Ebook: Mind and Hand: The Birth of MIT

The motto on the seal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ''Mens et Manus''—''mind and hand''—signals the Institute's dedication to what MIT founder William Barton Rogers called ''the most earnest cooperation of intelligent culture with industrial pursuits.'' Mind and Hand traces the ideas about science and education that have shaped MIT and defined its mission—from the new science of the Enlightenment era and the ideals of representative democracy spurred by the Industrial Revolution to new theories on the nature and role of higher education in nineteenth-century America. MIT emerged in mid-century as an experiment in scientific and technical education, with its origins in the tension between these old and new ideas.