Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known as MIT, is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. William Barton Rogers proposed it as a school of industrial science, its charter was signed on 10 April 1861, its first classes were held in Boston in 1865, and it moved from Back Bay to its Cambridge campus in 1916. It adopted the German polytechnic model, with laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. During the Second World War projects such as the Radiation Laboratory made it the nation's largest non-industrial research and development contractor, and in the late twentieth century it became closely associated with computer science, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and large projects such as the Apollo Guidance Computer and the LIGO project. Engineering remains its largest school, and its off-campus operations include Lincoln Laboratory and Haystack Observatory. It appears in this atlas as the long-time academic home of the engineer and inventor Robert H. Rines.