In a word, these forces of science and technology can save this nation from
being crushed by the burdens of war. But to do it, men must be free in mind,
spirit, and creative power so long as they do no injury to their neighbor. They
must be confident in the future. Clarkson College and all our technical
institutions have a great part to play in this recovery. From them must come
our trained men. And in their laboratories must develop much of our research. We
are confident of the contributions to these ends from Clarkson College.
During this celebration, Potsdam's store windows abounded with various displays of the
College past, present, and future. Weston's window displayed the famous picture of Thomas
Clarkson playing chess with his sister, Lavinia, flanked on both sides by large replicas of the
College coat of arms. Also in that window were other family photographs.
In the McCarthy store window was "Daddy" Reynolds' scale model of the proposed
plan for conversion of the gymnasium (now the Liberal Studies Center) into a chemical
engineering laboratory. White's Hardware store on Market Street showed chemistry from the
standpoint of what is projected and what is done.
In the Lewis Shop window (now Maxfield's Restaurant) the Department of Business
Administration spread out a sampling of its textbooks, pamphlets, and bulletins on accounting,
finance, marketing, sales, management, personnel, production, advertising, and other subjects to
be found in its curriculum.
To satisfy the human desire to "peek into" the instruments of a surveyor, the civil
engineering department mounted a display of the complete equipment of a surveyor. In
addition, its display included drawing tools, maps of the work done by civil engineers, and two
large pictures of Boulder Dam and the Lake Washington Floating Concrete Bridge in Seattle,
Washington. The mechanical engineering department displayed charts which gave the tension
of various metals, drawings, gears and tools made by students, and a complete machine shop in
miniature including a single cylinder gas engine made by the students.
Busy Corner windows displayed equipment of the physics department: mercury
rectifier, magnets, types of electric bulbs, timer, and various other instruments for fine accurate
measurements. They also had a machine showing the generation of electric current. But the hit
of this display was a simple little glass ball erected on a small standard and in which a device
resembling a weather vane with four blades was kept in motion by heat energy. Although
clearly labelled as a radiometer, its puzzled onlookers kept asking "What makes it go?" and
"Where are the wires?"
The display of the electrical engineering department in the Kingston window appeared
to be the most interesting from a practical standpoint, for it displayed some of the equipment
used in modern warfare. Through the use of a public address system, a student in the store
explained the features of the display including modern gun control. Such other items as a
superheterodyne receiver, signal generators, radio transmitter, a light meter, and a recording
wattmeter. Its feature attraction, though, was a cathode ray oscillograph on which all sounds
became visible as sine waves. Many people were fascinated by speaking into the "mike" and
watching their sound waves dance across the screen of this interesting device.
Each of the four fraternities and the Neutral Club also had displays in store windows.
Lambda Iota [now Delta Upsilon] displayed in one Kinney window a 1919 picture of its 30
young charter members. In another window of Kinney, Sigma Delta displayed a collection of
athletic and ice carnival trophies, and a Clarkson
Integrator
of 1929 describing Clarkson's 4 to
