1928
Hoover won the presidency. (A straw vote at Clarkson showed Hoover 184, Smith 66, Thomas
11, Bushey 2.) In August, the US subscribed to the Kellogg-Briand pact, outlawing war. [Frank
B. Kellogg (1856-1937), born in Potsdam, N.Y., was Secretary of State during Coolidge's
second term, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929.] Disney produced his first Mickey
Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy. WGY Schenectady began the first regularly scheduled television
broadcasts. Fleming discovered penicillin. Eastman exhibited the first color movies in
Rochester, N. Y. Earhart became the first woman to fly the Atlantic. Scholars completed the
new Oxford English Dictionary after 70 years of labor and a cost of £300,000. It was the year
of Hecht and MacArthur's Front Page; O'Neill's Marco's Millions, and Lazarus Laughed;
Barrymore starring in Shakespeare's The Tempest; Gershwin's American in Paris; and Benet's
Civil War novel in verse, John Brown's Body.
• New CCT President • Incidental Events
• Surveying Camp • Student Drowned
• Football Season • Green Griffin
• Football Broadcast • Hockey
New CCT President.
In the fall, with the enrollment standing at 380, Dr. Brooks was
appointed president emeritus as Joseph E. Rowe became president of Clarkson. Born March 21,
1883, in Emmetsburg, Maryland, Rowe was graduated from the Pennsylvania College at
Gettysburg in 1904 with first honors. He was a four-year varsity letter man in baseball and three
years in basketball. In 1904, he began graduate work at the University of Virginia where he also
played varsity baseball and represented the University in debate at which he won a gold medal.
He earned his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University in 1910, and was inducted into Phi Beta
Kappa for the excellence of his scholarship.
After teaching at Goucher College and Haverford College for a year each, he took a
position at Penn State where in the next six years he rose from assistant professor to professor.
He left to become an assistant physicist in Mathematical Engineering Research at the National
Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. From there he became chief ballistician at the Aberdeen
Proving Grounds in Maryland. While there, he gained first-hand experience which, when
coupled with his mathematical ability, made him such an acknowledged authority on ballistics
that the American Mathematical Society sent him many books on the subject for review. From
1921 until 1928, he was head of the Department of Mathematics at the College of William and
Mary. He was a member of Theta Chi national social fraternity, the American Mathematical
Society, the Mathematical Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Additionally, he was an inventor of no mean ability. One of his inventions, a Plane
Trinometer, solved plane triangles by mechanical operation. It was composed of calibrated bars
with movable joints which had a circular scale of degrees on them. The known parts were set
and the unknown ones read from the proper scales. This device was expected to be a boon to
someone without knowledge of trigonometry, and saving the user endless labor by eliminating
the use of the cumbersome cosine and tangent laws requiring the use of natural or logarithmic
