| When America's electrical industry began its remarkable growth in the early 1880s, the entrepreneurs behind the technologies found themselves unable to staff their factories, testing rooms, installation crews, and power stations. Fifteen years later more than 2,000 students were enrolled in postsecondary electrical engineering courses around the country, and thousands of college-trained workers pursued careers in the new field. During the 1880s new directions in American education and the new electrical technologies crossed paths in physics classrooms across the country as the electrical industries turned to institutions of higher education to prepare the new electrical engineers. Academic administrators supported the new discipline as a philosophically apt combination of science and social utility, as well as a source of students and public recognition, and American physics, just consolidating its identity, seized the opportunity to be useful. The physicists established courses in electrical engineering while at the same time consulting, testing, and testifying for the electrical industry. In return the industry donated equipment, practical expertise, and facilities to the schools. Students flocked to the new courses. By the end of the decade the first generation of electrical engineering graduates was returning to teach, and although they were often in departments separate from physics they depended heavily on physics faculty and facilities for fundamental instruction. On account of that dependency, physics, a minor study in most institutions in 1880, was by 1890 thriving in nearly every college, technical institute, and university across the country, and engineering education was institutionalized with a scientific core. The origins of electrical engineering as a discipline established relationships of science, technology, industry, academia, scientists, and engineers that have become a part of twentieth-century life. |
