Engineering Centennial 1888-1988

I took Adam to a lecture hall in the electrical engineering building and told him stories that I could remember.

Later, I took him to the basement to show him where the computer lab used to be ( and why there ever was such a thing as a computer lab ).

We were surprised to find a hall filled with pictures of Electrical Engineers from 1888 to 1988 and found my photo.

Here's the story behind the pictures:


1888 marked the graduation of Purdue's first two electrical engineers. In the next one hundred years, 20,272 men and women would join this select group granted Purdue Electrical Engineering degrees. Our Wall of Fame recognizes the first century of students to matriculate with bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees.


The "Nice Guys of Eta Kappa Nu" began producing class composites as a service project to the school using pictures taken from the Purdue yearbook, "Debris." Kent Fuchs, department head, had the composites installed in the hallway of the Electrical Engineering building in 2000. This pictorial history grew and became a source of enrichment to visitors, alumni and current students. Comments like, "Is that grandpa?", "Look, I can't believe my hair!", "I didn't know the school existed back then!" could be heard as people viewed the classes.


While the composites are impressive, they are incomplete (only including those people in yearbooks) and sometimes inaccurate (people appear in yearbooks other than their official graduation year). When it was decided to include the Wall of Fame on the Electrical and Computer Engineering website, Engineering Computer Network's Marian Delp agreed to manage the project and worked with students for forty months to scan 79% (16,014) of the images.


Difficulties were abundant as efforts were made to assure name and picture agreed. For example one record might list a person as "L. T. Smith" and another as "Lewis Tobias Smith" or "Lew Smith." Or the yearbook has a fall picture for "Sheila Marie Jones" and the registrar has a May graduation record for "Sheila Marie Wolfe," reflecting her married name. Placement of upper and lower case lettering was also inconsistent between sources: Dewitt versus DeWitt, or Del Costa versus DelCosta. Is all of the information accurate? Perhaps not, but as alumns submit correct information about themselves on the website, our accuracy can only improve.