Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute history

The school opened on Monday, 3 January 1825 at the Old Bank Place, a building at the north end of Troy.

The state incorporated the school on March 21, 1826 with the act stating,

His formal responsibilities expanded to include the teaching of courses in civil engineering as early as 1828.

Under Eaton, the Rensselaer School, renamed the Rensselaer Institute in 1832, was a small but vibrant center for technological research.

The first civil engineering degrees in the United States were granted by the school in 1835, and many of the best remembered civil engineers of that time graduated from the school.

In 1845 Nott resigned as president of Rensselaer and started his own Civil Engineering program at Union, which offered its first CE certificate shortly afterwards under William Mitchell Gillespie.

In 1847 alumnus Benjamin Franklin Greene became the new senior professor.

In 1850 he reorganized the school into a three-year polytechnic institute with six technical schools.

After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y. (1857), he joined his father in the work of building suspension bridges.

The nation’s first female labor union, the Collar Laundry Union, was founded in Troy in 1864 by Kate Mullaney and Ester Keegan.

His father put him in charge of the construction of the enormous masonry towers that supported the cables of the Cincinnati–Covington Bridge (1865–67) and then sent him to Europe to study new methods for the sinking of the foundations on which the granite towers of the Brooklyn Bridge were to stand.

On his father’s death in 1869 he was asked to serve as chief engineer on the Brooklyn Bridge and immediately began work on the foundations for the two towers.

The bridge, opened in 1883, took 13 years to complete.

The Alma Mater (Here's to Old RPI) - sung at formal events such as commencement and convocation, also played and sung by the Pep Band at hockey and football games. It was published in the first book of Songs of Rensselaer printed in 1913.

Nine dormitories were built at the east edge of campus bordering Burdett Avenue, a location which came to be called "Freshman Hill". The Houston Field House (1949) was reassembled, after being moved in pieces from its original Rhode Island location.

In this same time frame (1966) Herta Regina Leng was appointed as RPI's first female full professor.

The current Student Union building was opened in 1967.

Another tradition since 1978 has been the "Big Red Freakout!" game held close to the first weekend of February.

A tenth dormitory named Barton Hall was added to Freshman Hill in August 2000, featuring the largest rooms available for freshmen.

In 2001, a major milestone of the campaign was the pledging of an unrestricted gift of $360 million by an anonymous donor, believed to be the largest such gift to a United States university at the time.

Recently the FYE program was awarded the 2006 NASPA Excellence Gold Award, in the category of "Enrollment Management, Orientation, Parents, First-Year, Other-Year and related".

The Institute broke ground on August 26, 2007, and construction of the first phase is expected to last two years.

On October 4, 2008, the university celebrated the grand opening of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) situated on the west edge of campus.

Shirley Ann Jackson's compensation ranked 1st among USA private university presidents in 2014.

As of 2015, all staff positions had been reinstated at the institute, experiencing significant growth from pre-recession levels and contributing over $1 billion annually to the economy of the Capital District.