DEPARTMENT HISTORY |
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During this time Fisher and McNair both indicated their area of specialty to be "engineering education." McNair even served a term as president of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education. 
E. D. Grant was hired just before Osborne left and took over the position of assistant professor vacated by Fisher. While assistant professor, Grant earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1916, becoming our faculty’s first member to hold an earned PhD. At the same time he was promoted to be our department’s first associate professor. Shortly before the US involvement in World War I, Associate Professor Grant made extensive tours through Wisconsin, Northern Illinois and Indiana, and Southern Michigan to present a lecture "illustrated with lantern slides" on Mining in the Copper Country. Many of these presentations were at High Schools and he made sure to ask for a list of the graduating seniors. He had a lecture almost every night, with some in the day time, for three or more weeks straight. During much of the US involvement in World War I, McNair was at the Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. While he made frequent trips back to Houghton, much of the running of the college was done through written correspondence with Fisher. After the war, McNair took an additional leave of absence to help perfect methods to fire large naval guns at sea. While the US involvement in the World War had a large short-term impact on the University, as one would expect, it also appears to have precipitated a turn-over in the junior Physics faculty. In 1920 Grant accepted a professorship at Earlham College, a Quaker institution in Richmond, Indiana. At the same time Rood, who had taken over the assistant professorship in the department when Grant was promoted, went to Albion College. Both Grant and Rood had been with the department for almost 20 years. Instructor Albert Sobey had previously left at the beginning of World War I to take on some intelligence activities. In 1924 during one of his travels, McNair was tragically killed in a train wreck near Buda, Illinois (a bit North of Peoria, Il), leaving Fisher, now 51 years old, as the only Mathematics and Physics faculty member to have served prior to 1920.
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