History of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Morse Hall
1890 - 1923

Pictures

"In 18881889, the erection of a new building solely for the Department of Chemistry was authorized and funds for this were appropriated. The building was named Morse Hall in honor of S.F.B. Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph. This title was selected because of the association of Ezra Cornell with Morse in the building of the first telegraph line and, later, in the organization of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Morse Hall was located on a knoll at the northwest corner of the campus, west of and adjacent to Franklin Hall. The President of the University, Andrew D. White, had expressed his desire that this knoll be left vacant as a little park or lookout because from it there was a beautiful view down Lake Cayuga and across the valley; but President White was in Europe when the site was decided. In 1890 the Department of Chemistry moved into Morse Hall, leaving Physics as sole occupant of Franklin Hall.

The original Morse Hall consisted of a sub-basement, used for storage, a basement floor at the ground level of the west end of the building but largely underground at the east end, and two floors above the basement. The basement floor housed Qualitative Analysis, Organic Chemistry, Gas Analysis, Applied Chemistry, the Agricultural Experiment Station, and a small photographic dark room used by Professor Newbury in his researches on photographic emulsions, as well as offices, balance rooms, and a stock room. On the first, or main, floor were Quantitative Analysis, the office of the department head, the library, laboratories for the analysis of iron and steel, Sanitary Chemistry, Spectroscopic Chemical Analysis, a lecture room seating eighty students, a room for analysis by combustion, as well as a stock room, a balance room, an instructors office, a locker room, and a womens rest room. The second or top floor housed the laboratory for Introductory Inorganic Chemistry, a room originally intended for special analyses but which later became the laboratory for physical chemistry, a large lecture room seating 352, a storage and preparation room for and adjacent to the lecture room, a large room for a museum, and the office of the Professor of General and Applied Chemistry. The ventilating fans were in the attic. The building was of mill construction, with brick walls. It is described as being of slow-burning mill construction; later events proved the term to be somewhat in error. It was designed by C. Francis Osborne, with the advice of Professors Caldwell, Newbury, and Dennis. Architecturally it was consistent with Cornell tradition; it was inconsistent with the other buildings on the campus. The apportionment of space indicates that analytical chemistry in its various aspects was, even in 1890, the field of major importance.

In a few years more space was needed to accommodate the increasing number of students and the new courses that were being offered in both old and new fields. In 1899, a new building, the North Hall, was built. This was 125 feet long and 70 feet wide, parallel to the South Wing or Old Morse and joined to it, across a court, by a two - story passageway or bridge. In 1910 a second addition, made possible by a gift from Andrew Carnegie was built and some alterations were made in the older buildings. The Carnegie Addition extended north and south across the west ends of the older units and the separating court. The sub-basement of the addition was at ground level on the north. There were some later changes in the assignment of laboratory space. About 1916, the allocations were:

First Floor (old sub-basement):
Store rooms for chemicals and apparatus
Unpacking rooms
Power room
Shop
Boiler room for generating steam for distilled water. (The still itself was on the fifth floor)
Blower room for compressed air
Constanttemperature room
Large electric-furnace laboratory

Second Floor:
Laboratory for Qualitative Analysis, with offices
Hydrogensulphide room
Laboratories for Organic Chemistry, with offices
Assay Laboratory, with office
Gas-Analysis Laboratory, with office
Fire-proof rooms for hazardous work
Combustion room for ultimate organic analysis
Two recitation rooms
Mens and womens lavatories

Third Floor:
Quantitative Analysis
Agricultural Chemistry
Advanced Inorganic Chemistry
Electrochemical Analysis
Spectroscopic Chemical Analysis
Agricultural Experiment Station
Museum
Small lecture room
Various offices, private laboratories, small research laboratories, preparation and
balance rooms
Womens rest room
Library

Fourth Floor:
Laboratory for Chemical Microscopy
Laboratory for Sanitary Chemistry
Incubator rooms for water biology, Grinding and preparation room for
metallography, Museum for sanitary chemistry
Large research laboratory, Office and private laboratory

Attic:
Ventilating fans
Photographic studios, dark rooms and offices for the
University photographer

I came to Cornell as a graduate student in chemistry in 1910, very soon after the opening of the Carnegie Addition to Morse Hall. To a young graduate fresh from a small liberalarts college in the Midwest, Morse Hall seemed indeed luxurious. My first appointment was as a teaching assistant in the laboratory of qualitative analysis; specifically in old course Chem. 6. This was a combined course in qualitative and quantitative analysis required of all students in Engineering, Home Economics, and certain other divisions and elective for students in Arts and Sciences who did not contemplate advanced work in Chemistry. Those students specializing in Chemistry took Chem. 7, a similar but more intensive course in qualitative analysis only. The laboratory occupied an entire floor of the Carnegie Addition. The laboratory sections were crowded. The large room was usually filled with fume. Hydrogen sulphide was generated and dispensed in a separate room. The generator was a clumsy device built of sewer pipe and glass and rubber tubing wired together with copper wire. It was supposed to be automatic in operation but wasnt. During a laboratory period the hydrogen-sulphide room was filled with the escaping gas. Fortunately, no fatal case of poisoning occurred. The administration took no effective steps to remedy the condition, perhaps because in those days the high toxicity of hydrogen sulphide was not generally recognized.

