About ME
Entering the Modern Era (1941-70)
World War II, the Cold War, the space race, and the advent of federally funded research brought enormous opportunities and challenges to the entire field of engineering. With major funding from the new Department of Defense, NASA, and the National Science Foundation, ME figured prominently during this new age. The faculty became increasingly involved in top-flight research. The graduate program expanded dramatically. And the undergraduate program incorporated the latest technologies and methodologies. By now, some 120 students were acquiring degrees each year.
The Post-WWII Boom
In the 1950s, the department underwent a major restructuring to reflect the changing face of mechanical technology. The industrial engineering program within the department had become so large that for a time the department was renamed Industrial and Operations Engineering; after two years, industrial engineering split off to become a separate entity.
Research in the postwar period enlarged the boundaries of traditional areas of inquiry and pioneered innovative new fields. In traditional lines, one key researcher was Professor Edward Vincent, who investigated heat transfer in gas turbine rotor disks; his book Gas Turbines brought him international recognition. Under contract with the War Production Board during World War II, the production engineering group undertook important research on surface roughness measurement and the machinability of exotic materials. Interdisciplinary research led to the development of assistive devices for the disabled as well as the first environmental impact studies on power plant emissions.
The Space Race
Under the chairmanship of Professor Gordon Van Wylen, the department became a key player in space technology. Pursuing support for cryogenic research, Van Wylen was the first engineer to obtain funding from the Army Ballistic Missile Center, one of NASA's precursors. Other government-funded work in this period included Professor Frederick Hammitt's research on cavitation in liquid metal used in breeder reactors; Edward Lady's doctoral research on boiling at low heat flux; and Professor Lester Colwell's pioneering work on the numerical control of machines. Space research accelerated as NASA raced throughout the 1960s to beat the Soviets to the moon. Military research explored areas ranging from the biomechanics of cockpit design to detonation combustion.
As research expanded, so did the graduate program. In the department's first seventy years, it conferred only twenty-one Ph.D. degrees. From 1940 to 1970, that number soared to 151, and the department began to require that new faculty members hold a Ph.D.
The Campus Expands– and Moves
By the early fifties, it was clear that facilities built in Mortimer Cooley's day no longer served the department's burgeoning needs. One ME chairman after another spoke of the need for more space, which helped lay the groundwork for the construction of an entirely new campus devoted to engineering and the arts on a sprawling tract of university property north of the Huron River. The shift from Central Campus to North Campus, which would take more than twenty years, began in the mid-fifties with the building of the new W.E. Lay Automotive Laboratory and the G.G. Brown Building, which became home to new facilities in thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid mechanics.
Computers: The Latest Wonder of the World
Also in the fifties, faculty and students were introduced to a new technology that would eventually revolutionize teaching and research in engineering– the computer. Faculty members participating in a Ford Foundation initiative on the use of computers in engineering education incorporated key-punch computer problems into their instruction. In 1953, the Michigan Digital Automatic Computer (MIDAC) was designed and built at the Willow Run Research Center. One of only twenty high-speed electronic digital computers in the U.S., MIDAC was estimated to be some 20,000 times faster than a professional mathematician using a desk calculator. In 1959, the Regents authorized the establishment of the U-M Computing Center, home to the ground-breaking Michigan Terminal System (MTS), one of the world's earliest time-sharing computing systems.