The Polytechnic Institute (1855)

1854: A Year at the Pressure Point

The year 1854 was not an accident. It sits at one of the acutest pressure points in American history — seven years before the Civil War, at the crest of the greatest antebellum industrial expansion the United States had yet experienced, and in the same calendar year that the Kansas-Nebraska Act tore open the national wound over slavery's westward expansion. To found a technical institute in Brooklyn in that year was not a neutral educational act. It was a response — social, economic, ideological — to a world being unmade and remade at terrifying speed.

Two institutions were born simultaneously in 1854. The Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute opened in Brooklyn Heights, and across the East River, the University of the City of New York launched its School of Civil Engineering and Architecture.

Fig. 1. Brooklyn Heights, where the Institute was established at 99 Livingston Street, was the wealthiest residential neighborhood in the city — home to the same merchants and industrialists who signed the school's founding documents.

The institution that would become NYU Tandon School of Engineering — today ranked among the nation's leading engineering schools and home to over 10,000 students — began not with a grand civic ceremony but with a real estate search, a stockholders circular, and a group of Brooklyn's wealthiest men deciding that their city needed a school for their sons.

The Geography of Industrial Ambition

Brooklyn in the 1850s was not Manhattan's suburb. It was a distinct, booming industrial city — the third largest in the United States — whose factories, docks, and warehouses were the physical infrastructure of the northeastern economy. Its factories dominated the garment industry and some high-technology industries of the Second Industrial Revolution such as sewing machines and pianos, and it was an important center for hard rubber products, electrical goods, and petroleum processing along Newtown Creek.

The founders of the Institute were the captains of exactly this economy. The institutional history preserved in the Poly Archives identifies them explicitly.

"Brooklyn stands unrivaled in institutions of secondary education. The Packer Institute, the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute, and the Adelphia Academy are institutions of solid merit and widely recognized efficiency. They have been established, not by the Board of Education at the public expense of the city, but by private enterprise and liberality, and are maintained by revenues derived from their own property and patronage."

"Brooklyn," Collegiate of Poly Institute and Packer Collegiate Institute, c. 1880, Box 3, Folder 8, RG 021, Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, NYU.

This document — written approximately twenty-five years after the founding for public circulation — reveals the ideological architecture of the school in a single sentence. The explicit contrast with "the Board of Education at the public expense of the city" is not incidental. It is a founding-class assertion: elite private education is categorically superior to public provision, and the school exists precisely because of that distinction. Brooklyn's mercantile class was not building a democratic institution. It was building a citadel for its own reproduction.

Fig. 2. Industrial expansion in Brooklyn during the mid-to-late 19th century is visible in historical maps showing the location of odor-producing industries (Schulz, 2015).

The location at 99 Livingston Street, Brooklyn Heights, was not incidental. The Board of Trustees spent months in frustrated negotiation before securing it, as the Annual Catalogs of 1854–1864 reveal in granular, almost novelistic detail:

"It was the unanimous opinion of the Board that a building should be erected which should be capable of affording ample and superior accommodations for from 500 to 600 scholars; that its location should be as central, and as easily accessible as possible by public conveyance, from all parts of the city, and yet sufficiently retired to suffer no inconvenience or annoyance from the noise and bustle of the more public streets... Several pieces of property presented themselves to the committee, among them two or three sites upon the Schermerhorn estate, either of which would have been acceptable to the Board... but after waiting for some time for a favorable answer, it was ascertained that there were difficulties in the way which could not be overcome... some of the parties being then in California."

Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute, Annual Catalogs, 1854–1864, pp. 4–6, Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute Collection, Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, NYU.

The Schermerhorn estate reference is significant: the Schermerhorns were among the oldest Dutch-descended landowning families in the city. The parties who blocked the purchase were "in California" — chasing Gold Rush money while their Brooklyn real estate sat in legal limbo. This is the antebellum speculative economy in miniature: the same forces of expansion and displacement that were reordering the entire nation were determining where a polytechnic institute would be built in Brooklyn Heights.

