Saturday Notes

by Cliopatria

Had you been a candidate for admission to MIT in 1869, you'd have taken entrance examinations in algebra, arithmetic, English, and geometry. Try them. Would you have made the cut? Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.

Holland Cotter,"Friendship in Letters and Paint," NYT, 28 September, reviews"Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Émile Bernard," an exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan.

William Saleton,"The Mind-Booty Problem: Rethinking the Age of Sexual Consent," Slate, 27 September, argues that

The age of majority and the age of competence are coming apart. The age of competence is fracturing, and the age of female puberty is declining. It's time to abandon the myth of the ‘age of consent' and lower the threshold for legal sex.

Saleton understands, at least, that age of consent is historically conditioned and subect to change.

To complement his fine article,"Through a Lens, Darkly," Vanity Fair, September, David Margolick and Vanity Fair have a photo essay,"The Integration of Little Rock, Central." Hat tip.

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Andrew D. Todd - 10/1/2007

Well, nineteenth century engineering was not very mathematical. In fact, the major introduction of mathematics into engineering curricula was much later, circa 1950. The defining skill of an engineer in the nineteenth century, vis a vis a skilled craftsman, was drawing in one form or another, either mechanical drawing, or mapmaking. A mechanical engineer could make and use blueprints. A civil engineer could make contour maps, survey elevations, and suchlike, which a mere surveyor could not. A surveyor only knew enough to lay out property lines.

The Franklin Institute, the United States' first engineering society at one point ran its own secondary school to teach drawing and elementary mathematics along with the usual curricula of Latin and other languages.
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Reading note of:

Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia's Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute, 1824-1865, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1974.

The Franklin Institute was first organized by Samuel Merrick, a gentleman commercially interested in manufacturing who had been blackballed by a mechanic's society on social class grounds (ie. suspicion of being a "boss" seeking to appropriate the workingman's craft "mystery"). The Institute, as organized, had close ties to other genteel Philadelphia institutions such as the American Philosophical Society and the University of Pennsylvania. It was in effect the United States' first engineering society.

The Franklin Institute was constantly starting new programs of every imaginable description. Those programs which succeeded were generally taken over by some other body, usually a government department with greater resources. The failures cost money, but they were practically always papered over by the new programs which were being started. The closest the Franklin Institute came to disaster was in being engaged in trying to build a new headquarters when the 1837 panic hit. The resulting debts were eventually paid off.

The Franklin Institute was concerned with the development of the patent law, and contributed importantly, by lobbying and otherwise, to preventing the emergence of a system of guild privilege. Until the patent law was rationalized, the Journal of the Franklin Institute served as an ad hoc patent office gazette.

The Franklin Institute ran a variety of education programs, for all kinds of people. One of the first was a night-school class in mechanical drawing, the defining skill of the engineer in the nineteenth century. There were also public lectures, varying widely in quality, from professional symposia for working engineers down to popular science lectures attended primarily by elderly ladies. For a time, the Franklin Institute ran its own technical high school, aimed at producing a type of gentleman engineer who could either go into the family firm or attend the University of Pennsylvania.

The Institute sponsored exhibitions, aimed at promoting American manufactures.

The Institute organized large-scale industrial research, on the efficiency of water wheels (with industrial funding) and the safety of steam boilers (with government money). In effect, the Institute was functioning as a national laboratory.