About ME

Laying the Foundation (1868-1904)

Michigan's Department of Mechanical Engineering traces its roots to the years immediately after the American Civil War, when the profession of engineering, still in its youth, was emerging from an emphasis on civil and military engineering. In those earliest years, when only a handful of professors were teaching civil engineering courses to a few dozen students, Professors DeVolson Wood and Stillman Robinson recognized the need for a separate program in the developing fields of machine, power, and marine engineering. In 1868, the Regents approved the professors' proposal. But the administration failed to provide sufficient funding, and after only two years, the new Mechanical Engineering program was reabsorbed into Civil Engineering, where it remained for another decade.

Cooley Takes Over

In 1881, Mechanical Engineering reemerged as an independent entity under Mortimer Cooley, an energetic and visionary young naval officer. Under Cooley's dynamic leadership, the department developed a broad curriculum encompassing machines powered by steam and water. After two years of basic math, science, and liberal arts, engineering undergraduates chose from courses that included Workshop Appliances and Processes, Pattern Making, Moulding and Founding; Mechanical Laboratory Work (Shop Practice in Forging); Machiner, Machine Construction, and Drawing; Mechanism and Machine Drawing; Machiner and Prime Movers (Water Wheels and Steam Engines); Machine Design; Thermodynamics; Original Design, Estimates, Specifications, and Contracts; and finally Naval Architecture, which would not become a separate program until a number of years later.

When Cooley began as chairman, all engineering classes were taught in the South Wing of University Hall, the campus's main classroom building, where there wasn't room for even a single engineering workshop. Cooley, determined to see his students in their own workshops and laboratories, secured a state grant of $2,500 to build and equip the university's first mechanical laboratory--a simple, two-story frame-and-brick building. The ground floor housed a foundry, forge shop, brass furnace, and an engine room. Equipment included a steam engine and a four-horsepower vertical fire-box boiler. On the second floor were a pattern shop and a machine shop, plus the stove that heated the entire building. To increase the humidity in winter, the engineers melted ice in a pail on the stove.

Years later, after a long tenure as dean of the Engineering College, Cooley wrote: "How well I remember my first class in this little shop. Six engineers were taking the course. The first lesson was at the forge. I taught them how to build a fire. Then I wanted a piece of iron to heat. At the back door there was a wagon load of scrap of different kinds of metal, and I sent the members of the class to bring me back a piece of wrought iron. Much to my surprise not one of the six could identify wrought iron, cast iron, steel, or anything else in the pile. That incident thoroughly convinced me of the need for practical work to acquaint engineers with the characteristics of the materials they would be using after graduation."

Preparing for the Next Steps

Cooley, never satisfied with the status quo, tore down the little four-room lab only four years after it was built and replaced it with a larger facility on the same site. More classroom space was also acquired in 1891, when the department took over the former dental building. To supplement training in the classroom and lab, Cooley began taking his students on regular visits to manufacturing plants as far away as Cleveland and Pittsburgh, where they observed the design and construction of bridges, factory equipment, and ships first-hand.

In Mortimer Cooley, Michigan had a visionary and energetic engineer who designed a curriculum, built a home for the department, and established strong ties with business and industry. Promoted to dean of the college in 1904, he would look out for ME's needs as it continued to grow and prosper.