Union students of the early nineteenth century studied physics with a textbook that claimed that the moon and the sun were inhabited.
That's one of the findings of Ennis Pilcher, professor emeritus of physics, in his recently-published Early Science and the First Century of Physics at Union
College, 1795-1895.
Pilcher retired in 1986 and soon began a detailed study of how science education evolved at the College.
At the College's founding, the natural philosophy course
included all science instruction except for advanced studies in astronomy. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the course had evolved into physics after spawning separate specializations in natural history, chemistry, and civil and electrical engineering.
By the Civil War, Union led the nation in producing graduates with a breadth of technical and scientific understanding, Pilcher writes.
Edward J. Craig, professor emeritus of electrical engineering, devotes much of his new book, Electrical Engineering at Union, 1895-1995, to people-everything from anecdotes about faculty members to lists of everyone who received a degree in electrical engineering.
Perhaps the best story concerns a former chairman of the department, Harold W. Bibber. As Craig recalls, Bibber liked to emphasize in his lectures that the ratio of the line voltage to the line-to-neutral voltage in a
three-phase power system is the square root of three.
“Evidently some students, looking for a little excitement, thought that burning the symbol on his lawn would be fun,” Craig writes. They did so one night, but Bibber recognized them in the light of the flames and they had to resod his lawn.