Ursinus College
{ Ursinus College is a private liberal arts college in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. It occupies a 170-acre campus. 1867: Members of the German Reformed Church begin plans to establish a college where "young men could be liberally educated under the benign influence of Christianity." These founders were hoping to establish an alternative to the seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, a school they believed was heretical to traditional Reformed faith. 1869: The college is granted a charter by the Legislature of Pennsylvania to begin operations in its current location on the grounds of Todd’s School and the adjacent Freeland Seminary. Dr. John Henry Augustus Bomberger, for whom the campus' signature Romanesque building is named, served as the college’s first president until his death in 1890. Bomberger proposed naming the college after Zacharias Ursinus, a 16th-century German theologian and an important figure in the Protestant Reformation. 1870: Instruction begins at the college in September. For many years the annual opening meetings of "Zwing" and its rival society, were the major events of the student year.
1881: Women first admitted, as a direct consequence of the closing of the Pennsylvania Female College in 1880, a separate literary society for women, The Olevian, is formed. Like Zwingli and Schaff, Olevian Hall on campus is named in honor of its respective historical society. 1893: The first meeting of the college's alumni association is held at the Colonnade Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1896: In 1896, the town of Freeland incorporated as the Borough of Collegeville, the name the Pennsylvania Railroad had given the place in 1869—because of the Pennsylvania Female College. However, in years since, the “college” in Collegeville has come to mean Ursinus. 1897: The Ruby, Ursinus' yearbook is first published by the Class of 1897 as a tribute to Professor Samuel Vernon Ruby, who collapsed as he was entering Bomberger Hall in 1896 and died in its chapel, surrounded by students and teachers who had gathered there for morning prayers. 1921: The first aerial photograph of Ursinus is taken, by future college president D.
L. Helfferich, is published in the 1921 Ruby.1938: J. D. Salinger enrolls at Ursinus for the fall semester; as quoted from the Ursinus website, "The late 30s saw the arrival of someone, Ursinus’ most famous student ever: Jerome D. Salinger. Gallant and slim, he swooped in from New York City for a few months in 1938, wrote a zany column for the student newspaper, The Skipped Diploma, dated a few of the coeds dropped out at Thanksgiving, he went on to great fame as author of The Catcher in the Rye, short stories appearing in The New Yorker". 1942: Ursinus sees its male enrollment drop in half due to the start of World War II, falling from 535 to 350. During the war, Ursinus made a concerted effort to bring in military students from across the country acquiring a Naval V-12 unit.1972: Dr. Gerald Edelman'50, wins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work with Dr. Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system, becoming the college's first Nobel laureate.1989: The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art opens on the Ursinus campus.
1990: Phi Beta Kappa invites Ursinus into its ranks. In 1990, the F. W. Olin Foundation awarded a $5.6 million grant to Ursinus to construct a humanities building. 1993: Ursinus joins the Centennial Conference at its inception, a regional athletic conference, consisting of Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, Dickinson College, Gettysburg College, Johns Hopkins University, Franklin & Marshall College and others. 1995: The college appoints Dr. John Strassburger as its 12th president, the first president from outside the Ursinus alumni group. Dr. Strassburger was an American Historian, a graduate of Bates College, Oxford University, Princeton University. Under President Strassburger, Ursinus initiated the Summer Fellows program in which selected students worked on individualized research projects with faculty advisors. During President Strassburger's tenure as president Ursinus became affiliated with numerous prestigious groups such as the Annapolis Group, the Watson Foundation, the Kemper Scholars group and Project Pericles.
2006: Ursinus College is profiled among only 40 colleges in former New York Times education editor Loren Pope's popular guidebook, Colleges That Change Lives. 2011: Dr. Bobby Fong, a graduate of Harvard and UCLA and former president of Butler University, began his tenure as the 13th president of Ursinus on July 1, 2011. For the third year in a row Ursinus is designated as a Top Ten Up and Coming College by U. S. News & World Report. 2014: Dr. Fong dies of natural causes at his home in Collegeville. Lucien T. Winegar, the Dean and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, is appointed Interim President.2015: S. Brock Blomberg, Dean of the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance at Claremont McKenna College, is named 17th president of Ursinus. Ursinus College is independent in character with historical ties to its religious past, operates with a $138,800,000 endowment as of June 30, 2018. Ursinus established its chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 1992. At the time, only 242 of the nation's 3,500 colleges and universities had gained acceptance into the elite group.
