Publication: A Princeton Companion
Civil Engineering, the oldest kind of non-military engineering -- it was so named to differentiate it from the military variety -- was first taught at Princeton in 1875 by Charles McMillan, the first engineering professor in the newly established John C. Green School of Science, and the founder of the department that the Princeton Engineer many years later called ``the granddad of the School of Engineering.''
McMillan educated the earliest generation of Princeton civil engineers single-handedly, but as enrollment grew, additional appointments were needed, and within fifteen years he had been joined by three others who were to follow life-long careers in the department. Frederick Newton Willson, like McMillan a graduate of Rensselaer, organized the department's work in graphics in 1880 and taught that subject for forty-three years; much interested in the construction of bridges, he celebrated his eightieth birthday on the catwalk atop one of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. One of McMillan's first four students, Herbert Stearns Squier Smith (known to generations of students as H2S Smith) taught applied mechanics, water supply, and hydraulics for forty years; he was secretary of the civil engineering faculty for most of his career (and secretary of the Princeton Class of 1878 for sixty-two years). Another McMillan student, Walter Butler Harris 1886 (who, while still an undergraduate, designed and built the first jetty on the Atlantic coast), taught railroad engineering and surveying for forty-five years and by the time of his retirement in 1934 had left his mark by laying out a large part of the newer University campus and designing twenty-five faculty houses in the Broadmead area.
Charles McMillan retired in 1914 and was succeeded as chairman by Frank H. Constant, who served until 1937. The year of McMillan's retirement also marked the arrival of George E. Beggs who became internationally known for his pioneering work in the model analysis of bridges and other structures. Beggs was the mainstay of the departmental program in structural engineering, which was further strengthened in the late thirties and early forties by the addition of Gregory P. Tschebotarioff in soil mechanics and Hans F. Winterkorn in soil physics.
Beggs followed Constant as chairman, serving for two years until his death in 1939. He was succeeded by Philip Kissam (1939 to 1946) and Elmer K. Timby, who resigned in 1949 to enter private practice. Like his old teacher Professor Harris, Kissam initiated hundreds of undergraduates into the techniques of surveying during his forty-four years in the department. The chairman from 1950 to 1961 was W. Mack Angas, who, as a vice-admiral in the United States Navy, had supervised the construction of sixteen bases by the ``seabees'' in the Southwest Pacific during World War II, and who, at Princeton, founded the department's River and Harbor Program, which flourished during the fifties and sixties.
A change in the departmental structure came in 1966, when the department merged with the geological engineering department, which had been founded in 1922 and had been particularly strong during the fourteen-year chairmanship (1940-1955) of Blair Professor of Geology W. Taylor Thom, Jr. The Department of Civil and Geological Engineering, which resulted from the merger, continued until 1974, when geological engineering became a program within the Department of Civil Engineering under the direction of William E. Bonini (a member of both the civil engineering and the geological and geophysical sciences departments).
Another interdepartmental plan of study brought under the aegis of the department at this time was the Basic Engineering Program, first instituted in 1938 by Kenneth Condit to meet the needs of students wishing to prepare for administrative and economic phases of an engineering career in industry or government. Most recently, basic engineering has been supervised by Howard Menand, Jr. (director from 1964 until his retirement in 1977), and since 1977 by P. Michael Lion, chairman of the interdepartmental committee in charge of the program.
Norman Sollenberger's ten-year chairmanship (1961-1971) was marked by substantial expansion of the department's Ph.D. program and the recruitment of new faculty, reinforcing Princeton's strong tradition in structural engineering while developing a new theoretical undergirding in mechanics.
Those added in structural engineering included Robert H. Scanlan (an authority on vibrations and structural dynamics), David P. Billington (thin shell concrete structures), and Robert Mark (experimental stress analysis). Billington and Mark, who also teach in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, have been particularly concerned with developing fruitful relations between humanistic and engineering teaching and research, involving, for example, structures of historical and cultural interest such as bridges and Gothic cathedrals.
Increased strength was brought to the department's research and instruction in mechanics -- the other part of its current graduate program in structures and mechanics -- by the addition of Ahmet S. Cakmak (a specialist in the mechanics of materials), Peter C. Y. Lee (elasticity theory), and, later, A. Cemal Eringen (theory of mixtures).
Another addition to the department under Sollenberger's chairmanship was J. Stuart Hunter, a specialist in the use of statistical methods for problem solving and decision making in engineering, and also a leader in the Basic Engineering Program.
Under Professor Cakmak, who became chairman in 1971, the department gave special attention to strengthening the Program in Water Resources and to the development of a new Transportation Program. Jointly sponsored since the early sixties by the Departments of Civil Engineering and Geological and Geophysical Sciences to contribute to the solution of ``the increasingly acute water resources problem attending world population growth,'' the Water Resources Program was revitalized in the seventies under William E. Bonini and later George F. Pinder, who came to the department from the United States Geological Survey.
The Transportation Program was organized in 1972 under the aegis of the civil engineering department as a multidisciplinary project involving faculty and students from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Directed by Civil Engineering Professor P. Michael Lion, the program has generated a considerable amount of original research, with both student and faculty involvement in a number of outside projects, among them an assessment of transit alternatives for Trenton, commissioned by that city, and an analysis of the Conrail system and its potential as a profit-making venture, commissioned by Congress. More recently, under the direction of Alain L. Kornhauser, the program has explored ways of increasing the productivity of the railroads in cooperation with shippers, rail management and labor, and the federal government.
In the seventies the Department of Civil Engineering experienced a substantial rise in enrollment -- an increase Professor Cakmak attributed to the department's efforts to make its programs relevant to contemporary life and attractive to students interested ``in applying their technical knowledge to actual problems of social concern.'' By 1976-1977 Civil Engineering had risen to fifth place among the thirty-two departments of instruction in the number of undergraduate majors, surpassed only by the traditional leaders, History, English, Economics, and Politics.
As it passed its hundredth birthday, the ``granddad'' of Princeton engineering appeared quite spry, and not only able but eager to adjust to the times and to join with other disciplines -- some younger, some older -- in the search for solutions to contemporary problems.
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).