Igor Konstantinovsky

“Creating a town in Colonial America was a great property venture for its founder, but it also carried a certain number of obligations: opening a school, building a place of worship, welcoming the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. All these obligations were scrupulously fulfilled by Governor Wentworth, who donated almost 500 acres of good land for the construction of Dartmouth College. It opened in 1769 and is one of the oldest universities in North America, one of only nine built before the American Revolution. It was named in honour of William Legge, Second Count of Dartmouth, Lord of Trade and then Secretary of State for the Colonies under George III, whose intention was that the children of the colonies and the Amerindians in the newly conquered land that became New Hampshire should benefit from good-quality teaching under the supervision of two pastors, one English, the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, the other Amerindian, Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan Indian Tribe. There was no spectacular event to mark the first steps of Dartmouth College, which was dedicated from the very beginning to religious study, medicine and ‘engineering’, an emerging discipline which embraced the new techniques being used in the nascent industries of the time. Equally significant is that the College, at its foundation, had a professor of mathematics and ‘natural philosophy’ (a discipline which at the time covered astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology), Bezaleel Woodward, a young pastor aged just 24, who became a pre-eminent figure in the university and the small community of Hanover. As the decades passed, Dartmouth College proved its worth as a member of the Ivy League, the cream of the private universities of the eastern United States, which today includes Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Yale. It gained an outstanding reputation in a number of fields, including medicine, engineering, mathematics and physics, and was involved in the birth of computing in the 1940s. This gamble proved successful, as the college became world-famous in this new scientific field.”
― Charles-Edouard Bouée, The Fall of the Human Empire: Memoirs of a Robot