Engineering the Perfect Cup of Coffee: Samuel Prescott and the Sanitary Vision at MIT

In 1936, Fortune magazine featured a spread on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an apostle of science and handmaiden to industry. Twenty-six hundred fresh MIT graduates would soon join a group of alumni that included “the heads of General Motors, General Electric, Goodyear Tire, Eastman Kodak, Stone and Webster—and ten du Ponts.”1 While true, such praise was a little out of date, for Karl Compton, the institute’s president, had worked hard since his arrival in 1930 to wrest control of the institute’s agenda away from industry and refurbish its reputation in fundamental science. The Fortune piece nicely illustrated the school’s move to the cuttingedge, with scenes of sophisticated laboratories and modern instruments, such as a massive six-million-volt Van de Graaff generator. Above a picture of the institute’s imposing façade, as seen at night from the Charles River, the magazine arrayed portraits of Compton’s three deans: Vannevar Bush, dean of engineering; William Emerson, dean of architecture; and, between them, posed at his laboratory bench, Samuel Prescott, dean of science (fig. 1). But there was in fact a hidden irony in Prescott’s presence in that triumvirate, for, behind the scenes, Bush and Compton were struggling to reform a biology program they considered seriously behind the times.2