Putting ‘Technology’ on the map
William Barton Rogers, who founded MIT exactly 150 years ago on April 10, did not invent the word technology. But his choice of that word for the name of the new institution, at a time when terms like “useful arts” were more typically used, helped to bring that term — and the hands-on approach to solving the world’s problems that it embodied — into popular usage in American and world culture.Rogers, whom MIT President Susan Hockfield described as a “brilliant, charismatic dynamo,” founded the Institute on “principles that were revolutionary in his day,” she said. He was not just putting emphasis on a newly minted term, but on a whole new philosophy of education, stressing that actually working with one’s hands and building things was as important as knowledge gained from books. He sought to “make science more useful, and the ‘useful arts,’ technology and engineering, more scientific,” she said.Hockfield’s...