A slightly revised version of the Old Division Football paper has been posted. The well-known photograph of students playing Dartmouth-rules football has been dated to 1874.
Old-Division Football paper revised
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Category Archives: publications
Alfred T. Granger, Hanover architect
The Hanover architect Alfred T. Granger (remembered in the Granger Scholarship [pdf]) was not the same as the well-known Chicago architect Alfred Hoyt Granger, although that is how he was described in the West Wheelock Street Inventory (1993) and elsewhere, including on this website.
Thayer School adopts new logo
Last month, the Thayer School of Engineering adopted a new logo that incorporates a shield much more in keeping with those of Dartmouth and its other Associated Schools:
A wavy-lined representation of the Connecticut River now appears in the base of each institution’s shield.
The old logo was less heraldic and had become somewhat dated, although it has the pleasing feature of representing the hills of New Hampshire and Vermont:
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[Update 08.31.2013: Broken link to new logo replaced.]
An 1870s expedition to Mount Moosilauke
This is one half of an intriguing stereoview. The sign says “Camp Dartmouth” followed by what appear to be an apostrophe, the numerals 71, and a period: Camp Dartmouth ’71. The costumed men in the camp are trying hard not to look like students.
Editors of The Dartmouth explained during the spring of 1870 that an “Expedition to Moosilauk Mountain” was being led by J.H. Huntington of the New Hampshire Geographic Survey, with help from Professor C.H. Hitchcock and several citizens of Warren, including George A. Little ’71. One A.F. Clough, “the finest stereoscopic artist in New Hampshire,” took stereoviews on the mountain. This might be one of those views. The card itself says nothing except “Group Series” on the front.
Dartmouth’s architecture in the news
Many thanks to the Review for mentioning this site in an interview. A few points will always get jumbled over the phone, and this might be a good opportunity to clarify them for the record:
- “National Historic Registry” should read “National Register of Historic Places” and “the register.”
- “There are state and federal tax breaks” should read “There are state and federal tax breaks for renovations. . . . In addition, anything that gets on the list has to have the owner’s permission to get listed.”
- “There are state and federal tax breaks . . . largest in terms of commercial properties but still significant for even a home owner. But the real reason for a college to apply is that it is a blue ribbon” should read “Now, if you’re a college or university that’s not a homeowner and not a business, the real reason to be on the list is because it’s a seal of approval. It’s a blue ribbon. . . . Those tax breaks only come when you renovate your building, generally.”
- “Clement will be supplanted by a new visual arts building designed by McCado and Silveti — a very academic, theoretical type firm — to go on that site” should read “The firm of Machado and Silvetti — big names, a very theoretical, academic-oriented firm — are designing a new visual arts building to go on that site.”
- “Loews — that notoriously hard to find movie theatre — will, I think be moved next to the site on Lebanon Street” should read “Loew’s Auditorium will move from the Hood into this new building, and I have a feeling it will be placed on the street, on Lebanon Street, so that it will become more of a public movie theater.”
- “If you go to Oxford you will typically see a dining hall in the vicinity of the chapel” should read “If you go to Oxford, you will typically see a dining hall in the same ‘range’ ([i.e.] the same building) as the chapel.”
- “I don’t think it should necessarily be torn down or replaced, but it should be amended” should read “I don’t think it’s a terrible building, and I don’t think it should be torn down: I think it should be improved. . . . That said, I think Dartmouth is pretty fortunate to have Murdough and the Choates as their potentially worst buildings.”
- “I suppose the Fairchild center gets a lot of censure, and it is incongruous. But it is cool. And it was meant to be presentable. I don’t think it’s completely convincing. But at least it is presentable” should read “It is incongruous, but at the same time, when you look at it, you can tell . . . there was a sense of style there — there was a lot of skill put into it. It’s very cool and modern — cool in the sense of being refined, you know, the steel and glass, the thin skin. . .”
- “You could make a good argument for making use of the Crosby house (which is the name of the older part), and getting rid of the rest; it makes good use of that space” should read “[Y]ou’ve got all that land south of the building, between Blunt and Parkhurst, basically a vacant lot. . . . . You could make a good argument for a building there that would use the old Crosby House (which is the old part of Blunt), get rid of the rest, and make much better use of that space.”
- “Essentially it was built as a hotel, as part of the town” should read “[T]he Lodge . . . was built . . . effectively as part of the town, as a motel, and then used for a school purpose.”
- “Wheelock set it out back in the 1730s” should read “It’s one of those things that Wheelock set out back in the early 1770s.”
- “The only unfortunate thing is that it blocks access to the grad school . . . I think this is what lead Larsen to propose a large causeway to connect Thayer dining hall area with the graduate part of the campus” should read “The only unfortunate thing about it is that it kind of blocks easy access to the graduate schools. I think there was a plan by Larson in the 1920s that proposed a very long, high causeway or bridge that would have gone from Thayer Dining Hall, basically, across to the Engineering School.”
