At Harvard, we are fortunate to have a rich and deep history in science, engineering, and applied sciences.

• Creation of one of the first advanced scientific schools in the United States.
  

  The creation of the Lawrence Scientific School in 1847 marked the beginning of Harvard's first formal programs in engineering and applied sciences. The School was also one of the first advanced scientific schools created in the United States. Simon Newcomb, Rear Admiral in the United States Navy and a leader in mathematical astronomy, graduated in 1858. Charles Sanders Peirce, who created America’s greatest legacy in modern philosophy (pragmatism), graduated in 1862. While staying for less than a year, the future doctor, psychologist, and author William James entered around the same time before switching to medicine.

• Invention of baking powder.
  

  Baking powder (patented 1859) was invented by a former Lawrence School professor and dean (1861-1863), Eben Norton Horsford (1818-1893). Horsford honored the donor of his endowed chair, Count Rumford, on the label as well as in the name of a company he cofounded: the Rumford Chemical Works of East Providence, Rhode Island. In addition to formulating and patenting Rumford Baking Powder, the first calcium phosphate baking powder, Horsford developed a process for manufacturing condensed milk and more broadly, became one of the leading experts in creating new technologies to preserve food.

• Invention of the crystal oscillator.

  In 1919 One of the most important inventions in broadcasting and telephone came out of the Harvard Engineering School's Cruft Laboratory, the crystal oscillator invented by George Washington Pierce (Ph.D., 1900), Rumford Professor of Physics and director of Harvard's Cruft High-Tension Electrical Laboratory. The oscillator enabled a given radio station to stay “fixed” at a proper frequency and allowed multiple telephone calls to occur over a single line.

• Construction of one of the largest cyclotrons in the world.

  In 1938 a cyclotron was constructed at the Graduate School of Engineering's Gordon McKay Engineering Laboratory. Projected to be the largest such operating facility in the world, it was built to support research in biology and medicine as well as physics. In 1942 it was sent to Los Alamos.

• Advances in modern magnetism.

  John H. van Vleck (1899-1980), who served as the first modern dean, has been called “the father of modern magnetism” because of his fundamental work in the 1930s in understanding the behavior of magnetic fields. Van Vleck shared a Nobel Prize in 1977.

• Advances in solid mechanics.

  Faculty member Bernard Budiansky (1925-1999) made innovative contributions to nearly every subfield of solid mechanics.

• Advances in soil mechanics.

  Arthur Casagrande, whose last appointment was as the Gordon McKay Professor Emeritus of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering, developed design principles that changed the construction of earth and rockfill dams throughout the world.

• Development of one of the first electromechanical computers.

  Harvard research fellow in engineering and applied physics, Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, worked with Howard Aiken ’39 (Ph.D.) to develop and program the MARK series, among the first large-scale automatic digital computers, in the early 1940s. Around the same time, a new generation of technically- trained students began to share their knowledge well beyond Harvard's campus. Alumnus and donor of an endowed professorship at SEAS), Allen E. Puckett S.B. ’39, S.M. ’41, went on to define modern aerodynamics, served as CEO as Hughes Aircraft, and won the National Medal of Honor in Technology.

• Invention of the COBOL programming language.

  Grace Murray Hopper is generally credited with developments that led to COBOL, the programming language for business applications on which the world's largest corporations ran for more than a generation.

• Fundamental work on nuclear magnetic resonance imaging.

  In the 1940s and 1950s, engineering faculty member Nicolaas Bloembergen, together with Henry Purcell and Robert Pound, both of the Harvard Physics Department, conducted fundamental work on nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMR). Purcell won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery. Bloembergen shared a Nobel Prize in 1981 for his contributions to the development of laser spectroscopy.

• Creation of the famed Harvard Water Program.

  Harold Thomas, Jr., whose last position was as Gordon McKay Professor of Civil and Sanitary Engineering, was one of the principal members of the Harvard faculty who guided the Harvard Water Program in the late 1950s through the early 1960s. The program was unique in that for the first time it established a working interdisciplinary approach to the development of water resources. It was based in the Government Department and jointly administered by the Economics Department and the then Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

• Development of APL.
  

