Founded in 1740 as a charity school, the University of Pennsylvania is America's first university and one of its foremost institutions of higher education. Located in the University City section of Philadelphia, Penn offers its students the resources of one of the world's best research faculties and of a major metropolis rich in history, tradition and culture. Penn has a history of educational innovation, in keeping with founder Benjamin Franklin's vision of a school whose students would learn "everything that is useful and everything that is ornamental." The nation's first medical school, its first collegiate business school, the first journalism program, the first university teaching hospital and the first modern liberal-arts curriculum were all established here.
The first professor of physics or "natural philosophy" at the University was Rev. William Smith, who was appointed in 1754. His curriculum covered mechanics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, pneumatics, optics, chemistry, and astronomy. Dr. Smith later became Provost of the University. Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, the curriculum kept abreast of advances in scientific thought and education. By the late 19th century, a graduate school on the European model was formed. The first four graduate students at Penn enrolled in 1885. Among them was the first physics graduate student, Arthur Goodspeed. Dr. Goodspeed continued to teach at Penn after he obtained his doctorate, and became chairman of the department and particularly known for his work on x-rays. In 1901 the department moved to the newly constructed Morgan Laboratory of Physics, which included both classroom and research facilities, including labs of spectroscopy, optics, thermodynamics, and electricity and magnetism. Our current building, home to the Departments of Mathematics and Physics and Astronomy, was completed in 1964 and named after David Rittenhouse.
Premier American scientist of the 18th century, David Rittenhouse was born in 1732 and raised on a farm near Philadelphia. He began his scientific career as a clockmaker. In 1767, he designed an orrery, which represents the motions of bodies of the solar system and illustrates solar and lunar eclipses and other phenomena. He built an observatory and in 1769 constructed the first telescope made in America for an observation of the transit of Venus. Also active in the fields of mathematics, physics, surveying, and literary translation, he was a worthy successor to Benjamin Franklin as president of the American Philosophical Society in 1791. He was a Professor of Astronomy and a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania. During his lifetime Rittenhouse was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, William and Mary, and Princeton, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. David Rittenhouse died in 1796.