The "central and easily accessible by public conveyance" language deserves attention, too. The Board was thinking across a rapidly expanding urban geography — not just about building a prestigious enclave but about connecting it to Brooklyn's emerging transit infrastructure. This was an institution that understood itself as civic even as it functioned as exclusive.

The Pretension of "Polytechnic": European Legacy and American Aspiration

The word polytechnic is French, and its use in 1854 Brooklyn was a deliberate act of transatlantic cultural borrowing — an invocation of Enlightenment European prestige that announced, to anyone who understood the reference, exactly what kind of institution this intended to be.

The École Polytechnique was founded in 1794 by the mathematician Gaspard Monge during the French Revolution and militarized under Napoleon I in 1804. Its motto — Pour la Patrie, les Sciences et la Gloire ("For the Homeland, Science and Glory") — encoded a vision of applied science in service of national power and civic greatness. It trained the mathematical and engineering elite of Europe: Fourier, Arago, Biot, Carnot — names that American engineering educators knew and revered.

“By 1819, West Point was modeling itself on the École Polytechnique. Rensselaer offered civil engineering by 1828. All those schools looked to France for guidance.”

John H. Lienhard, "The Polytechnic Legacy," Engines of Our Ingenuity 

By the time Brooklyn's founders chose the name "Polytechnic" in 1854, it was already a transatlantic prestige marker — an assertion that their institution stood in the same lineage as MIT (then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded just nine years later in 1861), RPI, and Caltech, which was also originally called "Polytechnic Institute." The influence of the French grande école system was strong in the 19th century throughout the world, as can be seen in the original names of many world universities, including ETH Zürich — known as "the Polytechnicum."

Fig. 3. The original Institute building at 99 Livingston Street, Brooklyn Heights, completed 1855. Its architecture signaled the institutional seriousness the founders intended — a school designed to rival the distinguished boarding schools of New England.

But the name was also pretension — and deliberately so. The "Collegiate" in "Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute" is equally telling. It placed the school in conversation simultaneously with the technical rigor of the European polytechnic and the classical formation of the Anglo-American gentleman's college. The founders wanted engineers who were also gentlemen. They wanted Brooklyn's sons to be educated in a manner that would not require them to leave home for Harvard, Yale, or the New England academies — a cultural anxiety the founding circular would make explicit.

When the school surrendered its original charter in 1889 and reincorporated as the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, it was doubling down on this European identity at the precise moment American engineering education was consolidating into a competitive national field. The name change was a branding decision as much as a legal one — a declaration that this school belonged to the highest international tradition of technical formation.

Labor, Slavery, and Automation 

The most analytically unsettling dimension of the 1854 founding has nothing to do with what the founders said. It concerns what they didn't say — and what the broader historical context forces us to read into the establishment of a technical institute dedicated to machinery, engineering, and industrial production, in the seven years before the Civil War.

1854 is also the year of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which effectively reopened the question of slavery's expansion. The abolitionist movement was at high tide. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had been published in 1852 and was reshaping Northern moral consciousness with unprecedented force. Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church — perhaps the most famous abolitionist pulpit in America — stood blocks from the Polytechnic's Livingston Street location in Brooklyn Heights.

“Brooklyn Heights itself was a major center of the Abolition movement.”

Packer Collegiate Institute, Historical Archives, Center for Brooklyn History 

The industrial economy of the North was, meanwhile, entirely entangled with Southern cotton — processed in Brooklyn's factories, financed by Manhattan's merchants, shipped through New York's port. The same trustees who signed the Polytechnic's founding circulars were themselves embedded in this economy.

The argument this study advances is not that the founders consciously founded the school as a response to the labor disruption emancipation would cause. They did not write it down in those terms. But the structural logic is legible: the entire antebellum push toward industrial mechanization — the machines that were, by the 1870s, knitting stockings, stitching shoes, and producing nails by the millions — was a response to the cost and instability of labor, including enslaved labor. A school dedicated to training engineers to design and operate those machines was, structurally, a school dedicated to the project of labor substitution.