- “Yes, I hope some of that area is preserved, in particular the buildings . . . should be preserved” should read “although I hope, certainly, that they preserve at least one of those if they do use their sites.”
- “South Fairbanks being the first building designed and built by Charles Rich 1875” should read “He designed it in 1892 . . . [but] Beta , . . . did not build it until around 1903 [after the school had built several buildings designed by Rich].”
Hanover in Second Life
This month’s Wired calls out the digital model of Hanover’s Main Street as one of twenty sights to see in the online community Second Life.
A researcher at the Homeland Security-funded Institute for Security Technology Studies started the project as part of the Institute’s Synthetic Environments for Emergency Response Simulation (run by its ER3 Center).
The researcher later joined The Electric Sheep Company, which the Institute hired to build the model.
Satchmo Prototype has posted photos of the model, and Electric Sheep has 64 more photos.
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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link below fixed.]
[Update 11.30.2006: The Dartmouth has an article on Hanover in Second Life.]
[Update 09.24.2006: Post rewritten, Electric Sheep information added.]
New aerial available
The aerial view of Hanover on Wikimapia is highly detailed and only a matter of months old.
Pong on film
Is the film Beerfest (2006) the first film to depict the playing of pong? (See The Dartmouth;Wikipedia.) The characters appear to use paddles, but the film’s creators learned the game at Colgate.
Daniel Lindsay, director of a post-9/11 documentary titled Why U.S.?, is directing a film meant to document pong and its history on a national scale, according to an article in The Dartmouth. He and producer Josh Otten were in Hanover gathering material in November.
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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to Stanford Daily regarding Why U.S.? removed, broken link to The Dartmouth fixed.]
[Update 12.12.2006: Documentary information added.]
“On Campus-Making in America”
Stefanos Polyzoides‘ perceptive essay “On Campus-Making in America,” which appeared in Moore Ruble Yudell: Campus & Community (Rockport, Ma.: Rockport Publishers, Inc., 1997), is available at his firm’s website.
DHMC expansion reviewed
Architecture critic Donald Maurice Kreis has a thorough review in Dartmouth Medicine of the most recent expansion of the DHMC, a massive 2002-2006 project. The article also includes several short videos.
Bartlett Hall’s Wheelock Memorial Window, in the bathroom
Frances Cha has examined the remarkable Wheelock memorial window in Bartlett Hall in The Dartmouth:
The window depicts John the Baptist and quotes him: “Vox Clamantis In Deserto Parate Viam Domini.” In doing so, the window recalls Wheelock’s invocation of that message in his suggestion that the college motto be “Vox Clamantis in Deserto.” (Meacham photo)
[Update 04.12.2010: Parate inserted.]
A Curious Internet Rumor about “Harry Bates”
A curious Internet rumor is spreading, but it does not seem to have left the borders of Hanover:
Someone read the name “Harry Bates Thayer, [Dartmouth class of]
1879” to mean “Harry Bates, Thayer [School of Engineering Class of]
1879.” The real Harry Bates Thayer was a long-time AT&T executive, prominent leader among Dartmouth’s Trustees, and the namesake of Thayer Dining Hall. No one named “Harry Bates,” on the other hand, graduated from any branch of Dartmouth before at least 1910. The only person in Thayer’s graduating class of 1879 was Ray Gile.
What’s oddest is that “Harry Bates” got put in the shoes of Herman Hollerith, the famous punch-card man. The excellent Computing at Dartmouth timeline attributes to “Harry Bates” the 1887 design of a punch-card compiling apparatus, the incorporation of the Tabulating Machine Company, and the 1911 sale of the company, which later became IBM.
But it was Hollerith who registered “Art of Compiling Statistics,” U.S. Patent No. 395.781 (1889, filed 1887); who formed the Tabulating Machine Company (see IBM Archives Exhibit); and who sold the company in 1911.
Also picking up on “Harry Bates” are the DTSS Timeline; Here in Hanover magazine (Winter 1998) [pdf]; and the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science (Spring 2001) [pdf].
[Update 08.09.2006: Timeline was fixed last week.]
McDonough writes on architectural education
Architect Bill McDonough ’72 had a piece in The Green Magazine (Winter 2005), Dartmouth’s environmental magazine. The entire issue focuses on sustainable design.
Toward a set of visual identity guidelines
When Dartmouth started its current fundraising campaign in 2001, it expanded its small institutional news service into a full-fledged public relations team under the new office of the Vice President for Public Affairs. The creation of this office was by all accounts an overdue development. In the meantime, students took matters into their own hands by creating Buzzflood; the Tuck School has become a world center for the study of marketing; and alumni have discussed school “branding” (Class of 1963 newsletter).
