ABSTRACT
Cornell University and the American Association of Mechanical Engineers jointly sponsored the event and honoured Robert H. Thurston, who had died in 1903 at the age of sixty-four. All four universities in which Thurston had studied or taught sent representatives, including Admiral Wilson Brown, superintendent of the US Naval Academy, to memorialize the man who, as one speaker noted, "established educational standards and programs that set the pattern for modern engineering education." Thurston was the father of instructional laboratories for engineering students, first as chair of mechanical engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, and dean of the Engineering College at Cornell University. Thurston's first opportunity to show off his laboratory and popularize his educational ideas among engineering educators came in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial. Hermann Grothe's also noted Thurston's work in metallurgy at Stevens and the general progress of scientific and engineering education at the land-grant institutions and the Columbia School of Mines.