Fig. 4. Plymouth Church, Brooklyn Heights, c. 1860s — blocks from the Polytechnic's original site. Henry Ward Beecher's congregation was a major center of abolitionist organizing. The coexistence of the country's most famous abolitionist pulpit and its newest engineering school in the same neighborhood is one of the founding period's most charged geographical facts.

This becomes legible with particular force when we read the Stockholders Circular's emphasis on training young men for "business life" against the backdrop of what post-emancipation business life would require: a free labor force, managed by technically trained supervisors, producing goods through mechanized processes that did not depend on enslaved bodies. The polytechnic institute, in this reading, was part of the infrastructure of a particular vision of the post-slavery American economy — one organized around capital, machinery, and technically trained management rather than coerced agricultural labor.

The Second Industrial Revolution, which historians date to the post-Civil War decades, bears this reading out. Following the war, industrialization in the United States increased at a breakneck pace, with between 1860 and 1900 fourteen million immigrants arriving to provide workers for an array of industries.8 Polytechnic's engineers were training to manage, design for, and profit from exactly this transformed labor landscape.

The Curriculum

The most persistent misconception about the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute is that it was, from the beginning, a narrowly vocational institution. The archival record contradicts this entirely. The Story of Poly, the institutional history preserved in the Poly Archives, describes a curriculum of striking breadth:

"There were ten departments of instruction: English Language and Literature; Mathematics; History and Geography; Penmanship and Bookkeeping; Ancient Languages; Modern Languages; Physical Science; Philosophy; Drawing; and Music... For the period, the emphasis on English was something out of the ordinary, but both trustees and faculty were united in the determination to give to the studies of this department a prominence and an interest commensurate with their importance. Courses in the History of English Literature and Belles Lettres were indeed advanced ideas for the 1850's and, for that matter, several decades to come."

The Story of Poly, Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, NYU.

English Literature and Belles Lettres. Political economy. Ethics. Geology. Astronomy. French, German, and Spanish. Music. These were not trade school subjects. They were the subjects of a European-model formation — the same interdisciplinary breadth that made the grandes écoles something other than mere technical institutes. The Polytechnic's founders were not training mechanics. They were training a class of men who could move between the boardroom and the engineering office, between political discourse and technical problem-solving.

The Unpublished Institutional History confirms that this interdisciplinary ambition persisted and deepened over time:

"From the first, the Liberal Course, now known as the Course in Arts, has been a vital element in the work of the Polytechnic. Seeking to lay the broad foundations of general culture, it has afforded to young men of Brooklyn the opportunity of securing a college education at home. Its graduates in 1890, at the time of expansion of the technical courses, constituted more than one half of the total number of the institution's Alumni; and even today with four admirable technical courses to rival it in place of one, it can claim of the Polytechnic's total graduates fully a third."

Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, Unpublished Institutional History, 1890–1961, Box 3, Folder 24, RG 021, Poly Archives, NYU.

This is a remarkable datum: the majority of the school's early graduates were liberal arts students, not engineers. The Polytechnic was, in its first decades, as much a college of arts and letters as a school of engineering. This does not diminish its technical ambitions — it complicates the neat narrative of a vocational school that later added liberal arts window dressing. The interdisciplinarity was structural, not decorative, from the very beginning.

The tuition structure reinforced the class dimension of this curriculum. The Story of Poly records that instruction cost "from $60 to $100 a year according to the department in which the student was placed. The bills were payable in advance of each of four terms."9 In 1855 dollars, that tuition represented weeks of wages for a working-class family — payable, moreover, in advance. This was not a school built for the sons of Brooklyn's immigrants or its laboring poor. It was built for the sons of its merchants, lawyers, and industrialists.

The Corporation

Perhaps the single most revealing document in the Poly Archives is the Stockholders Circular of approximately 1856–57, preserved in Series 1, Box 3 of the Poly Archives History and Milestones Collection. It is a fundraising letter addressed not to parents or students but to investors — and it discloses, with remarkable candor, the founding logic of the institution.

