Pitt 225th Anniversary Timeline

At its first commencement ceremony, the University awards three academic degrees, all of them BAs. (In 2011, Pitt conferred 4,212 baccalaureate degrees, 2,315 master’s degrees, 519 doctoral degrees, and 594 doctorate-professional practice degrees.)

Pittsburgh’s Great Fire of 1845 destroys some 900 buildings, including the University’s Third Street home—and with it, all of the University’s records, files, books, and scientific equipment. Some trustees want to cease operations, but a local church offers its basement as temporary classroom space until the University can construct a new building.

The original Allegheny Observatory (pictured) is donated to the University. The current Allegheny Observatory, completed in 1912 in Pittsburgh's Riverview Park, houses the world's third-largest refracting telescope and remains both a part of Pitt and one of the world's major astronomical research institutions.

William Hunter Dammond earns a degree in civil engineering (with honors), becoming the University’s first Black graduate. Dammond is remembered as an engineer, mathematician, professor, and inventor who made noteworthy contributions to the railroad industry, which employed large numbers of African Americans.

John Brashear becomes director of the University’s Allegheny Observatory. A pioneering astronomer, “Uncle John”—as Pittsburghers fondly called him—built his first telescope in 1870 and produced many scientific instruments still in use today. He serves as Pitt chancellor from 1901 to 1904.

Engineering professor Reginald Fessenden proves that radio waves can transmit human speech. Fessenden makes broadcast history in November 1906 when he transmits his chief engineer’s voice across the Atlantic Ocean. On Christmas Eve, he broadcasts Christmas carols and a violin solo.

In 1908, the first cornerstone is laid for Pitt’s Oakland campus. Speakers at the cornerstone ceremony include former Pitt chancellors, Pittsburgh’s mayor, Pennsylvania’s governor, and the Vice President of the United States. Chancellor Samuel B. McCormick taps the stone with a hammer and declares, “For the glory of God, for the uplifting of humanity, for the conquest of this earth, in the name of true science and sound learning, I now declare this cornerstone well and truly laid.”

Together with Leonor Michaelis, Maud Menten develops an equation to help study rates and mechanisms of enzymatic reactions. Five years later, she joins Pitt’s Department of Pathology, where she remains for the rest of her career. The Michaelis-Menten equation becomes pivotal in biochemistry and is cited as the foundation of modern enzymology as well as a powerful tool for drug discovery.

Launching a tradition that still continues, Pitt freshman women holding lighted candles assemble to hear the wisdom of their elders. College administrators, especially deans of women, say they hope "sensible" ceremonies such as Lantern Night will replace the wild and often dangerous hazing practices of college men.

Some 97,000 local schoolchildren each donate a dime in a “Buy a Brick” campaign to help fund construction of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning. Each contributing child receives a certificate testifying that he or she is a member of the “fellowship of builders of the Cathedral of Learning.”

After five years of research, Pitt chemistry professor Charles Glen King and his research team isolate and identify the chemical structure of vitamin C. Thousands of lemons give their lives in the interest of science and to defeat scurvy, an often-fatal disease caused by vitamin C deficiency.

Pitt dedicates the 42-story Cathedral of Learning, still the tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere and the second-tallest in the world, after the University of Moscow’s main building.

During the war, 9,508 Pitt students, alumni, faculty, and staff members serve in the U.S. armed forces; 249 of them are killed. Pitt publishes a booklet, “Soldiers Belong Here,” for the thousands of military personnel who train and take classes at the University from 1942 to 1945.

The polio vaccine developed by Pitt professor Jonas Salk and his research team is declared to be “safe, effective, and potent” following an unprecedented, massive testing in the United States and Canada. Within a few years, the number of polio cases in the United States drops from a high of 57,900 to barely a handful.

Pittsburgh is the final stop on Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 11-day U.S. tour. “Let us live in peace, and let us have sincere competition,” he says during a Pitt-hosted luncheon in the ballroom of Schenley Hall, now the William Pitt Union. Pitt Chancellor Edward Litchfield thanks Khrushchev for bringing up the subject of competition, which Litchfield calls “essential to our society. We build institutions about it… ."

