Early College Engineering Labs
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These images have been chosen for their uniqueness. Subject matter ranges from historic events, to really cool phenomena in science and engineering, to relevant place, to ingenious contraptions, to interesting products (which now has its own dedicated Featured Product category).

When I think back at the engineering labs from my days in school, I wonder how much things have really changed from then until now. It is hard to believe that freshman and sophomore labs are not still consumed with radial lead resistors, inductors, and capacitors, solderless breadboards, and a variety of light bulbs, motors, transformers, relays, and rheostats. By the time you move into the junior year, labs have gotten a bit more intense with microprocessor controls (mine used an 8088 CPU with machine language programming for the serial port), some high voltage apparati[sic], digital logic circuits (74-series leaded ICs), and a chance to lay out/fabricate/populate a PCB. On-hand test equipment consists of 2nd or 3rd generation oscilloscopes, signal generators, and power supplies.

I did a search for photos of labs from back in the early to mid 1900s to see if much had changed from then until the time I was in college. Here are a few of the hundreds of pics that I found. If you appear in any of these pictures, you are really old.

Links are provided to all of the original images. All copyrights acknowledged.

Ohio State University (c. 1890)

Howard University Science Lab (c. 1900)

Clemson College Engineering (c. 1914)

Virginia Military Institute (c. 1924)

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (c.1942)

North Carolina State University (c. 1920)

University of Iowa (c. 1950)

Queens University (c. 1940)

Kansas State University (c. 1920)

University of Toronto (c. 1909)

Johns Hopkins University (c. 1900)

Tulane University Pratt Institute (c. 1904)

University of Michigan (c. 1944)

Posted June 13, 2024
(updated from original post on 8/14/2018)

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