 Everything people in the last 150 years did for Purdue is still here. The spirit they put here. Everything you do today will always be a part of this university. And believe me, I've seen a lot of giant leaps in the last 150 years. My name is John Purdue. As I've watched this university develop, I hear you singing these songs all the time on campus. And I have one concern. You're always singing this song, hail hail to old Purdue. I'm a bit offended by that. I don't consider myself old. I was born 217 years ago. But I consider myself in the prime of life. So what I would ask you to do is drop the old Purdue. The hail hail is just fine. I like that. I was born in 1802 on Halloween. I had nine sisters. One of them died in infancy. I never married. Some people I've heard say over the years, say that I didn't marry because I grew up with so many sisters. There hasn't at least been a truth to that. I love my sisters. And I help support them throughout my life. And I help their children, my nieces and nephews, whom I also love. I had very little education in Pennsylvania when I was growing up. School in those days cost money. My family was very poor. They didn't have any money. My sisters did work to help me get some formal education. And they gave me the rest of the education I received at home. As a young man, I left and moved to Ohio. All my family moved to Ohio at that time. I tried different things. I taught school for a while. And although it wasn't successfully financially, I considered the years I taught school the happiest years of my life. In time, I bought a farm and tried farming. I found farming wasn't suited to me. But I sold that farm for a profit. I started marketing hogs. I opened a dry good store south of Columbus. And it was quite successful. I brought in a young man who I taught school, Moses Fowler. In Indiana, they were building a canal, the Wabash and Erie Canal. And it would run from Toledo and Lake Erie down to Lafayette. I began to think that Lafayette was a place that had a great future. So in the late 1830s, Moses Fowler and I relocated to Lafayette and began a business here. Eventually, we broke up our partnership and we each went our own ways. I continued the dry good store. I had farms. I bought land in the area. All my life, I believed in philanthropy. When the schools needed money, I donated money to the schools, the public schools. When the church needed money for a building or an organ, I donated to help that church. When we needed to work on roads, I donated to roads. I helped build bridges. In fact, at one point, a newspaper in this town noted that John Perdue was a bachelor. Perhaps he might like to finance some of the projects that are needed in our community and have them named after him. Perhaps that would be where he'll be remembered. During the Civil War, there came a land grant act passed by the federal government in 1862. The land grant act provided money for states to start universities that would open higher education to the masses of people. Governor Conrad Baker addressed the General Assembly and said, This year, 1869, we have to decide where to put our university. And I can tell you, we do not have the funds to get it going. Although we have $200,000 from the sale of land, it'll cost another $200,000 to get this university up and running and we don't have it. And we should not increase taxes to pay for that. And I quite agree with him. So communities in Indiana started bidding to see who was going to get the new land grant college for Indiana. They would offer money to get the school started. Many communities in the Indiana bid to get that. Three were the leading contenders. The first one was Indianapolis. The second university was getting serious consideration was Indiana University. Indiana University started in 1820 in Bloomington. It was well established. It had everything it needed. All it needed to do was attach programs in engineering and agriculture, which were the two programs in the land grant act. And they could open up and get going. But there was a third contender. What I was going to do with my fortune. And I decided I was going to donate to a university. I contacted our state senator, John Stein. I sent him a note in the middle of the night. And I offered the state of Indiana $100,000. If they named it New University after me, Purdue University. And if they located it in Battleground, Indiana. In Battleground, Indiana, there was a Methodist church institute. The institute talked about 600 students of all ages. And the institute offered its facilities and land to the state for the new school. It was worth $100,000. Our commissioners threw in $50,000. I threw in another $100,000. Our timing is everything. And in this case, our timing was terrible. John Stein immediately brought forth my proposal. The legislatures liked it. They told them to draft a bill and get it done as quickly as possible. Before they could vote and accept my offer, the 15th amendment to the United States Constitution came up for ratification. The 15th amendment provided that African American males could vote. Rather than even consider that amendment. The Democrats in the General Assembly quit, resigned their positions, left and went home. There was not a quorum to vote on my offer. There was not a quorum to vote on the 15th amendment or to do all the other business that had to be done. So the session ended with very little accomplished. Well, Conrad Baker was a good governor and he would have none of this. He told them they would hold new elections within a couple of weeks. And they would all come back in April and they would finish their work. Get this done. They did. They held new elections. They all came back. In the meantime, Bloomington and IU raised more money to offer the state. Indianapolis raised more money to offer the state. And I knew we had to have more money to offer the state to get to Langran College. So I went to Battleground and asked them to contribute more money to our bid. They said we're a small town. We don't have anything more. We offered everything we have. I then went to Lafayette. And proposed the idea of putting the school in the city of Lafayette, or maybe within just a couple of miles outside, if they would donate some money. No one did. So I