History
MIT
William Barton Rogers founded Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1861. While William held his faculty position at the University of Virginia in the 1840s, he frequently traveled north to the New England area. In New England he found an intellectual and social culture more to his liking: people who valued education and hard work along with financial enterprise.
After speaking to Boston philanthropist John Lowell in 1846, Henry Rogers asked his brother William, who was still in Virginia, to draft a plan for a scientific school. William outlined his plan in a March 1846 letter to Henry. A group called the “Associated Institutions of Science and the Art” prepared a “memorial” seeking some of that land for various educational purposes, but their request was not successful—at least not at first. The next year, the same group enlisted William Barton Rogers to spearhead a new land grant proposal, and as part of that campaign, Rogers produced a 30-page pamphlet titled Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology, which was distributed widely.
The first classes at the Institute were held in February 1865 in the Mercantile Building in downtown Boston. Construction on the first building, later named for Rogers and shown here, was completed in 1866.
It was not until 1916 that MIT moved across the river to Cambridge.
Lincoln Laboratory
Lincoln Laboratory was established in 1951 to build the nation's first air defense system. However, its roots date back to the MIT Radiation Laboratory, which was formed out of the Physics Department during World War II to develop radar for the Allied war effort.
The explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb in August 1949, followed by the Soviet development of bombers that could traverse the Arctic Circle, created a significant new security threat to the United States. In response to this threat, the Department of Defense commissioned MIT to take a leadership role in addressing this problem. The result was the establishment of MIT Lincoln Laboratory to design and develop the first air defense system for the United States.
The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc.
A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Doc Draper founded a teaching laboratory in the 1930s that by the 1950s grew into the sophisticated engineering organization that designed and developed the world’s most accurate and reliable guidance systems and instruments for intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well as the highly precise, ultra-reliable guidance and control systems needed to guide the first astronauts to the moon and back safely to Earth in 1969. That laboratory became an independent not-for-profit in 1973. Since becoming independent, Draper has sustained its preeminence in guidance, navigation and control technology and has expanded its expertise in other areas, including microelectromechanical systems and electronics packaging. It continues its long service to the U.S. Navy and NASA while providing solutions to problems of national importance for and with many other organizations in government, industry and academia.