The Two Towers: Main

I think that our technical schools ought to have for the instructors the best machinists, the best machine designers, the best engineers, the best draughtsmen, and the best and most cultured gentlemen that America affords, regardless of what it costs.
      --Milton Higgins

The total neglect of hydraulic engineering during my stay at the Institute was a serious omission which actually has caused me much additional labor.
      --John M. Goodell ('92), 1897

this one did not last long--small consolation to the families who carried its grief and the full knowledge that war leaves no unimportant tears. The first Worcester officer to be killed in this war was a Tech student, Lieutenant Edmund Benchley.

Pelham W. Lincoln, also a Tech student, wrote to his mother soon after the battle of San Juan Hill: "We camped on the battlefield where the Spaniards made their last final stand. All day we have been throwing up breast works with our plates, cups, bayonets, or any odd thing we could find. Was not Lieutenant Benchley's death very sad? He was shot through the heart and never said a word. I heard that the Hornet was destroyed in the naval fight, but cannot help hoping Ralph Earle escaped some way."

He did, and came back to write a later chapter of Worcester Tech's story.

Very soon after the War a corps of extremely competent teachers took over the task of remaking Worcester Tech's reputation. It was to be a growing time at many unexpected edges, a time when roots would go deep for a later harvest.

One tangible indication of Tech's new directions was the hydraulic laboratory founded to study "the phenomenon of flowing water." Ironically, it too was "hydraulic"--in partial redemption of the word which had become anathema at the Institute.

This laboratory had been initiated at an alumni dinner in 1893 by Professor Alden. He had recently seen, he said, an old water privilege which would be an ideal setting for hydraulic experiments. The land covered perhaps two hundred acres and at least two-thirds of it was under water. Stephen Salisbury III, always listening for a good cause to support, casually interrupted: "I own that land. If you want it, I'll give it to you."

There was only one other school in the country with such a laboratory.

Since time immemorial, of course, water had been a subject of human study. There had been wells for holding water, canals for channeling it, reservoirs for storing it, aqueducts for moving it, siphons and pumps for coaxing it. In addition to its obvious benefits on which life itself relied, it had served many other practical purposes. The flow of water had been used to tell time, its pressure to move objects. Then, too, it had been used for power. But the new concept that this power might be transformed and transmitted great distances had pried open many fields of inquiry.

With the ponds and brooks of Mr. Salisbury's gift, which had originally provided power for three woolen and grist mills, Tech also received all "water rights, flowage rights, one corn cracker, one portable grist mill, one shoddy picker, one rag duster, one cupola fan, one water grindstone, one two-horse cart, pulleys, beltings, sacks, measures, grain, and a Fairbanks standard scale."

To this variety was later added the Fairbanks scale which Tech had acquired soon after its exhibition at the World's Fair in 1876. This pair of scales was so sensitive that it would as agreeably weigh