University of Pennsylvania history

Sometime later in its early history, Penn began to consider 1749 as its founding date and this year was referenced for over a century, including at the centennial celebration in 1849.

After being located in downtown Philadelphia for more than a century, the campus was moved across the Schuylkill River to property purchased from the Blockley Almshouse in West Philadelphia in 1872, where it has since remained in an area now known as University City.

And, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was established in 1874 as the nation's first teaching hospital.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (1887) is a noted teaching and research organization.

Penn's motto is based on a line from Horace's III.24 (Book 3, Ode 24), quid leges sine moribus vanae proficiunt?, 'of what avail empty laws without [good] morals?'. From 1756 to 1898, the motto read Sine Moribus Vanae.

The success of such efforts were evident in fall of 1910 when Vice Provost Edgar Fahs Smith (who the following year would start a ten-year tenure as Penn's provost) formally welcomed to Penn students from 40 different nations at an annual party.

By 1912, Stevenson focused almost all his efforts on the foreign students at Penn who needed help finding housing resulting in the Christian Association, buying 3905 Spruce Street contiguous to Penn's campus.

By January 1, 1918, 3905 Spruce Street officially opened under the sponsorship of the Christian Association as a Home for Foreign Students, which came to be known as the International Students' House with Reverend Stevenson as its first director.

In 1921, Penn was also the first university to award a PhD in economics to an African-American woman, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (in economics).

Since 1923, fifteen Penn scholars have been awarded Nobel Prizes.

By 1931, first-year students were required to live in the quadrangle unless they received official permission to live with their families or other relatives.

When it was pointed out that the motto could be translated as 'Loose women without morals', the university quickly changed the motto to literae sine moribus vanae, 'Letters without morals [are] useless'. In 1932, all elements of the seal were revised.

They accordingly proposed the construction of a general-purpose digital computer that would handle data in coded form, and by 1946 they completed the ENIAC, a huge machine (containing more than 18,000 vacuum tubes) that incorporated features developed by John V. Atanasoff.

The ENIAC was first used by the United States Army at its Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in 1947 for ballistics tests.

The following year Mauchly and Eckert formed a computer-manufacturing firm, and in 1949 they announced the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC), which used magnetic tape instead of punched cards.

In 1950 the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation was acquired by Remington Rand, Inc. (later Sperry Rand Corporation), Mauchly becoming director of special projects.

In 1965, Penn students learned that the university was sponsoring research projects for the United States' chemical and biological weapons program.

January 8, 1980 (aged 72) Pennsylvania