The study of Mechanical Engineering at Auburn began as the result of the farsighted Morrill Land Grant Act, which would have profound effects on education throughout the South and in our country generally. It promoted a technical, practical education for the "industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life." Proposed by farm and industrial groups from the Midwest prior to the secession of the South, the Act was opposed by Southern congressmen, and passed only in 1862 when the Confederate States had left the Union. Later the South would need just the kind of education the Morrill Act supported in order to develop its natural resources and to knit up its tattered economy after the Civil War.
In 1882, Auburn (then known as the "Agricultural and Mechanical College") had a dynamic, visionary new President, William L. Broun from Vanderbilt. This tiny leonine Virginian began at AMC as a controversial figure favoring a radical new balance in the disciplines the struggling little college would advance and nurture. Well aware of the impending technological revolution and of the South's critical need for trained manpower, Broun advocated curriculum changes to achieve a balance between "scientific" or "hands-on" student using laboratory methods and a classical "liberal" education. Some of the members of the Board of Trustees felt strongly that Broun's reforms would produce an unworkable hybrid. They believed that a practical education was no education at all. As John J. Wilmore later stated succinctly: "To the old-time Southerner, education meant literature and classics and did not mean anything else. The Jeffersonian ideals of a generation before [the Civil War] had somehow been lost."
Broun was even replaced temporarily because of his convictions, but on his return in 1884, he reintroduced his "general" course consisting of Agriculture, Chemistry, Mechanics, and Engineering. President Broun's tenacity shaped Auburn University's future in ways he may not have imagined. For in the critical days during Reconstruction, were it not for Auburn's early vocational identity, the college would logically have been incorporated into the University of Alabama system, a notion which makes War Eagles shudder just a little.
In 1885 President Broun inaugurated a "Department of Mechanical Arts" located on the ground floor of what was to be renamed Langdon Hall after Trustee Charles Carter Langdon. Having been moved from the corner of Magnolia and Gay Streets where it had been part of the Masonic Female Institute, it was then a plain wooden structure with a steeple, but without the handsome portico or stone columns one admires today.
Also in 1885 the college's first Instructor in "Practical Mechanics", George H. Bryant, a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was added to the faculty of eight and a "commodious" Mechanic Art Laboratory measuring 90 by 50 feet, basically a woodworking shop, was outfitted with a "a steam engine, machines, and tools, useful for instruction." There were three "Degree Courses," each leading to the degree of Bachelor of Science, and requiring four years for completion: the first in Mechanics and Engineering, the second in Agriculture and Chemistry, and the third in Latin Science.
As the cloud of Reconstruction slowly lifted, Alabama's bankruptcy and the wretched poverty that typified the post-war '70s began to ease. By the early to mid-1880s money at last became available for education. Helping to finance the emergence of the new Mechanics Arts Department, the Alabama legislature decided to give the college one-third of the net revenue collected from a tax on fertilizer, along with its first outright grant.
In that same year, 1885, the school's name changed unofficially to "Alabama Polytechnic Institute", largely due to an increasing focus on engineering studies. But the name was not approved by the state legislature until 1899. The following year a forge and foundry building was erected adjacent to Langdon and a five-horsepower Weston dynamo was installed in Langdon's cellar to light the building, providing the first electric lights in town, and the first in any college building in the South. But in June, 1887, disaster struck when a fire broke out and consumed "Old Main", the wooden main building. Using the insurance money and help from the state, President Broun prevailed over the trustees to replace the original structure immediately with what is now Samford Hall, rather than move the college to Montgomery as they had been considering. When the college reopened in the fall, classes were held partly in four makeshift classrooms partitioned on Langdon's second floor with the rest scattered over other quarters in the town. In 1889 the new main building opened and served as classrooms for most courses, with a mechanics lab on the ground floor and a mechanical drawing room on the third floor.
Two new Mechanic Arts "Assistant Instructors" arrived in 1888: B.A. Blakely from Cornell University, and John Jenkins Wilmore with his new ME degree from Purdue. Affable, reserved, member of a string quartet in college, and beloved by his students, Wilmore had grown up on a farm in Randolph County, Indiana, and was beginning his illustrious 55-year career here, arriving with initial misgivings in the middle of a wet night in a tiny college town in rural Dixie. He said later he was tempted to get back on the train, but without the money to return home and a yellow fever epidemic further down the line in Montgomery, he had little choice but to stay.
