The Two Towers: Main

ricants, fuels, structure of metals, ventilation, heating, refrigeration, metallurgy, and internal combustion. Upstairs, M. Lawrence Price and B. Leighton Wellman supervised the work of students in five well-lighted design rooms. (These two professors had for seven years shared an office in the old M. E. building.) Professor Wellman had recently completed the manuscript of his comprehensive Descriptive Geometry and could declare in an entirely convincing way, "Engineering is design." There were many to say that his book was the best of its kind in the country; even he had to admit it was the biggest.

The Higgins Laboratories had been the first building erected on campus for academic activities in thirty years. That is, with the exception of Kinnicutt Hall, which in 1939 had been added to Salisbury for the departments of Physics, Chemistry, and Chemical Engineering. There had been such an increased interest in these areas that very soon afterwards the space proved inadequate again. Another appendage added to Salisbury was this time utilized by Ernest Wilson (who united the Chemistry and Chemical Engineering under one head in 1940) as a unit operations laboratory for Chemical Engineering. There, according to undergraduates, the Chemical Engineering majors had "more air per capita to contaminate."

But not for long. Hardly had the laboratory been finished before Professor Wilson needed still more room. So did Morton Masius and his Physics Department, of which he had become chief in 1939. Prophetically, the classes of these departments spilled over into eighteen rooms of other buildings.

Electrical Engineering, with Theodore H. Morgan since 1931, had had its own kind of progression from electric lighting to electronics. It had become clear that this department could not be disassociated from the others on campus, and more and more often Hobart Newell found himself out at the Alden Hydraulic Laboratory handling the electronic phases of hydraulic research.

No facility of the school was used more extensively for research and defense than this laboratory, its unique value coming from its natural resources as well as from its leadership. During the War the applications of flow phenomena became immeasurably diversified. Hydraulics found itself involved in ballistics, propulsion, turbulence, diffusion, aerodynamics, oceanography, fog dispersal, ship resistance and a dozen other related problems. The laboratory had made projectile, hydrophone, and endurance tests; it had calibrated ship logs, made flood control surveys and recommendations, and, of course, had modeled many dams and rivers.

Charlie Allen retired from teaching, but not as director of the laboratory, in 1945. For two years more than a half century he had been accumulating medals for his pioneer work in hydraulics. For the same length of time he had been giving his incomparable lecture on Gasoline, Its Uses and Abuses. "Never once has he, his cigar, or his audience exploded," marveled The Journal. When

We strive to equip a man with his sleeves rolled up, ready to go to work, to set him on the threshold of his career, well equipped for his task.
      --Wat Tyler Cluverius, 1947

Hobart H. Newell