The Two Towers: Main

a sixty-thousand-pound load as a fifty-cent piece. It was also so reliable that in Worcester Tech's hundredth year, the old scale was still in constant use at the hydraulic laboratory. In a small one-story building on the site of the old woolen mill, this Fairbanks scale was placed near the copper-lined weighing tank. Other indispensable equipment was the Venturi meter, thirty-six inches in diameter, purchased by Mr. Salisbury after the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Through this meter, the largest in the world, all the water used at the Fair had passed.

George Alden guided the work of the hydraulic laboratory during its first two years before his resignation; by later provisions he was to influence its activities permanently. Assisting him was a young graduate of 1894, Charles Metcalf Allen, and thus began another indissoluble relationship of "man and lab" which would span more than a half century.

In the summer of 1896 young Charlie Allen shared a third-floor room in the Higgins home with his friend, John Higgins. The Higgins family, with the exception of John, had gone to Europe with the hope that Mr. Higgins might recuperate from a breakdown of physical and nervous energies. John, a graduate of Tech's Electrical Engineering course the previous spring, had set up a completely automatic system in his room. By pushing the right buttons, he and Charlie Allen could raise the window shades, open the furnaces, and even feed Nelson (the horse) his morning oats.

John Higgins had also become plant engineer and shipping clerk of the Plunger Elevator Company, which his father and Professor Alden had bought from Worcester Tech and transferred to Barber's Crossing near the increasingly successful Norton Company. For his thesis in 1896 John Higgins had submitted a plan for installing steam power and electricity in this elevator factory.

Electrical Engineering was becoming the predominant course at Tech, straining the resources of the Physics Department under whose care it had started with Professor Kimball before his death in 1897. The number of majors in Electrical Engineering equaled the graduates of all other departments; it was evident that accommodations would soon have to be made for this greedy innovation which gave signs of encompassing almost every area of human activity.

At the same bitter board meeting in which the Washburn Shops had been disrupted--in the strange way incidents have of balancing each other--a young Purdue University professor, Harold B. Smith, had been engaged to organize an extensive course in Electrical Engineering Its scope was to broaden so rapidly that though the department offered eleven courses in 1897, it had "limited" them to forty-one by 1915.

When the third president of the school, Edmund A. Engler, ordered a reorganization of curriculum in 1905, Professor Smith wrote a dramatic report of his cramped department in which he said a complete "strangulation" was imminent.