While students can choose from 60 courses of study, "biology and economics, English are the three majors with the largest numbers of students." The Common Intellectual Experience is Ursinus' unique seminar course required of all first-year students and is a requisite for the bachelor's degree. The Common Intellectual Experience (r
National Institute of Standards and Technology
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is a physical sciences laboratory, a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce. Its mission is to promote industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into laboratory programs that include nanoscale science and technology, information technology, neutron research, material measurement, physical measurement; the American AI initiative has called NIST to lead the development of appropriate technical standards for reliable, trustworthy, secure and interoperable AI systems. The Articles of Confederation, ratified by the colonies in 1781, contained the clause, "The United States in Congress assembled shall have the sole and exclusive right and power of regulating the alloy and value of coin struck by their own authority, or by that of the respective states—fixing the standards of weights and measures throughout the United States". Article 1, section 8, of the Constitution of the United States, transferred this power to Congress.
To coin money, regulate the value thereof, of foreign coin, fix the standard of weights and measures". In January 1790, President George Washington, in his first annual message to Congress stated that, "Uniformity in the currency and measures of the United States is an object of great importance, will, I am persuaded, be duly attended to", ordered Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson to prepare a plan for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage and Measures of the United States, afterwards referred to as the Jefferson report. On October 25, 1791, Washington appealed a third time to Congress, "A uniformity of the weights and measures of the country is among the important objects submitted to you by the Constitution and if it can be derived from a standard at once invariable and universal, must be no less honorable to the public council than conducive to the public convenience", but it was not until 1838, that a uniform set of standards was worked out. In 1821, John Quincy Adams had declared "Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessities of life to every individual of human society".
From 1830 until 1901, the role of overseeing weights and measures was carried out by the Office of Standard Weights and Measures, part of the United States Department of the Treasury. In 1901, in response to a bill proposed by Congressman James H. Southard, the National Bureau of Standards was founded with the mandate to provide standard weights and measures, to serve as the national physical laboratory for the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Samuel W. Stratton as the first director; the budget for the first year of operation was $40,000. The Bureau took custody of the copies of the kilogram and meter bars that were the standards for US measures, set up a program to provide metrology services for United States scientific and commercial users. A laboratory site was constructed in Washington, DC, instruments were acquired from the national physical laboratories of Europe. In addition to weights and measures, the Bureau developed instruments for electrical units and for measurement of light.
In 1905 a meeting was called that would be the first "National Conference on Weights and Measures". Conceived as purely a metrology agency, the Bureau of Standards was directed by Herbert Hoover to set up divisions to develop commercial standards for materials and products.page 133 Some of these standards were for products intended for government use, but product standards affected private-sector consumption. Quality standards were developed for products including some types of clothing, automobile brake systems and headlamps and electrical safety. During World War I, the Bureau worked on multiple problems related to war production operating its own facility to produce optical glass when European supplies were cut off. Between the wars, Harry Diamond of the Bureau developed a blind approach radio aircraft landing system. During World War II, military research and development was carried out, including development of radio propagation forecast methods, the proximity fuze and the standardized airframe used for Project Pigeon, shortly afterwards the autonomously radar-guided Bat anti-ship guided bomb and the Kingfisher family of torpedo-carrying missiles.
In 1948, financed by the United States Air Force, the Bureau began design and construction of SEAC, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer. The computer went into operation in May 1950 using a combination of vacuum tubes and solid-state diode logic. About the same time the Standards Western Automatic Computer, was built at the Los Angeles office of the NBS by Harry Huskey and used for research there. A mobile version, DYSEAC, was built for the Signal Corps in 1954. Due to a changing mission, the "National Bureau of Standards" became the "National Institute of Standards and Technology" in 1988. Following September 11, 2001, NIST conducted the official investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. NIST, known between 1901 and 1988 as the National Bureau of Standards, is a measurement standards laboratory known as a National Metrological Institute, a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce; the institute's official mission is to: Promote U. S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.
