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1860

J. Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) Awarded a Ph.D , the first Engineering Doctorate in America, with a thesis titled “On the Form of the Teeth of Wheels in Spur Gearing.”

After spending three years as a tutor in Yale College, he, with his sisters, spent nearly three years in Europe learning of the latest activities in the Natural Philosophies. He was appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics in Yale College in 1871. In 1872 he published the first of three of his great thermodynamics papers in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded many honors and medals including, at that time of the highest renown, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1901.

Yale designated recipient of Federal Funds for Connecticut under the Morrill Act, transferred to the Agricultural College at Storrs in 1896.

National Academy of Science was incorporated by an Act of the United States Congress and signed into law by President Lincoln. Professors Benjamin Silliman and Benjamin Silliman Jr. were amongst the founding membership.