Rochester Institute of Technology history

The Athenaeum merges with the Mechanics Literary Association, founded in 1836 by William A. Reynolds, to form the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Association.

Carleton Gibson was chosen as the first president of the Mechanics Institute in 1910.

By 1912, however, he had managed to have the institute adopt a policy of allowing students to work half their time of study in industry and spend half their time attending classes.

Newhall graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and went on to Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1930.

Starting at RIT as a teacher of salesmanship, personnel, and merchandising in 1931, she is the first female dean at RIT and first woman in the nation named to head a college of business.

George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak Co., donates the funds for this building and is an active benefactor of the institute until his death in 1932.

In November 1935 Newhall was hired as a librarian by MoMA. Soon after, MoMA’s director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., asked Newhall to curate a photography exhibition.

Newhall had married in 1936.

An important merger between the Empire School of Printing and the Mechanics Institute took place in 1937.

In 1944, the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute was renamed Rochester Institute of Technology.

In 1947 photographer Edward Steichen was appointed director of the photography department at MoMA. Newhall, feeling blindsided, had no choice but to resign.

Together with Adams and photographers Minor White, Dorothea Lange, and Barbara Morgan, in 1952 the Newhalls launched the photography magazine Aperture, a quarterly periodical devoted to examining and promoting photography as a fine art.

A 1961 decision to leave downtown Rochester for farmland in the suburban town of Henrietta put RIT on its path to pre-eminence as a global university.

RIT is chosen as the home campus for the federally sponsored National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which had been established in 1963 by Public Law 89-36 and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Land in Henrietta, N.Y., is purchased and construction on a new campus begins in 1964.

When Paul Miller began his term in 1969, the campus had just moved to Henrietta.

In 1979, RIT took over Eisenhower College, a liberal arts college located in Seneca Falls, New York.

Despite making a 5-year commitment to keep Eisenhower open, RIT announced in July 1982 that the college would close immediately.

He was also a photographer, and toward the end of his life he published In Plain Sight: The Photographs of Beaumont Newhall (1983), a collection of his photographs with a foreword by Adams.

Rose helped launch RIT’s first Ph.D. program, in imaging science, in 1988.

In 1996, RIT became the first college in the U.S to offer a Software Engineering degree at the undergraduate level.