NIST had an operating budget for fiscal year 2007 of about $843.3 million. NIST's 2009 budget was $992 million
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, sometimes known colloquially as Philly, is the largest city in the U. S. state and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-most populous U. S. city, with a 2017 census-estimated population of 1,580,863. Since 1854, the city has been coterminous with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the eighth-largest U. S. metropolitan statistical area, with over 6 million residents as of 2017. Philadelphia is the economic and cultural anchor of the greater Delaware Valley, located along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, within the Northeast megalopolis; the Delaware Valley's population of 7.2 million ranks it as the eighth-largest combined statistical area in the United States. William Penn, an English Quaker, founded the city in 1682 to serve as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony. Philadelphia played an instrumental role in the American Revolution as a meeting place for the Founding Fathers of the United States, who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 at the Second Continental Congress, the Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.
Several other key events occurred in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War including the First Continental Congress, the preservation of the Liberty Bell, the Battle of Germantown, the Siege of Fort Mifflin. Philadelphia was one of the nation's capitals during the revolution, served as temporary U. S. capital while Washington, D. C. was under construction. In the 19th century, Philadelphia became a railroad hub; the city grew from an influx of European immigrants, most of whom came from Ireland and Germany—the three largest reported ancestry groups in the city as of 2015. In the early 20th century, Philadelphia became a prime destination for African Americans during the Great Migration after the Civil War, as well as Puerto Ricans; the city's population doubled from one million to two million people between 1890 and 1950. The Philadelphia area's many universities and colleges make it a top study destination, as the city has evolved into an educational and economic hub. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Philadelphia area had a gross domestic product of US$445 billion in 2017, the eighth-largest metropolitan economy in the United States.
Philadelphia is the center of economic activity in Pennsylvania and is home to five Fortune 1000 companies. The Philadelphia skyline is expanding, with a market of 81,900 commercial properties in 2016, including several nationally prominent skyscrapers. Philadelphia has more outdoor murals than any other American city. Fairmount Park, when combined with the adjacent Wissahickon Valley Park in the same watershed, is one of the largest contiguous urban park areas in the United States; the city is known for its arts, culture and colonial history, attracting 42 million domestic tourists in 2016 who spent US$6.8 billion, generating an estimated $11 billion in total economic impact in the city and surrounding four counties of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia has emerged as a biotechnology hub. Philadelphia is the birthplace of the United States Marine Corps, is the home of many U. S. firsts, including the first library, medical school, national capital, stock exchange and business school. Philadelphia contains 67 National Historic Landmarks and the World Heritage Site of Independence Hall.
The city became a member of the Organization of World Heritage Cities in 2015, as the first World Heritage City in the United States. Although Philadelphia is undergoing gentrification, the city maintains mitigation strategies to minimize displacement of homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods. Before Europeans arrived, the Philadelphia area was home to the Lenape Indians in the village of Shackamaxon; the Lenape are a Native American tribe and First Nations band government. They are called Delaware Indians, their historical territory was along the Delaware River watershed, western Long Island, the Lower Hudson Valley. Most Lenape were pushed out of their Delaware homeland during the 18th century by expanding European colonies, exacerbated by losses from intertribal conflicts. Lenape communities were weakened by newly introduced diseases smallpox, violent conflict with Europeans. Iroquois people fought the Lenape. Surviving Lenape moved west into the upper Ohio River basin; the American Revolutionary War and United States' independence pushed them further west.
In the 1860s, the United States government sent most Lenape remaining in the eastern United States to the Indian Territory under the Indian removal policy. In the 21st century, most Lenape reside in Oklahoma, with some communities living in Wisconsin, in their traditional homelands. Europeans came to the Delaware Valley in the early 17th century, with the first settlements founded by the Dutch, who in 1623 built Fort Nassau on the Delaware River opposite the Schuylkill River in what is now Brooklawn, New Jersey; the Dutch considered the entire Delaware River valley to be part of their New Netherland colony. In 1638, Swedish settlers led by renegade Dutch established the colony of New Sweden at Fort Christina and spread out in the valley. In 1644, New Sweden supported the Susquehannocks in their military defeat of the English colony of Maryland. In 1648, the Dutch built Fort Beversreede on the west bank of the Delaware, south of the Schuylkill near the present-day Eastwick neighborhood, to reassert their dominion over the area.