Pitt’s Panayotis Katsoyannis performs the first chemical synthesis of a polypeptide hormone—insulin—and combines it with biologically active material, providing the means to explore and validate previous assumptions about the active amino acids in the insulin molecule. Katsoyannis goes on to also synthesize both oxytocin and vasopressin.

Pennsylvania governor William Scranton signs the bill making Pitt a state-related institution. In exchange for increased financial support from the state, the University lowers tuition and accepts state-appointed members on its Board of Trustees. (Pennsylvania’s contribution to Pitt’s annual budget has diminished steadily, from more than 30 percent in the mid-1970s to less than 10 percent in 2011.)

Pitt is elected to the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization comprising North America’s leading research universities. Founded in 1900, the AAU focuses on issues important to research-intensive universities, including funding for research, research and education policy, and graduate and undergraduate education.

Pitt’s Peter Safar, who developed CPR, founds Pitt’s International Resuscitation Research Center, a pioneer in intensive care medicine. When Patrick Kochanek succeeds Safar as director in 1994, his first act is to rename the center after its founder. Since 1995, Safar Center investigators have received more than $50 million in research grants.

Roger Kingdom (CGS ’02) wins the gold medal in the 110-meter high hurdles at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, then proceeds to take another gold in the same event in the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.

Pitt installs the first campus-wide fiber optic network in higher education, giving students, faculty, and staff access to high-speed data and communications.

Mary Edmonds is elected to the National Academy of Sciences for her research of poly (A) tails—a sequence of nucleotides to protect messenger RNA from degradation during transcription. Edmonds began her 37-year teaching tenure as a professor of biological sciences at Pitt in 1955. Today, Pitt bestows the Mary Edmonds Award to recognize the best graduate student publication in the biological sciences.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, jointly run by Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University, and Westinghouse Corp., receives $45 million to operate the most powerful nonmilitary computer in the world. The Terascale Computing System is the size of a basketball court and can predict weather, map chemical body reactions, and model earthquakes. The system has 10,000 times the memory of an average computer and the capacity to perform 6 trillion calculations per second.

Pitt alumnus Michael Chabon wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, had been largely inspired by his days as a Pitt undergraduate. His second novel, Wonder Boys, was made into an Oscar-nominated movie. Rumor has it that Wonder Boys’ main character, Grady Tripp, was based on Pitt writing professor and novelist Chuck Kinder, Chabon’s former teacher.

In recognition of Pitt’s unparalleled record of achievement in the Marshall Scholarship Competition and to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Scholarship Program, His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, The Duke of York, designates the University as a Marshall Center of Excellence during an Oct. 24 luncheon in Pitt’s Alumni Hall.

Wangari Maathai (A&S ’65G) is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work as a human rights advocate, including her founding of the Green Belt Movement, which mobilizes Kenyans, many of them women, to plant trees—providing employment for them and renewable resources for their villages. She is the first African woman, and Pitt grad, to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

At a White House ceremony, alumnus Bert W. O’Malley becomes the fifth Pitt-affiliated winner of a National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest honor for science and engineering. O'Malley is honored for his contributions to the fields of endocrinology, reproduction, genetic disease, and endocrine cancers.

Pitt maintains its top 20 ranking among U.S. public universities in U.S. News & World Report’s annual “America’s Best Colleges” listings, and Pitt graduate schools and programs perennially earn high grades in U.S. News’ Best Graduate Schools rankings. Also in 2010, Pitt placed 15th among U.S. public institutions of higher education and 64th worldwide in the London-based 2010-11 Times Higher Education rankings.

Pitt trustee and former Board of Trustees chair William S. Dietrich II—a business leader, investor, author, and philanthropist who earned his MA and PhD from Pitt—gives the largest single gift to Pitt in its 225-year history, a $125 million fund. Weeks later, on October 6, Dietrich dies after an extended illness. On October 28, Pitt trustees vote to name the University’s arts and sciences school the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in honor of Dietrich’s father.