MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

MIT's Building 20: The Magical Incubator Story, Anecdote, or Reminiscence

Reminiscence of Pre-Building 20

Richard M. Stewart
RIMOST@aol.com

Back in the Spring of 1931, the depression was biting hard, the land now occupied by Building 20 was "unimproved," (meaning that there wasn't money to spend on unnecessaary lawn or mowing) and Stew Phillips and I were wondering what we would do for our thesis.

Professor Walter Voss, head of Course XVII, Building Construction, was working on an idea that there was a relationship between the water absorption of a building brick and the ultimate strength of the bond between the mortar and the brick.

He assigned us the task of finding if this was true. (It was.) This would involve bonding dozens of kinds of brick with various mortars under different degrees of moisture.

The first problem was to find a location where a few hundred specimens could be kept for several months while exposed to the weather during the curing period.

The solution was the unused land where Building 20 was to be built a dozen years later. Today it is hard to imagine creating behind Building 10 an eyesore of unpainted racks hammered together from not too perfectly aligned 2 X 4s and loaded with brick specimens. But that is what we did. Fortunately, so far as I know, no one took photographs.

But the site must cast a magical spell on the projects it supports. Stew and I soon grew tired of dipping bricks in a water-filled bucket and devised an apparatus whic used the float chamber of a Model T Ford carburetor to control the flow of water absorbed by the brick. Happy ending. No less a person than Professor Vannevar Bush complimented us on the project and we both received "H"s on our thesis.