The Swedes responded by building Fort Nya Korsholm, or New Korsholm, named after a town in Finland with a Swedish majority. In 1655, a
Moore School of Electrical Engineering
The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania came into existence as a result of an endowment from Alfred Fitler Moore on June 4, 1923. It was granted to Penn's School of Electrical Engineering, located in the Towne Building; the first dean of the Moore School was Harold Pender. The Moore School is famed as the birthplace of the computer industry: It was here that the first general-purpose Turing complete digital electronic computer, the ENIAC, was built between 1943 and 1946. Preliminary design work on the ENIAC's successor machine the EDVAC resulted in the stored program concept used in all computers today, the logical design having been promulgated in John von Neumann's First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, a set of notes synthesized from meetings he attended at the Moore School; the first computer course was given at the Moore School in Summer 1946, leading to an explosion in computer development all over the world. Moore School faculty John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert founded the first computer company, which produced the UNIVAC computer.
The Moore School has been integrated into Penn's School of Applied Science. It no longer exists as a separate entity. Constructed in 1921 as a two-story building by Erskin & Morris, it was renovated in 1926 by Paul Philippe Cret and a third story was added in 1940 by Alfred Bendiner. A complete history for all of Penn Engineering, including the Moore School
Electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the study and application of electricity and electromagnetism. This field first became an identifiable occupation in the half of the 19th century after commercialization of the electric telegraph, the telephone, electric power distribution and use. Subsequently and recording media made electronics part of daily life; the invention of the transistor, the integrated circuit, brought down the cost of electronics to the point they can be used in any household object. Electrical engineering has now divided into a wide range of fields including electronics, digital computers, computer engineering, power engineering, telecommunications, control systems, radio-frequency engineering, signal processing and microelectronics. Many of these disciplines overlap with other engineering branches, spanning a huge number of specializations such as hardware engineering, power electronics and waves, microwave engineering, electrochemistry, renewable energies, electrical materials science, much more.
See glossary of electrical and electronics engineering. Electrical engineers hold a degree in electrical engineering or electronic engineering. Practising engineers may be members of a professional body; such bodies include the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Electrical engineers work in a wide range of industries and the skills required are variable; these range from basic circuit theory to the management skills required of a project manager. The tools and equipment that an individual engineer may need are variable, ranging from a simple voltmeter to a top end analyzer to sophisticated design and manufacturing software. Electricity has been a subject of scientific interest since at least the early 17th century. William Gilbert was a prominent early electrical scientist, was the first to draw a clear distinction between magnetism and static electricity, he is credited with establishing the term "electricity". He designed the versorium: a device that detects the presence of statically charged objects.
In 1762 Swedish professor Johan Carl Wilcke invented a device named electrophorus that produced a static electric charge. By 1800 Alessandro Volta had developed the voltaic pile, a forerunner of the electric battery In the 19th century, research into the subject started to intensify. Notable developments in this century include the work of Hans Christian Ørsted who discovered in 1820 that an electric current produces a magnetic field that will deflect a compass needle, of William Sturgeon who, in 1825 invented the electromagnet, of Joseph Henry and Edward Davy who invented the electrical relay in 1835, of Georg Ohm, who in 1827 quantified the relationship between the electric current and potential difference in a conductor, of Michael Faraday, of James Clerk Maxwell, who in 1873 published a unified theory of electricity and magnetism in his treatise Electricity and Magnetism. In 1782 Georges-Louis Le Sage developed and presented in Berlin the world's first form of electric telegraphy, using 24 different wires, one for each letter of the alphabet.
This telegraph connected two rooms. It was an electrostatic telegraph. In 1795, Francisco Salva Campillo proposed an electrostatic telegraph system. Between 1803-1804, he worked on electrical telegraphy and in 1804, he presented his report at the Royal Academy of Natural Sciences and Arts of Barcelona. Salva’s electrolyte telegraph system was innovative though it was influenced by and based upon two new discoveries made in Europe in 1800 – Alessandro Volta’s electric battery for generating an electric current and William Nicholson and Anthony Carlyle’s electrolysis of water. Electrical telegraphy may be considered the first example of electrical engineering. Electrical engineering became a profession in the 19th century. Practitioners had created a global electric telegraph network and the first professional electrical engineering institutions were founded in the UK and USA to support the new discipline. Francis Ronalds created an electric telegraph system in 1816 and documented his vision of how the world could be transformed by electricity.
