History of Imperial College London 1907-2007

Read excerpts from Dr Hannah Gay's new book - the first major history of Imperial College London.

Dr Hannah Gay's book The History of Imperial College London 1907-2007: Higher Education and Research in Science, Technology and Medicine is the first major history of the College to be published, telling the story of a new type of institution.

Each month for the remainder of 2007, we will whet your appetite by publishing excerpts from Dr Gay's book.

Alumni can purchase copies of the book from the Union Shop on the South Kensington Campus or online from Imperial College Press books.

Excerpt one, June 2007
Pre-1907: the founding of Imperial College

This book tells the story of a kind of institution that came into being with the federation of three older college. Why they federated, and how the resulting structure and goverance of the new college contributed to its longer-term success, is a major theme of this book. Imperial College was founded by the government as an institution for advanced university-level training in science and technology and for the promotion of research in support of industry throughout the British Empire. True to its name, the College soon built imperial links and was an outward looking institution from the start. It laid early the foundations that were to make it an international success and its connections to the larger world, to industry, and to the British state, have been major factors in its historical development.

That Imperial College was given a utilarian mandate led to its having a distinct identity within the British university system and set it apart from other universities with more outwardly liberal aims. In this, the College resembled some European and North American technological institutions which the government had in mind when creating the College.

The College was founded by the state in 1907. It was the materialisation of a bureaucratic dream that, to a degree, was resisted for many years. People continued to identify with the old colleges and the formation of a new Imperial College identity was not easily achieved . Even today, if asked to identify Imperial's founding heroes, people at the College are more likely to name Prince Albert, Hofmann, Huxley, or De la Beche than the creative bureaucrats of 1907. Long before Imperial was founded the need to do more for technical education in Britain was gaining recognition. by the early twentieth century it had become a major political issue.

That science education and state sponsorship began to come under public scrutiny when it did may have had something to do with Charles Babbage's difficulties in getting support for his calculating machines. He discussed these difficulties, and what he saw as the related amateurism and dilettantism in the Royal Society, in his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830) and On the Econoy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832). The idea of decline as it related to Britain's position relative to her industrial competitors not only fuelled the rhetoric fo promoters of science and technology in the 1830s and 40s, it has done so, not always justifiably, to this day. The case of Babbage helped to nudge the largely laissez-faire attitudes towards science and science education in a more interventionalist direction.

Text taken from chapters one-three.

Reproduced with the kind permission of author Dr Hannah Gay

Copyright © 2007 by Imperial College Press