The Two Towers: Main

tracted to this eastern school, which otherwise might have entirely escaped their attention.

Glen A. Richardson came to the Electrical Engineering Department in time to supervise the renovation of the Atwater Kent Laboratories and the removal of forty truckloads of obsolete material from the big building. "But not the ideas," insisted Hobart Newell, teaching since 1921 and now trying to discover why the high voltage lines he had pioneered in the previous generation were raising such havoc with radio and television communications. "No, the ideas haven't changed, just our understanding of them. Why, even if they deliver electricity to your back door in a bucket--which they may well soon do--the principles will be the same."

Not yet reduced to bucket size, the heavy equipment of the laboratory had nevertheless become so miniaturized that the great open laboratory was now a yawning empty space which Dr. Richardson soon began filling with laboratories for the study of electronics, transistors, computers, servo-mechanisms, high frequency circuits, direct energy conversion, and microwaves. There were additional areas for graduate study, conference rooms, and offices. Across the street, the department's acoustics laboratory was supervised by William B. Wadsworth in the house which had been the birthplace of Milton P. Higgins II, a generous Tech trustee and the grandson of the man of the same name who figured so prominently in the early Tech story.

On a clear and breezy June morning in 1964 Dr. Richard- son had the opportunity to meet a member of Tech's first class in Electrical Engineering, Robert S. Parks, who had come to the Hill for his 71st reunion.

"I started out in Mechanical Engineering," said this dapper gentleman, aged ninety-two, who after graduation in 1893 had gone on to pioneer in industrial air conditioning.

"When this snap course about electricity came along--well, I wasn't going to pass it up," joshed Mr. Parks as he and the new professor companionably traced the long journey which electrical engineering had taken in the last seventy-five years from a set of simple principles to a maze of complex applications. In 1964 Electrical Engineering was by far the biggest department in the Institute, graduating seventy-five from a class of two hundred and thirty-five.

Down in Kaven Hall Carl H. Koontz had stepped into the place of his senior professor, Andrew H. Holt, who died on Thanksgiving morning in 1956. Professor Koontz had been a member of the Civil Engineering Department since 1945, had moved with it to Kaven in 1954, and was now shaping a new philosophy for its instruction. Some specialties, such as surveying, drafting, and stereotomy, on which the students had formerly worked a great portion of their time in Civil Engineering, had been parceled out to specialists and technicians, while engineering itself had become