As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill by informing him in its catalogue that “it is coming to be generally recognized that a four-year technical course following the high-school course is not an adequate preparation for those who are to fill important positions; and the University would urge all those who can afford the time to extend their studies over a period of five or six years.”
John compromised on five. This gave him a 5 few Business courses in the College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique courses in the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of Science.
He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the assembling of machines before they were shipped, and he overheard wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen cents an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total income was about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he was raised to fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of Science.
The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of those institutions married almost immediately on graduation. John didn’t. He didn’t get married so early nor become a widower so often. He didn’t carry so many children to the christening font nor so many to the cemetery.
Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.
Pick out any of the early Harvard classes. Honestly and truly at random, run your finger 6 down the column and pick any class. The class of 1671!
It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don’t be too severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining ten, four were married twice and two were married three times. For ten husbands, therefore, there were eighteen wives.
Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very competently remarks: “The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another woman’s children.”
The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their eighteen wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the earth. They also filled the churchyards.
Twenty-one of those seventy-one children died in childhood.