VITERBI ENGINEERING
A PROUD PAST
1905 1905-06 USC, led by Pres. George Finley Bovard, offers its first engineering courses. 1907 One hundred students are enrolled in physics and engineering. Engineering classes in the early days were held in the basement of the Old College building.
In 1905, the University of Southern California, which had been founded with the support of the Methodist Church 25 years earlier, had President George Finley Bovard, brother of USC’s first president Marion Bovard, at the helm. The university’s physics department, adapting to the times and its environment, began offering classes in engineering. Los Angeles was a growing western city in the throes of an oil boom in a nation that was rapidly being electrified. The first courses were Direct Current Principles and Machinery, Alternating Current Theory and Machinery and Dynamo Laboratory. During the same 1905-06 academic year, the mathematics department began a course in surveying. The first engineering professor, John B. Johnson, was hired in 1908, the same year that USC awarded its first engineering degree, a B.S. in The Dynamo Laboratory civil engineering, to Omar R. Turney. The recipient of the first USC electrical engineering degree was Austin Byrant Gates, who graduated in 1911. In 1921, USC awarded its first mechanical engineering degree and its first master’s degree in chemical engineering. Oddly, USC had yet to grant a single B.S. in chemical engineering. The first degree in architectural engineering was in 1926 and the first petroleum engineering degree was not awarded until 1927. By that year, USC had awarded 254 engineering
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USC Viterbi Engineer
Civil engineering students, 1914
degrees, mostly bachelor’s degrees in civil and electrical engineering. The year 1927 was a milestone in another respect. Two decades after USC offered its first engineering courses, it established a separate College of Engineering with five departments — chemical, civil, electrical, mechanical and petroleum engineering. Professor Philip S. Biegler, chair of the electrical engineering department, became USC’s first dean of engineering. Under Biegler’s leadership, the new College of Engineering moved from the “Red Barn,” a temporary structure put up during World War I, to headquarters in Bridge Hall. Biegler began laying a foundation for further growth by recruiting a number of excellent teachers and expanding into the new Petroleum and Chemical Engineering Building. One of the recruits was alumnus Dean Philip S. Biegler Robert E. Vivian (BS CHE ’17), who arrived in 1937 to teach chemical engineering. He found USC engineering’s physical resources to be unimpressive and the Master of Science was the highest engineering degree awarded. “The electrical engineering department was still in the same basement laboratory ... where I had taken courses in 1917-18,” Vivian wrote in his memoir, The USC Engineering Story, “and as far as I could tell, the equipment was the same as I had used then.... It is safe to say that all the equipment of the College of Engineering, including the few surveying transits and levels and drafting tables, could have been purchased for $10,000.” At the time, the college had 10 full-time faculty, one secretary and 230 students. “In spite of the lack of equipment and small budgets,” Vivian wrote, “there was optimism, initiative, cheerfulness and a willingness to work hard on the part of faculty and students. These are the elements which make progress possible.”