Читать книгу The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life - Allison Chisolm - Страница 9

The city’s development as a leading industrial center required a steady pipeline of workers with appropriate mechanical training. The old apprentice system, which had supplied on-the-job problem solving experiences for Ichabod Washburn in blacksmithing and machining, needed updating. The city’s leading business owners sought a way to supply education for those already working, as well as for students preparing to enter the workforce.

In the 1840s, Ichabod Washburn, steam engine builder William Wheeler and others formed a Mechanics’ Association for “the moral, intellectual and social improvement of its members, the perfection of the mechanic arts and the pecuniary assistance of the needy.” The subscribers held their first meeting in February 1842, quickly established a library and lecture series, and made plans for an annual exhibition of the city’s mechanical products. Hosted in September 1848, the fair had the hoped-for effect, increasing the demand for Worcester-made merchandise. The exhibitions also created demand for a dedicated space, and the fundraising campaign led by Washburn’s offer of a $10,000 matching gift resulted in the opening of Mechanics Hall in March 1857.

John Boynton, a tinware manufacturer, thought Worcester’s future industrial leaders needed more formal scientific education, and his gift of $100,000 in 1865 helped to found the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science, soon renamed Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Ichabod Washburn had long dreamed of a school of applied science, and he endowed a machine shop for the new college. Gifts of land and $61,111 from 232 individuals, 20 shops and factories, made those dreams a practical reality.

The school differentiated itself from other institutions of higher learning by training both minds and hands. With a motto of “Theory and Practice,” the founders believed that:

the connection of academic culture and the practical application of science is advantageous to both ... The academy inspires its intelligence into the work of the shop, and the shop, with eyes open to the improvements of productive industries, prevents the monastic dreams and shortness of vision that sometimes paralyze the profound learning of a college.

Students could gain both theoretical and practical knowledge of mechanical engineering, civil engineering, chemistry, physics, modern languages (French and German), and drawing. The practice came during 10 hours a week in the shop, lab or drawing table, plus a full month in July.

Washburn turned to his own general superintendent and school trustee, Charles Morgan, to find the best superintendent for the new machine shop. Charles looked far beyond Worcester County, to the town of Hanover, New Hampshire, where he found Milton Higgins, freshly graduated from the Chandler Scientific School at Dartmouth College. A firm believer in practical education, Higgins took on the job with enthusiasm, running the Washburn Shops from 1868 to 1896, while helping to create new businesses, including the Riley Stoker and Norton Emery Wheel companies. Many graduates of the novel hybrid program remained in Worcester, as Boynton had hoped they would, and went on to lead companies and strengthen its industrial base with new enterprises.

Within a few years of his arrival in Worcester, Higgins proposed that the city develop a trade school where students would receive traditional classroom learning with practical training in a commercial shop. Higgins served as consultant to a Massachusetts industrial education commission in 1906 and helped frame the law allowing each town or city to establish a trade school, independent of the existing school system, with its own board of trustees. Higgins was appointed by the governor to the new Commission on Industrial Education in 1907. The city of Worcester approved the trade school proposal almost immediately, local industrialists raised more than $100,000, and the free Worcester Boys’ Trade High School opened its doors to 52 boys in February 1910, with four-year programs for the cabinet making, pattern making and machinist trades. Similarly funded with private and public dollars, the David Hale Fanning School began as a girls’ trade school in 1921.

The businesses of Worcester had designed and constructed a pipeline for future workers, but the dynamic contributions of the city’s diverse population would supply more energy and ideas than anyone anticipated.