Ezra Cornell referred to himself as a farmer and mechanic who had spent some time working in the telegraph industry. His ambition and imagination, however, were not so prosaic. Skillful work, uncommon tenacity, and fortuitous circumstances resulted in his amassing a fortune. As soon as it became clear that it was a fortune, he promptly rejected conventional practice and sage advice, and directed that those riches be used to found a unique university: a comprehensive and practical institution of higher learning dedicated to all forms of intellectual endeavor.
Ezra Cornell had visions of a great public prosperity and a universal fairness, viewing America as a place where technology, wealth, and altruism could coalesce to benefit all its inhabitants. He spent much of his life far from his home in Ithaca: walking through the ante-bellum South, selling plows in Maine, supervising the construction and operation of lines for the telegraph industry, and serving as a New York State legislator in Albany. Throughout these endeavors, he wrote long and detailed letters home and kept a diary.
Similarly, as Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White conceived and planned Cornell University, their correspondence closely documented the evolution of their dreams and their preparations for the University's opening and operation. Ezra's letters reveal a practical but visionary man whose life both exemplified and shaped nineteenth-century America. His keen observations provide a contemporary account of the country's cultural development, the profound effects of industrialization and the Civil War, and his own role in developing the century's principal communication technology and its most innovative educational experiment.
Ezra Cornell, ca.1828
Ezra Cornell's Cyphering Book In 1823, at the age of sixteen, Ezra Cornell acquired eighty-five folio sheets of handmade paper and bound them together within flexible cardboard covers. The book contains practical rules and exercises in arithmetic, beginning with simple addition and subtraction and going to fractions, compound interest, weights and measures, the equation of payments in state and federal, American and British money, annuities, and barter. The last exercise is dated February 13, 1824, and some pages later, there is a new heading, "Loss and Gain." Thirty-five years later, at the age of fifty-three, Cornell returned to the book and made several additional annotations. (Collection Finding Aid) |
  |
|
|