The circular opens with the founding's stated rationale:

"This enterprise originated in the want, long and deeply felt in our city, of a large and well-appointed educational establishment for boys, at which our sons might be thoroughly and variously trained for business life, without being withdrawn from home influence."

Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute, Stockholders Circular, c. 1856–1857, Series 1, Box 3, Poly Archives History and Milestones Collection, RG 021, Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, NYU.

Three phrases demand close reading. "Our sons" — this is a self-reproducing elite project; the school exists to educate the children of the men who built it. "Business life" — not civic virtue, not religious formation, not classical scholarship, but commerce. "Without being withdrawn from home influence" — the founders did not want to send their boys to New England boarding schools. Brooklyn's mercantile class was asserting its own cultural sufficiency against the established prestige of New England education.

"The Trustees do not entertain a doubt that, if pecuniary profit was their only object, the Institute might, with a little shrewd management, be made to yield a very comfortable dividend to its stockholders... But the object of the enterprise is not to make money, but to make (if possible) a perfect school."

Stockholders Circular, c. 1856–57, Series 1, Box 3, RG 021, Poly Archives, NYU 

The tension between profit and perfection that the circular names explicitly is one of the founding tensions of American private education — and it would haunt the Polytechnic for its entire independent existence, culminating in the financial crises of the 1970s that eventually forced the merger with NYU. The founders were telling their shareholders, in 1856, that they were choosing educational excellence over profit maximization. That choice — idealistic, principled, and structurally unstable — defined the institution for 150 years.

The circular also contains the most economically revealing detail in the entire archival record: "An arrangement of the board…allows a deduction of five per cent from the tuition bills of stockholders, thus making the stock to them at once and surely a dividend-paying stock."10 The return on investment was partly financial, partly educational — shareholders' children received cheaper tuition. This collapses the distinction between philanthropy and self-interest entirely. The school was, in the most literal sense, a dividend-paying investment in the education of the investor class's own children.

The circular also reveals competitive anxiety — an institutional insecurity about the school's limited upper-level offerings that would drive the eventual recharter and expansion: "Already advanced students begin to talk of leaving the Institute, and of leaving Brooklyn, not from any want of attachment to the institution...but simply because they have gone nearly as far as we have yet arranged."11 The school's interdisciplinary ambitions were driven not only by educational philosophy but by the very practical fear of losing its most talented students to Columbia, Yale, or the New England colleges.

This is the founding's deepest irony: a school built to keep Brooklyn's sons in Brooklyn, anchored to the city's industrial economy, was threatened from its first years by the gravitational pull of the very institutions it was trying to rival.

War and Its Aftermath

The school opened in September 1855. Six years later, the Civil War began. Among the members of its early classes was Joshua Sill, a Professor of Mathematics at the Institute who became, according to the school's own historical records, the youngest General in the Civil War.12 The war claimed him — Sill was killed at the Battle of Stones River in December 1862. He was 31.

The Civil War was, among other things, an engineering war — a war of railroads, telegraphs, ironclad ships, rifled artillery, pontoon bridges, and logistical systems of unprecedented scale. The Union's industrial and technical advantage was not incidental to its victory. It was central to it. And the Polytechnic, in its first decade of operation, was training precisely the kind of technically literate men who would design, manage, and operate the Union's industrial war machine.

Fig. 6. The Brooklyn Bridge under construction, c. 1870s. James J. Wood (class of 1879) was responsible for the machinery that produced the bridge's distinctive cables — the same cables that would change the skylines of every major American city by making cable-lift elevators possible.

The post-war decades confirmed the school's founding logic. Following the Civil War, industrialization in the United States increased at a pace the antebellum founders had only imagined. And Polytechnic's early alumni were central to this transformation. James J. Wood (class of 1879) built the cable machinery for the Brooklyn Bridge. Arthur V. Abbott (class of 1875) invented the coupling system for the bridge's cables and developed testing equipment for the materials used in its construction.13 The same cables, the school's history proudly notes, changed the skylines of every major city by making cable-lift elevators possible.

