Page History

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Karl T. Compton came to MIT as president in 1930 from the Physics Department at Princeton. During his first years in office he had to face financial problems at the Institute caused by the Depression. One of his early accomplishments was the restructuring of the Institute's administrative organization. The departments were grouped into three Schools and two auxiliary divisions with a single faculty. Compton's most important achievement in the 1930s was the building up of the science departments and the encouraging of research throughout the Institute. In his correspondence and other statements, he showed awareness of the increasingly scientific nature of metallurgy and the growing importance of materials, as will be shown by several quotations in Chapter 4. 

The Department of Mining Engineering and Metallurgy 

As mentioned above, Richards retired in 1914 and Hofman was in charge of the Department from 1915 to 1920. At his request, his responsibility was reduced to the Metallurgy option from 1920 to 1922, the year of his retirement. 

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The introduction of the new curriculum was upset by the effects of World War I. The report of the Department for 1918-19 comments on the interference by the Student Army Training Corps program with the academic program end mentions an emergency curriculum which was in effect for several years. 

Wiki MarkupIn response to the new status of physical metallurgy, an option in this subdiscipline was established in 1927-28. This option substituted applied optics, industrial radiology, optical identification of crystalline compounds, and physical crystallography for engineering courses taken by production metallurgists. In commenting on the new option, the President's Report mentioned the "growing importance of. .. preparing metals for specific and new uses, for creating hitherto unknown properties or the enhancement of physical properties by alloying and \ [heat\] treating" (President's Report for 1927-28, p. 19). With the introduction of the new option, the undergraduate options were Mining Engineering, Petroleum Production, Metallurgy and Physical Metallurgy.  

In 1931-32, three new subjects were introduced as electives open to graduate and undergraduate students. One subject was aluminum and magnesium alloys. The President's Report for that year called attention to the growing importance of light metals for the aircraft industry. A second new subject was welding metallurgy. The Report mentioned the role of welding in manufacturing and added: "It is believed that the Institute is the first educational institution in the country which offers instruction in this subject." The third subject was corrosion and heat-resistant alloys, which, in retrospect, was a particularly appropriate choice, in view of their emerging role within a relatively few years. 

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