women, and Lenore Schupak became the first female graduate of the institute when she graduated in three years. She went to work for an environmental consulting firm.
In 1983, the institute began requiring all incoming freshmen to have a computer.
Campus life in war and peace
As the institute expanded, it began planning a system for housing its growing population on campus. Two new dormitories – Palmer and Jacobus – were constructed in 1937 and still house undergraduates today.
Three years later, as America found itself embroiled in an overseas war, the engineers of Steven were called upon to assist with technical operations. Dr. Harvey Nathaniel Davis, the former Harvard professor who had succeeded Humphreys as president, feared that his students’ expertise would be wasted in combat and began making speeches encouraging the military to ensure that they stay in technical positions.
Davis’ advice was heeded, and he devised a system to keep such positions filled while at the same time allowing his students to finish school on schedule.
The “Accelerated Service Plan” gave students three terms with no summer vacation, and each third term would involve filling a technical job in a defense plant. Students were rotated through 171 available jobs so that the military’s needs were always filled.
From 1943 until the end of the war, the Navy paid the school to house and train 505 servicemen.
Notable events and graduates
After the war, the school continued to expand. In 1968, the admissions office underestimated the size of the incoming freshman class, and the school had to build a “floating dorm” on the Hudson for $130,000.
Several notable events have occurred at the school since the war. In 1953, Marlon Brando toured the campus while filming On the Waterfront. In 1985, Frank Sinatra accepted an honorary degree from the institute, which he had dreamed of attending as a boy.
Stevens currently has 1,400 undergraduates and 2,600 graduate students who are aspiring to the Stevens family’s success and trying to live up to the school’s motto, “Per Aspera Ad Astra,” which means “To the stars through striving.”
Famous alumni of Stevens include sculptor and mobile designer Alexander Calder, Texas Instruments founder Eugene McDermott, bubble wrap inventor Al Fielding, former President of Ecuador Leon Febres Cordero, and Mervyn D. Weich, founder of BJ’s Wholesale Clubs.
Editor’s note: A full version of this column was originally printed in Hoboken History Issue No. 13, published by the Hoboken Historical Museum. Please visit the museum at 1301 Hudson St. for more information. To read past columns from this year-long series, visit www.hobokenreporter.com.