Charles R. Flint (class of 1868) formed the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company — which was later renamed IBM.14 The line from the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute of 1854 to the International Business Machines Corporation of the 20th century runs through a single graduating class, and through a school that was itself structured as a corporation from its first year of existence.

The Unpublished Institutional History describes the school's post-war expansion into extension courses with language that captures the new ambition clearly: "Through the medium of a corps of Consulting Professors, each a recognized expert of highest rank in his particular field, students of the extension courses in Chemistry and Engineering have presented to them by lecture those practical problems which are met and must be solved in actual life work."15 Theory and practice integrated, delivered by working industry experts. This is the polytechnic model fully operationalized — and it is, in structural terms, the model that NYU Tandon still follows today.

· · ·

The Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute was founded, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle announced on September 6, 1855, "with a view to aid the intellectual development of our youth; to place Brooklyn in the front rank of our cities…and promote that mental discipline, intelligence, and refined taste which are the real glory of a people."16 A century and seventy years later, the institution that grew from that founding is NYU Tandon School of Engineering — home to Nobel laureates, NASA astronauts, the architects of 5G, and the engineers who built the world the 19th century imagined.

What the archival record reveals, beneath the civic rhetoric, is something more complicated and more interesting than the official history generally acknowledges: a school born from corporate structure, class anxiety, industrial imperialism, European cultural aspiration, and the deepest unasked questions of a nation on the edge of its most destructive war. To understand how Tandon became what it is, you have to be willing to read what its founders actually wrote — the stock certificates, the circulars, the board minutes, the site selection deliberations — and to ask the questions they never asked themselves.

Bibliography

• Primary Sources — Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, NYU

Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute. Annual Catalogs, 1854–1864. Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute Collection. Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University, Brooklyn, NY.

Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute. Opening Stockholders Circular. c. 1856–1857. Series 1, Box 3. Poly Archives History and Milestones Collection, RG 021. Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University, Brooklyn, NY.

Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute. Stockholders Circular [fundraising letter]. c. 1856–1857 [misdated May 1, 1852 in source; internal evidence suggests 1856–57]. Series 1, Box 3. Poly Archives History and Milestones Collection, RG 021. Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University, Brooklyn, NY.

"Brooklyn." Collegiate of Poly Institute and Packer Collegiate Institute. c. 1880. Box 3, Folder 8. Poly Archives History and Milestones Collection, RG 021. Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University, Brooklyn, NY.

Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Unpublished Institutional History. 1890–1961. Box 3, Folder 24. Poly Archives History and Milestones Collection, RG 021. Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University, Brooklyn, NY.

The Story of Poly. [Date and author unknown.] Poly Archives at Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, New York University, Brooklyn, NY.

• Primary Sources — Other Repositories

Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute. Stock Certificate. 1854. Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute Collection. Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn, NY. [Gift of Cornell University, 2014.]

Brooklyn Daily Eagle. "The Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute." September 6, 1855. Brooklyn Public Library Digital Collections.

• Secondary Sources — Articles and Digital Resources

Lienhard, John H. "The Polytechnic Legacy." Engines of Our Ingenuity. University of Houston. engines.egr.uh.edu/talks/polytechnic-legacy.

Library of Congress. "The Industrial Revolution in the United States." Classroom Materials. loc.gov.

Library of Congress. "Work in the Late 19th Century." Rise of Industrial America, 1876–1900. Classroom Materials. loc.gov.

NYU Tandon School of Engineering. "Our History: Roots of Greatness." engineering.nyu.edu/about/history.

NYU Tandon School of Engineering. "170 Years of Engineering: A Brief History." engineering.nyu.edu/170-years-of-engineering.

Poly Archives & Special Collections. Finding Aid: Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute Collection. findingaids.library.nyu.edu/cbh/arms_1985_055_brooklyn_collegiate_polytechnic/.

Poly Archives & Special Collections. Finding Aid: Polytechnic History and Milestones Collection, RG 021. findingaids.library.nyu.edu/poly/poly_rg_021/.