  APL (A Programming Language) is an array programming language based on a notation invented in 1957 by Kenneth E. Iverson '51, '54 while pursuing his master's at Harvard University. It originated as an attempt to provide consistent notation for the teaching and analysis of topics related to the application of computers. IIverson received the Turing Award in 1979.

• Development of the leading program in aquatic chemistry.

  From 1956 to 1970, Werner Stumm (1924-1999) created the leading research and teaching program in aquatic chemistry at the then Harvard Division of Applied Physics. In a memorial piece, the National Academy of Engineering reported: “Stumm began to formulate a broad vision encompassing both applications to water technology and processes in the natural water environment.”

• Development of one of the first head-mounted display (i.e. virtual reality).

  In 1966, Ivan Sutherland was appointed associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University. While there, he conducted research that resulted in the first HMD (head-mounted display), one of the first attempts at virtual reality. The HMD contained special binocular glasses through which the user viewed graphics displayed on tiny computer screens.

• Harvard was one of the first nodes on the ARPANET.

  The Advanced Research Projects Agency Networks (ARPANET) was the first packet switching computer network and precursor of the Internet. In 1969, the Department of Defense commissioned the ARPAnet for network research. The first official network nodes were UCLA, Standford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah. The first node to node message was sent from UCLA to SRI. In 1971, more nodes, including Harvard and NASA, joined the network, bringing the total to 15.

• Development of BASIC interpreter; Founding of Microsoft.

  Harvard undergraduate Bill Gates, who worked on the code for what would become Microsoft's first product (Microsoft BASIC), left the University in 1975. His classmate and future colleague, Steven A. Ballmer AB ’77, did finish his degree and returned in 1999 to dedicate the Maxwell Dworkin Building that he and his former classmate made possible, perfectly melding the past with the optimism of the present.

• Establishment of one of the first full-featured computer science curriculums.

  In 1984 Harvard offered a stand-alone undergraduate concentration in computer science; CS had previously been part of applied mathematics.

• Publication of one of the 10 most cited papers in the field of engineering.

  In 1992 John Hutchinson, the Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering, and Zhigang Suo, the Allen E. and Marilyn M. Puckett Professor of Mechanics and Materials, authored a paper on cracking in complex materials systems that is among the 10 most cited papers in the field of engineering.

• Light brought to a complete stop.

  Lene Hau and her colleagues created a new form of matter to bring a light beam to a complete stop, then restart it again.
  

• Implementation of hyper-encryption.

  Computer scientist Michael Rabin embedded messages in rapidly moving streams of random digital bits in ways that cannot be decoded, even with unlimited computing power.
  

• Discovery of black silicon.

  Eric Mazur’s group created a new material that efficiently traps light and has potential use in solar cells, global warming sensors, and ultra-thin television screens.
  

• Discovery of how the Venus flytrap snaps.

  L. Mahadevan and colleagues discovered how the Venus flytrap snaps up its prey in a mere tenth of a second by actively shifting the curved shape of its mouth-like leaves.
  

• Creation of double emulsions.

  A new microfluidics-based device made by David A. Weitz and colleagues at Harvard University and Unilever Corp. makes precisely controlled double emulsions in a single step. Double emulsions, droplets inside droplets, could be useful for encapsulating products such as drugs, cosmetics, or food additives.

• Launch of what would become Facebook.

  Facebook, a social networking company developed by Mark Zuckerberg, began in a dorm room at Harvard.

• Launch of a microrobotic fly.
  

  Electrical engineering created the tiny microrobotic fly, hailed by its as "the first robotic fly that is able to generate enough thrust to takeoff." The artificial bug was showcased at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2008. The life-sized Flybot has a wingspan of 1.2 inches (3 cm) and weighs a mere 0.002 ounces (60 mg).