In 1891 he was named Director of the Department of Mechanic Arts and eventually became Auburn's first Dean of Engineering, a position he held from 1908 until his death in 1943. During that period Dean Wilmore had seen a "quasi-trade" school develop into a university preparing nationally recognized engineers.
Facilities kept pace with the academic talent the institution was attracting. Professor A.F. McKissick had come to teach Electrical Engineering and Department Director Wilmore made significant improvements in Mechanic Arts. These improvements were on such a scale that a new combined Department of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering began in 1892-93. Electrical and Mechanical Engineering were separated into two distinct departments in 1905, bringing to four the number of engineering studies offered, with mining and civil engineering-the latter being what Dean Wilmore called the "Siamese twins."
Engineering at Auburn remained a white male preserve, however, until the first women students arrived in 1892, but it was not until 30 years later that Maria Rogan Whitson graduated in engineering. Auburn's first black engineer was graduated in Mechanical Engineering when Marshall Ray Lyons took his B.S. in 1971.
In 1918 consonant with America's involvement in the war effort, Auburn's ME Professor Fullan pledged to train "an army of mechanics" and the University proceeded to train several contingents of student soldiers in general mechanics, drilling metals, pipe fitting, sheet metal work and the like.
The woodworking shop was moved in 1921 and mechanical engineering studies abandoned Langdon's basement. The late '20s brought a new surge of development in engineering facilities provided primarily by private gifts. Ramsay, Ross and the "L" Building were constructed, the latter relieving crowded and decrepit conditions in the original buildings around Langdon Hall.
In 1932 a triumvirate was chosen to run the school in the most trying circumstances of the Great Depression. John J. Wilmore of Engineering, Bolling Crenshaw of Mathematics and Luther Duncan of Agriculture assured the school's survival despite the failure of the State to pay appropriations. These were crisis times that caused cutbacks of salaries and sharp reductions in services. After three years Prof. Duncan became President and before his death, the bonded indebtedness of API was paid in full and 14 new buildings, including Wilmore Labs with 66,000 sq.ft. and ten labs and classrooms, were constructed by the late 1940s. During World War II Auburn trained 38,500 military recruits through the Army Specialized Training, Engineering Science, Management and War Training Programs.
The ME Department from the late '30s to the early '50s was characterized by the leadership of the ever-popular and jolly Charles (Charley) Hixon, an able administrator and educator, but in addition, an expert lock picker, hypnotist, sleight-of-hand artist and great friend to circus performers (who would go out of their way to visit and consult him), and who charmed students with his card tricks and feats of memory. Easily overcome with laughter at his own or another's joke, legend has it that Prof. Hixon once saved the day at a local bank, picking one of its locks in 30 seconds.
Because legislative appropriations did not keep pace with growth, Auburn and other state institutions suffered financial setbacks in the late 1950s. In 1957 the Departments of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering lost their accreditation, but a combination of prompt action by the Administration, badly needed changes in organization, equipment, personnel and research resulted in a reversal of that decision. The 1960s and 1970s were marked by the able leadership of Donald Vestal who served for just under 20 years as ME Department Head. Although enrollment figures in the Department dropped in the mid-1970s.
The late 1970's and 1980's were a time of change. A succession of Department heads where placed in charge including Royce Beckett, Ray Askew, W.F. Swinson, Malcolm Crocker and John Goodling. In this time many of the faculty members hired in the Vestal era retired and a new emphasis on research was emerging. An almost complete turnover in faculty took place.
In the mid 1990's the Department changed its administrative structure to a chair position that has subsequently been held by David Dyer. The department has expanded dramatically to include 22 full time faculty members, nearly 500 undergraduates and over 70 graduate students. Research expenditures have doubled in the last decade. The quality of undergraduate education is being emphasized using a continuous quality improvement model implemented by our accrediting agency, ABET. The department looks forward to moving into completed remodeled space in Ross Hall in early 2006. In the long term the department is slated to move into its own building in the Transportation complex near the Lowder business building.