donated some more money. I raised my offer. I sent a letter to the governor and said I would donate $150,000 for the new school if it were located in Tipikidoo County. That didn't exclude Lafayette in Battleground, but it didn't specifically mention Battleground either. I just said it had to be located in Tipikidoo County. And I had to be on the Board of Trustees and the university had to be named for me. Well, the offer was good. And the Indiana General Assembly accepted it. First, the Senate approved it and invited me to the floor when they approved the bill. Then the House voted on it on May 6, 1869. And they invited me to the floor, too, to hear that vote. It was the proudest day of my life. And that became our founding day, our birthday, 150 years ago. We had to find where we were going to put it in Tipikidoo County. And several sites were considered. We had to have a site by the end of the year, by the end of 1869. The land I bought for the start of the university I bought with money from several contributors, it wasn't all my own. And also the people who sold the land donated by selling it less expensive. That land is now what you consider the South Campus today. But it had not been for what happened with the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. Purdue University today would be located in Battleground. Eventually, the Board of Trustees told me to buy land north of State Street. And that's where we started the university on what you now call Memorial Mall. The university opened in 1874. We expected about 200 students to show up and apply. 33 did. 13 of them were qualified for university studies. The rest were put into an academy, kind of a glorified high school. And they lived in Purdue Hall and went to studies to qualify them later for the university. One of the first members of our faculty, who I knew very, very well, was a man named Harvey Wiley. Harvey Wiley was a graduate of Hanover College. He had a degree from Harvard. He was an MD. And he came to Purdue with the first year the university was open in the fall of 1874 to teach chemistry. He was also put in charge of the men's dorm, the Purdue dorm, there to keep order. But as he himself said, he was kind of a fat, jolly old guy. And he let the students do pretty much what they wanted. He was one of the most popular professors with our students. And he was one of the most successful, the first really successful professor in research. He was very interested in the adulteration of foods and foods being improperly labeled. Harvey Wiley used to like to spend time with the students. And he played baseball with the students, something that was frowned upon. It was an unprofessional professor to be playing baseball with the students. And when he played baseball, he wore knickers. He also did something horrible. Harvey Wiley rode a bicycle. It was a bicycle he had to order and have shipped in. It had a huge front wheel and a very small back wheel. Again, he wore knickers when he rode this bicycle. It was very difficult to get on that bicycle. It was so high. And he got students to help him as he learned how to do it. And he didn't know how to stop once he got going. So he would crash into the bushes near my grave in Memorial Mall, right in front of the president's office. The bushes they had planted so carefully to decorate the campus that had no vegetation on it when we opened. He used to ride that bicycle from his home in Lafayette to Purdue every day when he got the hang of it. And the students loved it, were quite entertained by the sight of this professor in knickers, bicycling across the Wabash River and up the State Street Hill. Well, one day, Harvey Wiley got an invitation to attend a meeting on the Board of Trustees. He had been so successful with his research and done so well with the students, he thought he was going to get a commendation, perhaps even a raise. When he walked into the Board of Trustees meeting, he was met with dead silence. Everyone turned their head away and looked away from him. They looked down at the ground. At this point, Harvey Wiley began to get the idea that maybe he wasn't going to get a raise. The meeting got going. He sat down. Before long, a man named Devil Bauer on the Board of Trustees made a talk. He never looked at Wiley during the talk. He just talked about Wiley. He said, Devil Bauer said, it's my displeasure to say that there is a member of our faculty, Harvey Wiley, who is riding a bicycle on campus and playing baseball with our students and wearing knickers. He said, as he rode the bicycle across the Wabash River Bridge, he looked like a monkeyist riding a cartwheel. What can I say when someone asks me, who is that riding a bicycle across the river? Devil Bauer said, and I have to say, it's one of our faculty. I'm embarrassed at this whole incident and we want this to stop. Well, with that, Harvey Wiley stood up, asked for pencil and paper, wrote on the pencil and paper, I resigned and handed it to John Stein, the Secretary of the Board. He left the meeting. That evening, John Stein came to his home with a sealed envelope. Harvey Wiley opened it up and it said, we reject unanimously your resignation. But Harvey Wiley would leave very soon anyway. He was getting ready to go to Washington D.C., where he would become the Chief Chemist of the United States in the Department of Agriculture. As Chief Chemist, he became involved in one of the most famous, one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. He was concerned that there was food being sold to the American people that had preservatives in it, like borax, things that were harmful to people to eat. Worse, the food wasn't labeled what it had in it, that these harmful materials had been in it. Drugs were being sold that had dangerous things in it. Women were buying something for their teething children to help to kill the pain. It had morphine in it, but there was nothing to tell them that there was morphine in that product they were giving their children. They knew well not to give their children morphine, but they didn't know it was in the product that was killing the pain to their children's teething. Harvey Wiley wanted to have products labeled what was in them, and he wanted to get rid of the harmful substances that