Over 50 years he joined the new Society of Telegraph Engineers where he was regarded by other members as the first of their cohort. By the end of the 19th century, the world had been forever changed by the rapid communication made possible by the engineering development of land-lines, submarine cables, from about 1890, wireless telegraphy. Practical applications and advances in such fields created an increasing need for standardised units of measure, they led to the international standardization of the units volt, coulomb, ohm and henry. This was achieved at an international conference in Chicago in 1893; the publication of these standards formed the basis of future advances in standardisation in various industries, in many countries, the definitions were recognized in relevant legislation. During these years, the study of electricity was considered to be a subfield of physics since the early electrical technology was considered electromechanical in nature; the Technische Universität Darmstadt founded the world's first department of electrical engineering in 1882.
The first electrical engineering degree program was started at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the physics department
1952 United States presidential election
The 1952 United States presidential election was the 42nd quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 4, 1952. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won a landslide victory over Democrat Adlai Stevenson, ending a string of Democratic Party wins that stretched back to 1932. Incumbent Democratic President Harry S. Truman had remained silent about whether he would seek another full term, but the unpopular incumbent announced his withdrawal from the race following his defeat in the New Hampshire primary by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver. After Truman's withdrawal, the president and other party leaders threw their support behind Stevenson, the moderate Governor of Illinois. Stevenson emerged victorious on the third presidential ballot of the 1952 Democratic National Convention, defeating Kefauver, Senator Richard Russell Jr. of Georgia, other candidates. The Republican nomination was contested by conservative Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio and Eisenhower, a general, popular for his leadership in World War II.
With the support of Thomas E. Dewey and other party leaders, Eisenhower narrowly prevailed over Taft at the 1952 Republican National Convention; the Republicans chose Richard Nixon, a young anti-Communist Senator from California, as Eisenhower's running mate. Republicans attacked Truman's handling of the Korean War and the broader Cold War, alleged that Soviet spies had infiltrated the U. S. government. Democrats faulted Eisenhower for failing to condemn Republican Senator Joe McCarthy and other anti-Communist Republicans who they alleged had engaged in reckless and unwarranted attacks. Stevenson tried to separate himself from the unpopular Truman administration, instead campaigning on the popularity of the New Deal and lingering fears of another Great Depression under a Republican administration. Eisenhower retained his enormous popularity from the war, as seen in his campaign slogan, "I Like Ike." Eisenhower's popularity and Truman's unpopularity led to a Republican victory, Eisenhower won 55% of the popular vote.
He carried every state outside of the South and won several Southern states that had always voted for Democrats since the end of Reconstruction. Republicans won control of both houses of Congress; the fight for the Republican nomination was between General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who became the candidate of the party's moderate eastern establishment; the moderate Eastern Republicans were led by New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the party's presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948; the moderates tended to be interventionists, who felt that America needed to fight the Cold War overseas and confront the Soviet Union in Eurasia. The moderates were concerned with ending the Republicans' losing streak in presidential elections. For this reason, Dewey himself declined the notion of a third run for president though he still had a large amount of support within the party; the GOP had been out of power for 20 years, the sentiment that a proper two-party system needed to be reestablished was strong a Republican Party in control of the White House would have more incentive to reign in unpopular demagogues such as Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The conservative Republicans, led by Taft, were based in the Midwest and parts of the South. The Midwest was a bastion of conservatism and isolationist sentiment, dislike of Europeans, in particular Great Britain, was common, there was a widespread feeling that the British manipulated US foreign policy and were eager to kowtow to the Soviet Union, although attitudes were beginning to change among the younger generation who had fought in World War II. Taft had unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in the 1940 and 1948 presidential elections, losing both times to moderate candidates from New York. Taft, 63, felt that this was his last chance to run for president and so his friends and supporters worked extra hard to ensure that he win the nomination. Warren, although popular in California, refused to campaign in the presidential primaries and thus limited his chances of winning the nomination, he did retain the support of the California delegation, his supporters hoped that, in the event of an Eisenhower-Taft deadlock, Warren might emerge as a compromise candidate.