• Creation of bubbles that last for more than a year.

  Engineers led by Howard Stone whipped up the first long-lived nanoscale bubbles. With the aid of kitchen mixers, engineers whipped up, for the first time, permanent nanoscale bubbles—bubbles that endure for more than a year—from batches of foam made from a mixture of glucose syrup, sucrose stearate, and water. Their study appeared in the May 30 issue of the journal Science.
  

• Development of the first room temperature T-ray laser.

  A group of engineers and applied physicists in the Capasso lab demonstrated the first room-temperature, electrically pumped semiconductor laser source of Terahertz (THz) radiation, also known as T-rays. The breakthrough in laser technology, based on commercially available nanotechnology, has the potential to become a standard Terahertz source to support applications ranging from security screening to chemical sensing. T-rays can penetrate efficiently through paper, clothing, cardboard, plastic, and many other materials.
  

• Conversion of light to matter (and back).

  In the lab of applied physicist Lene Hau, a light pulse disappeared from one cold cloud then was retrieved from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light.
  

• Creation of spray-drying method for TB vaccine.

  Bioengineers, including David Edwards, Professor of the Practice of Bioengineering, and public health researchers at the School of Public Health developed a novel spray-drying method for preserving and delivering a tuberculosis vaccine that could help prevent the related spread of HIV/AIDS in the developing world.
  

• Invention of light-focusing optical antennas for storage.

  MIT’s Technology Review named the creation of light-focusing optical antennas (that could lead to DVDs that hold hundreds of movies) as one of their Top 10 emerging technologies for 2007.

• Ability to make muscle cells grip, pump, walk, and swim.

  In an innovative marriage of living cells and a synthetic substrate, the lab of bioengineer Kit Parker found that a rubberlike, elastic film coated with a single layer of cardiac muscle cells can semi-autonomously engage in lifelike gripping, pumping, walking, and swimming.
  

• Building of the smallest NMR system to date.

  In collaboration with Hakho Lee in Ralph Weissleder’s group at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the two engineering graduate students who work with Donhee Ham, the John L. Loeb associate professor of the natural sciences, built what may be the smallest complete Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) system to date. The system, about as big as a breadbox, delivers 60 times more sensitivity than a 120-kilogram commercial machine costing $70,000.

• Commercialization of breathable chocolate.

  Bioengineer David Edwards launched Le Whif, a culinary art experiment originating with the help of Harvard students.

Unexpected & Fun Facts

• The boards of Harvard and MIT fully approved two potential merger plans (in 1904–5 and 1913–4), despite vocal opposition by many alumni and faculty. Needless to say, the two institutions did not merge.
• Applied mathematician L. Mahadevan was presented with a 2007 Ig Nobel award for the study of wrinkle patterns on sheets, saying, "there's no reason good science can't be fun."
•  “Squirrel fishing,” an unusual sport of “‘catching’ squirrels and attempting to lift them into the air using a peanut tied to a string or fishing line, and optionally some kind of fishing pole,” is thought to have been partially popularized (if not invented) by two engineering graduate students, Nikolas Gloy and Yasuhiro Endo, at Harvard in the late 1990s.
• On Sep 9, 1947 Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, USNR, (1906-1992) who worked with computer pioneer Howard Aiken, found one of the first literal computer bugs: a moth from Relay #70, Panel F, of the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (now in the Science Center).
• An SEAS graduate student appeared on a reality television show (about science and engineering); a graduate of the Harvard Design School currently hosts a reality show on engineering and design.
• A current SEAS faculty member in bioengineering and a current graduate student in applied math have both published works of fiction; a late SEAS faculty member, an expert on animal locomotion, published 4 novels; the late famed author Norman Mailer concentrated in aeronautical engineering at Harvard.
• Entrepreneurs Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) both departed Harvard during their sophomore years.
• SEAS is responsible, by the will of donor Gordon McKay, to maintain his family’s grand, marble mausoleum located in Pittsfield, MA.