The PR Office and currently has five members, as described in a profile in PR Week [pdf] and has hired the Manhattan PR firm of Plesser Holland. The firm is experienced in drafting materials and managing reputation but does not claim to be a design shop that focuses on creating logotypes and related images.
The most notable recent step of Dartmouth’s PR Office is the welcome issuance of the Dartmouth Editorial Style Guide during December of 2005 by its Office of Publications. The Guide sets standards for the use of Dartmouth’s Seal (1773, engr. Nathaniel Hurd), its Shield (1940, W.A. Dwiggins, modified 1957), and the lesser-used White Pine from its Bicentennial Flag (1969). The Shield is properly rendered in black and white; the Seal is properly reserved for official uses. The Guide also mentions an odd little Baker Tower sketch that might fit better in a clip art collection. (More information on the history of some of these designs may be found in the Library Bulletin.)
Dartmouth does not yet have a comprehensive set of “visual identity guidelines,” a set of standards that would cover the images mentioned above as well as lay out appropriate uses of an official typeface and coat of arms. Some schools developing clear and comprehensive guidelines that include all of these elements are Brown, Cornell, Cambridge.
A coat of arms is a heraldic device that would exist alongside the Seal and Shield, and it is something the College needs. The most recent proposal for a coat of arms features Dartmouth Hall (unlike the above devices, which feature hypothetical buildings) and includes the school’s motto as well as a buck’s head from the arms of the Second Earl of Dartmouth.
Dr. Good’s proposed arms, in black and white
Because a heraldic coat of arms is by nature an adaptable arrangement of colored elements on a field, this design would be suitable for a much wider range of applications than the Shield, which is exclusively a black-and-white line drawing.
Following are some indications that a coat of arms is needed:
This Shield uses colors other than black and white and incorporates an inappropriate drop shadow.
This shade of lavender (presumably derived from the face of Baker’s clocks) belongs in the palette, but this logotype makes the institutional subunit look more independent and important than the Tuck School.
The nonstandard logotype above diverges in size, font, arrangement, and color from the one the school should adopt; the Shield within it also is highly unorthodox. (Dr. Good also notes that it eliminates the Indians from Dartmouth’s Seal.)
This one uses an attractive but nonstandard version of the White Pine.
The point is not that the new guidelines, which would prevent most of the uses above, are being enforced insufficiently. The website of the Technology Transfer Office needs color in its graphic identification with Dartmouth. The point is that it is inappropriate to transform the Shield into some sort of color logo or coat of arms in graphic-design terms as well as heraldic ones, and that Dartmouth therefore needs a coat of arms, which may be rendered in color or black and white as well as abbreviated, with smaller elements standing for the whole.
The PR Office, as the manager of the school’s visual identity, is the proper body to request the official adoption of a coat of arms and to then specify its use in exactly these situations. The office is probably too busy at the moment, but if it ever commissions a set of visual identity guidelines from an outside firm, as the schools listed above have done, it should include a coat of arms in the specifications for the project. The variety of logotypes that Dartmouth needs (and already is trying to use) simply requires a coat of arms: a black-and-white line drawing from 1940, however traditional and useful in some situations, is far too limited for what Dartmouth requires.
[04.08.2006 altered slightly.]
Moosilauke Ravine Camp film available
The half-hour film An Unlikely Cathedral: Moosilauke, Dartmouth and the Ravine Camp 1909-1939 (1999) is available for download from Google Video.
Graphics for energy-saving campaign
The press release announcing the new energy-saving campaign features a retro sticker urging users to turn off the lights, but it does not mention the classical message that still may be found on worn switchplates throughout the College, “Vox Clamantis in the DARK.”
New book on historic scientific instruments
Article on Old Division Football posted
A somewhat disjointed article on Dartmouth’s local pre-soccer form of soccer, Old Division Football, has been posted.
The only information of any interest outside Dartmouth might be the conclusions, obvious enough but still not widely known, that:
1. The first soccer game in the world between two universities seems to have been the Princeton-Rutgers game of 1869. Oxford and Cambridge did not play until 1872. (The Football Association wrote the rules of “soccer” in 1863, and Rutgers was using those rules, possibly with slight variations.) The story that Princeton and Rutgers played the first American gridiron football game before rugby had arrived is so obviously incorrect that it is hard to imagine why it is still told, yet it is the official line at Rutgers. Back then, soccer was called “football” and allowed the use of the hands, just not running with the ball.
2. The first college football game in the U.S. was the McGill-Harvard rugby game of 1874. College football and pro football as we know them today are descendants of the rugby that McGill played. The first college football game between U.S. teams was the Harvard-Yale game of 1875. Princeton, Rutgers, and the other schools that had been playing soccer dropped it and switched to rugby. All American football is played under the rules of rugby as used by Harvard and Yale and modified by them and their later competitors during the succeeding decades.