60
Russell C. Coile
rotating at 2,000 revolutions a minute so he needed to take a
photograph with a light exposure of a few thousandths of a
second. Modern cameras now use the stroboscopic techniques
of Professor Edgerton's fl ash electronics.
Now for the reason I went to MIT. Once upon a time
there was a graduation day speaker at Yale. The speaker
spoke for about 20 minutes on the signifi cance of "Y" in the
University's name. Y stood for youth and the enthusiasm of
youth, etc. Then he spoke for more than 20 minutes about the
signifi cance of "A" which stood for ability the ability of Yale
graduates to accomplish anything they decided to do, etc.
After about 20 minutes discussing "L" which stood for the
leadership role played by past Yale graduates, he appeared to
be getting warmed up to his topic. One person in the audience
then turned to the person next to him and said, "Thank God
we are here at Yale and not at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology."
I had a happy fi ve years at M.I.T. I lived in the dorms all
the semesters I was in Cambridge. When I was on a work
assignment semester such as the one at General Electric in
Schenectady, New York I lived in the YMCA. It cost $7 a week
to stay there and about a dollar each evening for dinner. It
only cost 50 cents for lunch at the GE cafeteria. I would go
swimming each day after I fi nished work. They had a bulletin
board where you were supposed to record how many laps you
swam so that each month they gave an award to the winner
with the most laps. To keep us out of mischief, we had to go
to an electrical engineering class two nights a week taught
by the GE engineer who was in charge of recruiting college
graduates to come to work at GE when they graduated.
I was originally assigned to work in the test section of
Building 51 Turbines. The fi rst project I was on was being an
oiler for the test of a steam turbine for a generator for the city
of Des Moines, Iowa. I had to record the temperature of the
oil in the bearings every 15 minutes to watch for any danger
signs of overheating. One of the other student engineers was
in charge of opening a steam valve a half turn every hour for