were in our food and drugs. He got together a group of young men, and he started feeding them these harmful substances, and scientifically proved that they started to become ill. Just as they became ill, he stopped feeding it to them, let them regain their health, and went on again with another substance. They called this group the poison squad, and they called Harvey Wiley Old Borax for one of the substances he was trying to get rid of. In 1906, Harvey Wiley became the father of the Pure Food and Drug Act, an act which continues to protect your food and drugs to this very day. He is one of the most significant people in the history of our country. He went on a few years later to work for Good House Keeping Magazine, and he fought against cigarette smoking 50 years before the U.S. Congress decided that this was dangerous to our health. In 1906, Harvey Wiley came back to Purdue. He gave a commencement address. It's one of the best commencement addresses I've heard at the university. He talked about how he'd been in the conference, and they talked about all the great natural resources in the United States, water, minerals, so many, many, many things. But he said they forgot the most important natural resource of all, young people. The young people of our nation are the most important natural resource we have. I always think that Harvey Wiley was standing there in a black robe giving that commencement speech. I like to think that underneath that black robe, he was wearing knickers. Over the many years I've been watching my little agricultural university on the west side of the Wabash River, I've seen many, many stories, many, many, many things happen. Some of them were very exciting. Some of them were sad. Some of them were victorious. One of my favorite stories took place in the early 1890s during the presidency of James Smart. It's a wonderful name for a college president, Smart. He had a wonderful beard, too. He probably had the coolest beard of any Purdue president in all of our history. Go into the union and look at his bust and see that beard. Smart wanted to build the best engineering building of any university in the nation. And he went to the Indiana General Assembly and asked for money to do it. They, of course, did not provide anywhere near what he wanted, but he used what they gave him and he went ahead and built a small building and got a start. Over in Frankfurt, Indiana, not too far from Lafayette, there was a man named Amos Hevelin. Amos Hevelin was elderly. He was not feeling well. He had lived with his parents all his life until they died. He was single, a bachelor like me. And he decided what he was going to do was give half of his fortune to Purdue University. He said that he felt that the way to help people is to help them help themselves. And he thought he could do that through Purdue. But one day, in University Chapel, James Smart, the president, announced that he had an important announcement to make and there was an important person present. And he said the man's name was Amos Hevelin. And Amos Hevelin was going to give them half his fortune. And with that, they were going to build the grandest, the greatest engineering building in the United States. It was a beautiful dedication. The governor was here. They had a dedication ceremony in University Hall. The legislators were here. The business people in town were here. The students took part. It was a very formal and wonderful day. In the evening, they had a ball. Helen Hall was built with a huge tower in front, a great big tall tower. There was no practical reason for the tower. The main reason it was there is as an exclamation point to say, this is Purdue University and we have arrived. Look at what we have done. It was a glorious evening. It was a glorious moment. Four days later, there was an explosion in the boiler room. And then another explosion. And before anyone really realized what had happened, Helen Hall was engulfed in flames. The flames shot up so high that people in Lafayette could see it. Children in Lafayette ran through the streets shouting, Purdue is on fire. Purdue is on fire. People came out of the opera house, left the performance to stand in downtown and watch this fire engulf the building. Many others went across the river in the snow and got up close to the building to watch it burn. The reporters of the day said the fire was glorious. It was beautiful. It was all the colors of reds and oranges and purples and greens, blues. It was gorgeous, but it was tragic. It was disastrous. It was consuming this great building. Students ran into the building and tried to carry equipment out, risking their lives until other people stopped them. James Mard came from his home across the river in Lafayette, walked up and looked at his dreams, all his dreams for Purdue going up in flames. He stood there by himself for a few moments. He broke down crying. He turned around and left and went home. The next morning, all the students and all the faculty and staff met at the top of University Hall in Chapel. The room was not that large. The students and the faculty and staff had been at the fire all night and the smoke had been absorbed in their clothes. The room that they were in was full of the deep dank smell of smoke from Hevlin Hall. Outside, the fire was still smoldering. They could see it from the windows. The students were despondent. They all sat with their hands on their knees and their heads looking down, thinking to happen next, thinking of all that they'd lost in that fire the night before. James Mard got up before them to speak. He stood up straight. He drew his breath and he said, we are glad that no one was injured, but we are no longer looking to the past. From now on, we are looking forward. I promise you, young men, that building, that tower will go up one brick higher. The students and the faculty and the staff all jumped out of their seats and cheered and they were all enthused and excited. And they did build that building back up. Just a couple years later, they dedicated a new hall, a new engineering hall, which they would later name Hevlin Hall. It was grander than the first one and the tower was not only a tower this time. It had a beautiful clock in it with bells and the bells chimed the hours and