Background

Thurston was born on October 25, 1839 in Providence, R. I. He was the eldest of three children of Robert Lawton Thurston and Harriet (Taylor) Thurston. The father was one of the pioneer steam-engine builders of the country and the son, during his early years, spent much time in his father's shops.

Education

Persuaded by his high school principal, Edward H. Magill, to take a college course in preparation for engineering as a learned profession, he matriculated in Brown University at sixteen and graduated in 1859 with the degree of Ph. B. and a certificate in civil engineering.

He received honorary degrees from Stevens Institute of Technology (1885) and Brown University (1889).

Career

After a short period as draftsman, Thurston represented his father’s company in Philadelphia, where in 1861 his first published article appeared in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. Throughout the Civil War (1861–1865), he served as an assistant engineer in the navy, and at the end of the war he was assigned to the U. S. Naval Academy in Annapolis as assistant professor of natural and experimental philosophy. The pattern of his subsequent career was evident in his six years of teaching at the academy. Upon the death of the incumbent, he became head of his department. He designed and built a signaling lamp; experimented with lubricants; and published a number of descriptive technical reports and popular articles on naval armament, steam engines, and the manufacture of iron and steel.

Henry Morton, former editor of the Journal of the Franklin Institute and president of the newly formed Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, invited Thurston to organize and to direct the school of mechanical engineering. It was during his fourteen years (1871–1885) at the institute that Thurston established his international reputation. In 1874 he persuaded the trustees of Stevens to equip a testing laboratory to serve commercial clients. Subsequently, laboratory work became a part of the engineering curriculum.

While teaching, Thurston invented testing machines and carried out extensive research on strength of materials and lubrication. He was one of the first to demonstrate that the elastic limit of ductile materials can be raised by the application of stress beyond the yield point. His series of public lectures on the history of the steam engine, published several years later, in 1878, was long a standard work on the subject. Major works-which were derived from his classroom lectures on materials of engineering, friction, and lubrication-were published while Thurston was at Stevens. During this period Thurston wrote large books on steam boilers and the steam engine. He served also as secretary of the U. S. Board to Test Iron, Steel, and Other Metals: as U. S. Commissioner to the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition; as an official of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition; and as first president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which in 1880 he helped organize. He also published an extraordinary number of both technical and popular articles.

In 1885 Thurston moved to Cornell University, where he reorganized and directed the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering. Through his publications and the considerable number of Cornell graduates who became teachers in engineering colleges throughout the country, Thurston influenced greatly the philosophy and direction of engineering education. In an engineering school he expected to treat only professional subjects and to relegate general education to a preparatory school. He considered general education as desirable but not essential; his successors gave only lip service to its desirability. Thurston suggested in 1893 that the ideal technical education was probably to be found in the military academies, where scientific and professional studies and physical training were all given due weight.

Thurston made massive contributions to the order and the promulgation of the engineering sciences and to the promotion of organizations that were directed toward the increase of material wealth in a progress-oriented social order.

He died 1903 in Ithaca, New York.

Achievements

• Thurston was a mechanical engineer who exerted wide and lasting influence upon the American engineering profession. He was a prolific writer of textbooks, reference works, and technical and popular articles; and he organized and directed two mechanical engineering schools. In addition he organized and was an active member of professional societies and served on industrial and governmental committees. Thurston held two patents: one for an autographic recording testing machine for material in torsion and the other for a machine for testing lubricants.

Works

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• book

  • A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Materials of Engineering

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • The Development of the Philosophy of the Steam-Engine: An Historical Sketch

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Report of the United States Board Appointed to Test Iron, Steel and Other Metals

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Stationary Steam Engines; Especially As Adapted To Electric Lighting Purposes

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • The Animal as a Machine and a Prime Motor, and the Laws of Energetics (Paperback) - Common

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • A manual of the steam-engine. For engineers and technical schools; advanced courses

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • book

  • Heat as a form of energy

Membership

He was a member or honorary member of a score of technical societies in the United States and Europe.

Personality

Thurston was diligent, enthusiastic, and persistent, and tended toward action rather than reflection.

Connections

He married Susan Taylor Gladding on October 5, 1865.

From 1878, some months after the death of his wife, until 1880, he was incapacitated by a breakdown, but regained his health, and during the remaining twenty-three years of his life he lost no time from serious illness. His first wife left one daughter. On August 4, 1880, he was married a second time, to Leonora Boughton of New York. Two daughters were born of this marriage.

Father:

Robert Lawton Thurston

Mother:

Harriet Thurston

Spouse (2):

Leonora Boughton

Spouse (1):

Susan Taylor Gladding

References

• The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830-1910: Professional Cultures in Conflict (World Bank)
• History of Stevens Institute of Technology: A Record of Broad-based Curricula and Technogenesis, 1870-2000
• A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers: 1880-1980