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Burden's
inspiring 60-foot vertical wheel, most powerful in history.
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And of course, Rensselaer engineers designed and supervised the construction of
a significant share of the railroads, the subways, and the splendid suspension
bridges that became the fabric of the new cultural form in urban-industrial America
(as well as in many other parts of the world). Somewhere between about 1825 and
1860, then, Amos Eaton's Rensselaereans became among the first in the nation to
realize that the future would be closer to our notions of the Jetsons than it
would be to Jefferson's notion of the heroic yeoman farmer. Indeed, in urban-industrial
America, the sturdy social bulwark known as the yeoman farmer was swept aside
via modernist put-downs of country bumpkins, hicks, and hayseeds, and was replaced
with more timely icons of virtue such as that quintessential American inventor,
Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park and a suspiciously similar figure to the
Wizard of Oz.
Rensselaer County Historical Society 
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What is more, the descendants of Eaton's original Rensselaereans augmented
their awareness of modernism and their enabling of it by also celebrating it.
Like his father who designed it, Rensselaerean Washington A. Roebling (Class of
1857) knew that the Brooklyn Bridge he and his employees were building wasn't
just a conveyance between Brooklyn and Manhattan Island. It was also a statement,
a declaration that the upstart United States had emerged from its coonskin cap
days to build urban monuments that evoked the grandeur of classical Rome. When
the French, who dominated European civil engineering, responded first with a Trojan
Horse known as the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor three years later, then
followed that with the spectacular 300-meter-tall Eiffel Tower of 1889, Rensselaer
graduate George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. (Class of 1881) and his Rensselaer-educated
assistant William Gronau (Class of 1887) responded with the world's first Ferris
wheel, a 264-foot-tall structure carrying 1,440 people above the midway of Chicago's
World Columbian Exposition of 1893. It was as fine a celebration of the dynamic
culture of urban life as there has ever been. What is more, that wheel bore a
striking resemblance to Henry Burden's "Niagara of Water Wheels" in South Troy,
the most powerful vertical water wheel in history and very probably—since
Ferris and Gronau undoubtedly studied its structure while undergraduates—the
model for Ferris's wheel.
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Rensselaer County Historical Society
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The
automobiles in this more recent photograph of downtown Troy look innocent enough,
but they were a primary instrument by which the vitality of Northeastern cities
migrated elsewhere. Ironically, the automobile-era billboard (preceding photo)
brags that Troy is "modern" just as the pioneer city of modernism has
fallen behind the skyscrapers and the car-culture suburbs of the 20th-century
metropolitan complex.
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Rensselaer, then, was the central educational institution in the
Silicon Valley of the 19th century, where cutting-edge technology became the focus
for regional economic prosperity, where the phenomenon was deliberately cultivated
via infrastructure innovations in transportation, education, and investment banking,
where a wartime climate helped significantly to bankroll economic expansion, where
people realized early on that farm life was being replaced wholesale, not perfected,
and where people enabled and celebrated that cultural transformation and welcomed
the new cultural form. In these ways, among others, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
played a key role in designing modern America, both in a material sense and inside
the heads of those who have made modern America their home.
P. Thomas Carroll is executive director of the Hudson Mohawk
Industrial Gateway and former associate professor of history at Rensselaer. This
article was originally an address at the 175th Anniversary Founders Day Symposium,
November 6, 1998. It has been revised for publication in Rensselaer magazine.
Copyright © 1998 by P. Thomas Carroll. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved
© 1999 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Send comments, opinions, or questions to alum.mag@rpi.edu
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