After being persuaded to run, Eisenhower scored a major victory in the New Hampshire primary, when his supporters wrote his name onto the ballot, giving him an upset victory over Taft. However, from there until the Republican Convention the primaries were divided evenly between the two, by the time the convention opened, the race for the nomination was still too close to call. Taft won the Nebraska, Wisconsin and South Dakota primaries, while Eisenhower won the New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Oregon primaries. Stassen and Warren only won their home states of Minnesota and California which ended their chances of earning the nomination. General Douglas MacArthur got ten delegates from various states, but had made it clear from early in the race that he had no interest in being nominated; when the 1952 Republican National Convention opened in Chicago, most political experts rated Taft and Eisenhower as neck-and-neck in the delegate vote totals. Eisenhower's managers, led by Dewey an
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Considered by some to be a "father of the computer", Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in Babbage's analytical engine, his varied work in other fields has led him to be described as "pre-eminent" among the many polymaths of his century. Parts of Babbage's incomplete mechanisms are on display in the Science Museum in London. In 1991, a functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked. Babbage's birthplace is disputed, but according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography he was most born at 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, England.
A blue plaque on the junction of Larcom Street and Walworth Road commemorates the event. His date of birth was given in his obituary in The Times as 26 December 1792; the parish register of St. Mary's, London, shows that Babbage was baptised on 6 January 1792, supporting a birth year of 1791. Babbage was one of four children of Betsy Plumleigh Teape, his father was a banking partner of William Praed in founding Praed's & Co. of Fleet Street, London, in 1801. In 1808, the Babbage family moved into the old Rowdens house in East Teignmouth. Around the age of eight, Babbage was sent to a country school in Alphington near Exeter to recover from a life-threatening fever. For a short time he attended King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, South Devon, but his health forced him back to private tutors for a time. Babbage joined the 30-student Holmwood Academy, in Baker Street, Middlesex, under the Reverend Stephen Freeman; the academy had a library. He studied with two more private tutors after leaving the academy.
The first was a clergyman near Cambridge. He was brought home, to study at the Totnes school: this was at age 16 or 17; the second was an Oxford tutor, under whom Babbage reached a level in Classics sufficient to be accepted by Cambridge. Babbage arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1810, he was self-taught in some parts of contemporary mathematics. As a result, he was disappointed in the standard mathematical instruction available at the university. Babbage, John Herschel, George Peacock, several other friends formed the Analytical Society in 1812; as a student, Babbage was a member of other societies such as The Ghost Club, concerned with investigating supernatural phenomena, the Extractors Club, dedicated to liberating its members from the madhouse, should any be committed to one. In 1812 Babbage transferred to Cambridge, he did not graduate with honours. He instead received a degree without examination in 1814, he had defended a thesis, considered blasphemous in the preliminary public disputation.
Considering his reputation, Babbage made progress. He lectured to the Royal Institution on astronomy in 1815, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1816. After graduation, on the other hand, he applied for positions unsuccessfully, had little in the way of career. In 1816 he was a candidate for a teaching job at Haileybury College. In 1819, Babbage and Herschel visited Paris and the Society of Arcueil, meeting leading French mathematicians and physicists; that year Babbage applied to be professor at the University of Edinburgh, with the recommendation of Pierre Simon Laplace. With Herschel, Babbage worked on the electrodynamics of Arago's rotations, publishing in 1825, their explanations were only transitional, being broadened by Michael Faraday. The phenomena are now part of the theory of eddy currents, Babbage and Herschel missed some of the clues to unification of electromagnetic theory, staying close to Ampère's force law. Babbage purchased the actuarial tables of George Barrett, who died in 1821 leaving unpublished work, surveyed the field in 1826 in Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives.
This interest followed a project to set up an insurance company, prompted by Francis Baily and mooted in 1824, but not carried out. Babbage did calculate actuarial tables for that scheme, using Equitable Society mortality data from 1762 onwards. During this whole period Babbage depended awkwardly on his father's support, given his father's attitude to his early marriage, of 1814: he and Edward Ryan wedded the Whitmore sisters, he made a home in Marylebone in London, founded a large family. On his father's death in 1827, Babbage inherited a large estate. After his wife's death in the same year he spent time travelling. In Italy he met Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, foreshadowing a visit to Piedmont. In April 1828 he was in Rome, relying on Herschel to manage the difference engine project, when he heard that he had become professor at Cambridge, a positio
