In 1916 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology left Boston's Back Bay for this campus in Cambridge. Founded in 1861 to advance "useful knowledge", MIT was the vision of William Barton Rogers, who sought to accelerate American industrialization through scientific knowledge. The institute began with a federal land grant and, following a German polytechnic model, emphasized laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering.
Back then its students and faculty focused on practical engineering education; early growth came through research contracts with private industry, even as the school remained financially constrained into the 1930s. In 1916 MIT left Boston's Back Bay and moved to this campus in Cambridge. Its transformation into a research powerhouse accelerated during World War II, when projects such as the Radiation Laboratory made it the nation's largest non-industrial R&D contractor.
In the postwar decades graduate enrollment and research funding grew rapidly, helped by faculty like Vannevar Bush who shaped federal support for basic science. Stand here and imagine those experiments, lectures, and wartime labs. Wartime work at the Radiation Laboratory made MIT the nation's largest non-industrial R&D contractor.