October 9, 1701, the Collegiate School was chartered in the colony of Connecticut. The thinking was that Harvard College, which had been around for over 60 years by that time, was getting much too liberal and a new school was needed that would “maintain the Puritan religious orthodoxy.” The school didn’t have a permanent location, and moved around from one village to another depending, for the most part, on which Puritan minister had some spare room in his house.
This wasn’t very conducive to attracting students, though, who had no idea how far they’d be traveling to school from one term to the next. The ministers approached a prominent Boston businessman who’d made a fortune in the slave trade in India, and he agreed to donate the money to construct a building for the college. Although he didn’t ask them to, they renamed the school after him, so the Collegiate School became Yale College in 1718.
Meanwhile, the real trouble started — a Harvard graduate arranged for a shipment of 500 books to be donated to Yale by British intellectuals to begin its library. The books were the most prominent works of the day in literature, science, and philosophy. Like most of the colonists in North America, Yale students had never been exposed to modern European thinking. For that matter, neither had the faculty. The Rector organized a study group to learn from the new ideas too, and before long the entire faculty announced they were giving up Puritanism. Even worse, they joined the Church of England. Yale, too, had become a liberal institution. On the other hand, Harvard and Yale are still here, but as for the Puritans…
By 1745, there was a movement afoot to try to return Yale to the ultra-authoritarian principles of its founding. A new college president, Thomas Clapp, was hired to try it — but he got nowhere, possibly because he didn’t think to close the library and (as they still try to do) burn the books. Many people probably regretted that it wasn’t a century earlier — it was October 9, 1635 that the Puritans coped with another annoying reformer, Roger Williams, by simply kicking him out into the wilderness, where he founded the state of Rhode Island. But in the mid 1700s, there already wasn’t very much unclaimed wilderness left to banish anyone to.
October 9 is associated even more intellectual history. It goes back as far as 1410 in Prague, when a clockmaker (Mikulás of Kadan) and a professor of mathematics and astronomy (Jan Sindel) collaborated to build the Orloj, a complex astronomical clock — and the oldest one that’s not only still in its clocktower, but still working. A few years later, in 1446, the Hangul alphabet (the official writing system in Korea) was created on October 9. And a mere 427 years after that, October 9 was the day the US Naval Institute was established in 1873. It’s not the Naval Academy, which isn’t connected to it. It isn’t a government organization either; it’s a private forum that holds conferences and publishes books and journals about just about anything related to navies, past, present, and future.
Future naval considerations not only include huge vessels like aircraft carriers, but small autonomous drones that can navigate the oceans (or other environments) by themselves. Like a lot of recent technology, they keep getting smaller and smaller. So it might be telling that not only is today the anniversary of the Naval Academy, Yale and more, it’s also National Nanotechnology Day in the US. Nanotechnology became a topic of general discussion in the 1980s when Eric Drexler published “Engines of Creation.” He later expanded on it in his PhD thesis — but he didn’t attend those hotbeds of enlightenment thinking Harvard or Yale. Drexler went to MIT — where as far as I could find, absolutely nothing of note ever happened on the ninth of October.
