The MIT building on Boylston Street in Back Bay was for many years called the Rogers Building, though modesty would never have allowed Rogers to condone that in his lifetime. I’ve attempted to re-create the original building’s details by studying photographs, drawings, elevations filed with the municipal records, and student accounts. In 1938, twenty-two years after MIT moved to Cambridge, the remarkable Boylston Street building was demolished to make way for an insurance office building, which stands there today.
Rogers returned to MIT to deliver the commencement address to the Class of 1882. Midway through his speech, he paused, leaned forward, and collapsed. Here were some of Rogers’s last words, delivered to the new graduates and their families:
I confess to being an enthusiast on the subject of the Institute, but I am not ashamed of this enthusiasm when I see what it has come to be. It is true that we commenced in a small way, with a few earnest students, while the tides rose and fell twice daily where we now are. Our early labors with the legislature in behalf of the Institute were sometimes met not only with repulse but with ridicule, yet we were encouraged and sustained by the great interest manifested by many in the enterprise. Formerly a wide separation existed between theory and practice; now in every fabric that is made, in every structure that is reared, they are closely united into one interlocking system—the practical is based upon the scientific, and the scientific is solidly built upon the practical. You have not been treated here today to anything in the nature of oratorical display; no decorations, no flowers, no music, but you have seen in what careful and painstaking manner these young men and women have been prepared for their future occupations in life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, incredible people inside and outside publishing deserve thanks for making this novel possible and making it better. Suzanne Gluck, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fisher, Alicia Gordon, Cathryn Summerhayes, Eugenie Furniss, Michelle Feehan, Erin Malone, Sarah Ceglarski, Caroline Donofrio, Liz Tingue, Mina Shaghaghi, Eve Attermann and their fantastic colleagues at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment; Jennifer Hershey, Tracy Devine, Gina Centrello, Tom Perry, Jane von Mehren, Erika Greber, Amy Edelman, Vincent La Scala, Richard Elman, Courtney Moran, Jessica Waters, and the dedicated team at Random House, as well as Stuart Williams and his colleagues at Harvill Secker; my secret society of readers/brainstormers Eric Bennett, Kevin Birmingham, Benjamin Cavell, Joseph Gangemi, Julie Park Haubner, Marcus Padow, Cynthia Posillico, and Scott Weinger, as well as tireless supporters Marsha Helmstadter, Susan Pearl, Warren Pearl, and Ian Pearl.
My research assistant Gabriella Gage once again used her exemplary skills to help me uncover layer upon layer of great historical material. Gail Lippincott, Joyce Miles, and Pam Swallow were among the scholars who lent aid in searching out rare material on Ellen Swallow Richards. Nora Murphy at the MIT archives, Frank Conahan at the MIT Museum General Collections, Peter Bebergal at the MIT Technology Licensing Office, and David Kaiser of the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society each were helpful and generous with their time and expertise. The early history of MIT was first recorded thoroughly by Samuel Prescott in When MIT Was Boston Tech, later enriched by Julius Stratton and Loretta H. Mannix in Mind and Hand: The Birth of MIT and in a recent volume of essays Professor Kaiser edited called Becoming MIT. Along with Robert Hallowell Richards’s memoir, His Mark, these sources proved to be among the most valuable.
Finally, my wife and son provided inspiration and perspective on a daily basis and gave me a reason to come back from the nineteenth century.
FOR MY SON
ALSO BY MATTHEW PEARL
The Last Dickens
The Poe Shadow
The Dante Club
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATTHEW PEARL is the New York Times bestselling author of The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, and The Last Dickens, and the editor of the Modern Library editions of Dante’s Inferno (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales, and Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood. His novels have been published in more than thirty languages and forty countries around the world.
www.matthewpearl.com
Matthew Pearl, The Technologists
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