chimed the beginning and end of class and chimed the lights out in the evening. The tower was not one brick higher. It was actually nine brick higher and the one brick higher became a mantra for Purdue University. Everything done at Purdue from that time forward has always been one brick higher than what was done before. Some years before the start of World War I, our president, Winthrop Stone, called a woman into his office, Carolyn Shoemaker, who was teaching on the campus and he asked her to take on the added duties of part-time dean of women. She was quite surprised by the offer. She said she didn't know if she was capable of doing it. She didn't know what the responsibilities would be. And Stone made one of the most famous comments in the history of our university. He looked at her and he said, be a man, Miss Shoemaker, be a man. Fortunately, she did not act like a man. She was a woman and she became a great first dean of women students at the university, did a great job. Other women started appearing in the years to come, Virginia Meredith, who was known as the Queen of American Agriculture, became the first woman on the board of trustees. Her adopted daughter, Mary Matthews, became head and later dean of our School of Economics and ran it for many, many years. One of our most famous experiences was in the mid-1930s when Amiya Earhart came to Purdue. Our president, Edward Elliott, heard her speak in New York City at a conference he was also speaking at. He liked her. This modern world of science and invention is of particular interest to women. He liked what she had to say. Amiya Earhart, of course, was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She was also the second human. No one had done it before her except for Lindbergh. Elliott asked Earhart to come to campus to speak. She did. She was well received. And then he offered her a position at Purdue. She would come and spend several weeks at Purdue every semester and she would be an advisor to our School of Aeronautics and she would be a counselor on careers for women students. Amiya Earhart claimed that she was the first woman to hold that title at any university in the United States. The history of the world, the history of our country has passed through our university over the many decades over the 150 years of our existence. One of the most amazing stories that has passed through is the story of flight. Flight was first accomplished in 1903. But before flight even happened, in the year 1900, Purdue President Winthrop Stone, a tall man that looked very distinguished with his gray hair comb back, gave a speech to the students at Anderson High School. Winthrop Stone would soon become the president of Purdue University and he would die 20 years later in a mountain climbing accident. But that evening, that afternoon, at Anderson High School, he gave a speech and as older people often do, he was looking to the past. He told the students about all the glorious things that had been accomplished, the technology that had been done in the 19th century. He enlisted off all the things, railroads, telegraph, much, much more, the light bulb. The students, as young people do, were not looking to the past at all, they were looking to the future and that's what they wanted to hear about. Winthrop Stone could never, in his wildest dreams, imagine, was that some of the students in his audience that day would live to see a man walk on the moon and that man would be a graduate of his university. Purdue became one of the first universities in the country to get involved in aeronautical engineering in the early 1920s. There was an exhibition flight at Purdue in 1911. Purdue was very much involved in developing the early technology in flight. But the most amazing thing happened in the middle of the 20th century. In 1950, a man named Virgil Gus Grissom graduated from Purdue. Five years later, in 1955, a man named Neil Armstrong graduated from Purdue. In 1956, Gene Cernan graduated from Purdue and in 1957, Roger Chaffee graduated from Purdue. Those young men walked through the campus of Purdue, they sat under trees, reading books, they went out in dates, they studied their engineering, they studied hard. But never once, never once while they were at Purdue, did they dream what was going to happen in their lives. Grissom became the second American with the third human being to launch into space in 1961. Neil Armstrong would become the first person to walk on the moon. And it took place 14 years after he graduated from Purdue University. Gene Cernan became the last person to walk on the moon. And Roger Chaffee died with Gus Grissom in 1967 under the attempt to test a module, space module at the Kennedy Space Center. Once we had those four astronauts come to Purdue, more astronauts came. Our graduates had done amazing things that have impacted our nation and our world. We have two Nobel Prize winners that have come from Purdue, both in chemistry. The first was Herbert Brown. One of his students, a postgraduate student, was Aichi Nagishi. Years later, Aichi Nagishi would become the Herbert Brown Professor at Purdue University and he would win a Nobel Prize. We have two people on our faculty who are world food prize winners and a graduate of Purdue who was a world food prize winner. There's also been some really what people might call cool things done by Purdue University graduates. For instance, those re-estats you have in your home that lower the lights in your dining room, the man who invented that for your home was a Purdue University graduate. The person who invented chicken nuggets was a Purdue University graduate. The person who patented the first soft-serve ice cream machine and I certainly like that was a Purdue University graduate. The person mainly responsible for the creation of Stowe's Top Stuffing was a Purdue University graduate. It's now time for me to leave. But I've enjoyed talking to you and telling you some of the stories of the giant leaps that have happened at Purdue University over the last 150 years. I'll continue to watch over this school and see what has happened and I am confident that all of you here today will play a role in making this an even greater university during the next 150 years. And I leave you with this thought. Boiler up!