The authors of its 1861 charter named the university the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not the Massachusetts Institute of Science. It was a moment of increasing industrialization in the United States, and the school’s founders believed that the word technology suggested a vocational emphasis, a hands-on approach to industrial engineering and applied science, with less concern for theoretical science. Engineering technology was about processes and operations, it was meant to be practical. The university’s principal founding donor was the inventor of film production methods. Over the following decades, MIT’s academic leaders have continued to nurture a balance between the basic science work of physics, chemistry, and molecular biology, and the technological practice of product development.
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