History
The University of Manchester has a long and distinguished record of achievement in science and engineering disciplines, and a history of breaking new ground. Rutherford began his work on splitting the atom at the University (and later received the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his work on radioactivity). The world's first stored-program computer, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (nicknamed 'The Baby') came into being at the University, as did its successor, Manchester Mark 1.
The University of Manchester was the birthplace of Chemical Engineering.
The world's first steerable radio telescope at Jodrell Bank was built at the University by Bernard Lovell.
Since 1906, when former student Joseph Thompson won the Nobel Prize in Physics, the faculty and its antecedent institutions have produced more than 11 Nobel laureates in Physics out of the 25 awarded to staff or students of the University of Manchester as a whole. Most recently, Manchester physicists Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work with graphene.
The University's history is closely linked to Manchester's emergence as the world's first industrial city. Manchester businessmen and industrialists established the Mechanics' Institute to ensure that their workers could learn the basic principles of science. Similarly, John Owens, a Manchester textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1851 for the purpose of founding a college for the education of males on non-sectarian lines. Owens College was established and granted a royal charter in 1880 to become England's first civic university, The Victoria University of Manchester.
Read more about this topic: Faculty Of Engineering And Physical Sciences (University Of Manchester)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
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“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
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“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)