MIT

MIT is 150. The Buzz’s oldest brother is an MIT grad where he played soccer. The Buzz thought that by osmosis this might qualify for admission to the patent bar but no such luck. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts approved a charter in 1861 for the “Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Society of Natural History.” The name was subsequently shortened. MIT grads founded over 26,000 companies including everything from publisher of Guitar Hero and Bose to Intel and HP, and those companies collectively would constitute the 17^th largest economy in the world. Grads include everyone from Click and Clack of NPR’s CarTalk to Buzz [no, no relation] Aldrin to Benjamin Netanyahu to I.M. Pei. Its first woman instructor was Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards, the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry, who also studied at MIT in 1870. A founder of the American Association of University Women, Richards died almost exactly 100 year ago. There is no truth to the rumor that MIT has no Division I football team because other schools protested that MIT’s student’s ability to work calculations on the fly concerning ballistics would be unfair to other schools. We say, when visiting, watch out for smart attacks!

-- Paul Marotta