Bert Little, host of the Science Reporter TV episode “Big Magnets,” looked into the camera in 1961 and gravely promised that soon MIT “will house the strongest magnets in the world.”

These magnets were co-designed by MIT professor Francis Bitter, who ironically was dwarfed by Little on camera. Bitter had founded MIT’s magnet laboratory over twenty years prior to his on-screen appearance, and for him it wasn’t just the strength of the magnet that mattered, it was also about how you used it. Bitter said magnets were a way to see the invisible; to him, they were the key to solving the “mystery of patterns beyond life.” And the funding climate, after a twenty-year lull, could not resist the attraction of deciphering those mysterious patterns. Full Article »

Descriptions of the MIT elective Reproductive Biology, devised in the late 1980s as an explicitly feminist course, were frank. The upstart elective aimed to cover the discoveries “which affect the ability of the human race to influence its own reproduction.” But this course went on to spawn something bigger, something that spoke to seismic changes in twentieth-century science: the first required biology course at MIT.

Biology, long dismissed as a “soft” science, was on the rise. “The first clonings of human disease genes were happening,” says MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, now emeritus. “And I thought, wow! Every young person is going to have to learn genetics,” she says. “This is going to become required human knowledge.” Full Article »

In 1888, a thirty-three-year-old MIT professor poured a glass of water, held it up for a class of young civil engineers to see, and over the course of an hour struck terror in the hearts of his listeners.

“He would scare us to death by saying that [the water] contained enough germs of typhoid fever to give the disease to a thousand people…,” wrote former student George C. Whipple. The professor then eased tensions by showing how engineering methods could be used to make water safe to drink. Full Article »

In the late 1960s, the whole country had its head in the clouds. The sky wasn’t the limit anymore. Supersonic planes were going to take us, in the words of John F. Kennedy, “to all corners of the globe” and then straight into the future — after all, you can’t spell The Jetsons without jet. The Boeing supersonic transport (SST), commissioned by the U.S. government on December 31, 1966, was to lead the way. The American answer to the Anglo-French Concorde, the SST would have been the quickest thing on two wings. Early sketches described a plane traveling at such speeds that “passengers are almost unaware they are flying.” Full Article »

You may have heard of New York City’s MoMA, an icon of modernity synonymous with art and culture’s bleeding edge. But there’s another MoMA you should know about: a small-town, redbrick museum in southwestern Virginia that lays claim to 15,000 years of North American history by virtue of that classic of tableside condiments: salt.

Located in Saltville, Virginia, a town of 2,000 tucked away in southwestern Virginia’s Appalachians, the Museum of the Middle Appalachians (MoMA) is a many-layered paean to good ol’ sodium chloride, which exists in mind-boggling concentrations underneath the local valley. The story of that salt—and the tiny town that mined it—provides the museum with “a staggering story from the Ice Age to the Space Age,” says Harry Haynes, the museum’s longtime manager, a story that’s forced several expansions over the last 15 years and a recent overhaul of the exhibit spaces.

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Byers had bought into the latest in “homeopathic” trends, radium-infused products. Radium is actually present in small quantities in almost all plants, animals, rock, soil and even water. But it was its presence in natural hot springs, considered by many to have curative properties, that kick-started the element into celebrity. In an effort to cure a golf injury, Byers adopted the religious habit of downing several bottles a day of the popular and delicious Radithor. Radiothor was an early form of smart water, but instead of your day’s worth of vitamins, the elixir delivered “certified radioactive water.” “New Substance, Declared to be Cheap and Efficacious in Many Diseases, Shown to Doctors,” read a 1909 New York Times headline on the product.

Radium was cool and everybody was doing it. French women were putting it on their faces in creams. Watches and military instruments used it for its glow-in-the-dark effect. A European company was plunking it in their bread, and another was using it to spruce up their chocolate. Radium toothpaste graced supermarket shelves promising to “load cells with new life.” Even James John “Jimmy” Walker, New York’s incumbent mayor, was home-brewing his own radium water. Full Article »

Colloquially known as HowToGAMIT, this student-only publication contains the only written record of MIT slang, originally compiled from Ehrmann’s circle of friends and associates. Successive editors of HowToGAMIT have adjusted definitions according to the popular usage of their time, and modifications of culturally rich words like hack act as windows into MIT’s history.

The original 1969 definition of hack listed “a trick, prank, parlay” as the first and foremost usage. This meaning has not changed much over time, as MIT remains famous for its colorful history of elaborate pranks. In its founding years, MIT was small, new, and scandalously unpopular. The faculty couldn’t afford the drastic disciplinary actions that Harvard imposed. Perhaps in recognition of their teachers’ leniency, the creative engineering students sculpted their mischief into an art, defining a very specific kind of prank that was unequivocally bound by a sense of responsibility and the aspiration to do no harm. Full Article »

Around the Caribbean, the storm reaches a transition point. Usually it loses momentum, dissipating into oblivion. But in rare instances, the storm abruptly—and mysteriously—intensifies into to a hurricane. So why does that chance storm become so much stronger? This very basic question haunted MIT meteorologist Jule Charney for some seven years.

Charney’s very entrance into the field was meandering, from math (bachelors) to theoretical physics (masters) to eventually climate and weather (doctorate), all at the University of California, Los Angeles. There Charney was mentored by Jacob Bjerknes, the first researcher to identify the connection between the ocean and atmosphere, as well as to recognize the significance of this interaction on long-term climatic variation. For Charney, as he later put it, Bjerknes’ enduring lesson was that, “though the atmosphere is disconcertingly complex, it is not hopelessly so.” Full Article »

Ohio surgeon Vergel Heber Seargent had an unusual request.

“You all remember Curel and what happened to us there,” began his typewritten letter to John Ely Burchard. The two men had served together in a mobile hospital during World War I—Seargent as a medical student, Burchard as an ambulance driver. Now, in June 1942, Burchard was a successful MIT architecture professor and a combat scientist for the United States government.

But Seargent was not writing to reminisce about battlefield experiences, or to reconnect with his old army buddy, or to discuss the ongoing Second World War.

Instead, Seargent wanted to wax nostalgic about diarrhea.

“No one could forget those days and nights of illness when typhoid and dysentery made life for us a burden, and an awful nuisance when we had to change our underwear and had no clean suits of it to change into!” he wrote. “How could anyone forget the speed with which we had to leave those barn-lofts, slide down steep and broken ladders, and do a Marathon out toward the latriny suburbs above the church, in the dark and drippy darkness of a French winter night?” Full Article »