Across the river, a neoclassical dome and columned facade face Boston, marking one of history's most productive engines of science and technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded in 1861 and moved to its current Cambridge campus along the Charles River in 1916, its neoclassical dome and columned facade looking south across the river to Boston. MIT has produced 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, and alumni who have founded more than 30,000 companies, including companies whose combined revenues would make them the world's tenth-largest economy.
The technologies developed here include radar, which was developed at the Radiation Laboratory during World War II and is credited with saving Britain from the Luftwaffe; the World Wide Web's underlying protocols, developed partly here; GPS navigation; and contributions to nuclear energy, chemotherapy, and the Human Genome Project. The Building 20, a temporary structure built in 1943 for wartime radar research, was so fertile as a workspace — because its flexible layout allowed researchers from different disciplines to work alongside each other — that it became a model for innovation spaces worldwide before its demolition in 1998. Look across the Charles at the Boston skyline; MIT's position between the river and Cambridge has made it a literal bridge between the city's science and its culture.