The instructor in charge of the qualitative analysis laboratories was B.J. (Burt) Lemon, a graduate student. Burt was a very personable, very likeable and very dapper young man--a favorite with the ladies as well as with his fellowstudents. He was also addicted to tennis. In those days there was a small green wooden house east of the Triphammer Bridge and between Fall Creek and Forest Home Road. (This was before the road was relocated to bring it nearer the gorge and to make room for the embankment on which Baker Laboratory now stands.) The lower floor of this house was occupied by an eating place - The Sibley Dog. It was customary, at about the middle of the long afternoon laboratory sections, for the Assistants in Qualitative Analysis to send one of their number to the Sibley Dog to buy pie -- one piece of pie of specified variety for each contributor to the purchase fund. One warm afternoon the assistants were gathered in the laboratory office for the pie-break, when one of them was called away for a short time. He placed his untasted piece of cherry pie carefully on a chair and left the office. Just at that time, Burt Lemon, on his way to keep a tennis appointment with his favorite young lady of the moment, entered, resplendent in blue blazer and white flannel trousers. Without looking, he sat down squarely on the juicy section of cherry pie.

In Morse Hall, the laboratories of organic chemistry were in the basement at the east end of the older South Hall. They were rather dark and gloomy and had acquired the patina and the aroma that characterize all laboratories of organic chemistry.

In February, 1916, fire destroyed all of the upper two stories of Morse Hall and most of the basement (1), but enough of the brick walls remained so that a roof could be built over the ruin to give a one-story building with basement and sub-basement. In this makeshift building, some of the work of the Department was continued on a restricted scale. Some of the lectures and laboratories were transferred to other buildings.

In 1923, Baker Laboratory of Chemistry was completed. The money for this building was given by George F. Baker, New York financier and banker who had been interested in Cornell through the good offices of Duprat White, trustee and personal friend of Professor Dennis. The architects were Gibb and Waltz of Ithaca, although the staff of the Department, through Professor Dennis, had a determining voice in the general arrangement, the allocation of space, and the design of many details of construction and equipment. Since Baker Laboratory at the time of its first occupancy is adequately described in a brochure published in 1923 (3), it is not necessary to give a detailed description here. A few salient points may be mentioned.

A very considerable amount of space was set aside for analytical chemistry in its various aspects: qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, gas analysis, spectroscopic analysis, organic analysis, food analysis, water analysis, agricultural analysis, electrochemical analysis, etc. Much more room for physical chemistry and organic chemistry was provided than was available in Morse Hall. The provision for industrial chemistry was made after the plans had been pretty well crystallized; as a result, the space allotted to this division was unsuitable for laboratory work in this field.

Directly opposite the main entrance was a large museum room with show cases filled with specimens of chemicals, ores and minerals, and manufactured products. This served as a reservoir of samples for lectures and demonstrations, and, would, it was expected, encourage students to become more familiar with the appearance of chemical substances and of products made in the chemical industries. An advantage not contemplated was that it helped many students in qualitative analysis to identify the components of their unknowns without resort to the tedious and troublesome procedure suggested in the laboratory manual.

Since the main lecture room was on the second floor, much of the heavy student traffic must be carried through the corridors of the main floor and up or down stairs. The several lecture rooms had windows looking out on the concrete-paved inner court that served as a parking lot and as an access route to the receiving and delivery doors, and in which there was the noise of traffic and of loading or unloading supplies and garbage. When lantern slides were to be shown, the windows were closed by shutters. In the smaller lecture rooms these were hand-operated by an ingenious mechanism of levers that usually resisted all effort to close the shutters tightly. The main lecture room had many long windows and a large skylight. The shutters for the windows and skylight were operated by motors controlled by pushbuttons at the lecture desk or in the projection booth. The mechanism always operated leisurely and with much grinding and creaking; after each button was pressed, there was a period of anxious waiting, by the speaker and the audience, to see if anything was going to happen and, if so, what. There have, I believe, been occasions on which the operator was able to press all of the buttons in the right order, without re-opening a shutter that had been purposely closed or re-closing one that had been purposely opened.

The lecture room seats were of oak-very hard oak. They were made by the Bool Furniture Company, which operated a mill at Forest Home. I have always suspected that they were designed by the same person that designed the wooden benches in the waiting rooms of the railroad stations.

These comments are not made in serious criticism of the design. A great deal of intelligent thought went into the design of Baker Laboratory. That the building reflects to some extent the tradition of earlier years is to be expected; that it showed some faults that were avoided in later buildings, when the experience with Baker was available, is certainly not a valid criticism of its planners." (Chamot and Rhodes, 1937)

"The construction of Morse Hall begins as another chapter in the clash between Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Henry Sage, and President Andrew White over the choice of building materials. White from his student days at Yale favored white stone, whereas Sage, the practical business man, preferred the less expensive red-brick. In 1888 White left again for Europe and when he returned in 1889 there stood the red-brick Morse Hall, complete with Medina sand stone trim and a gray slate roof. To make matters worse, Morse Hall occupied a promontory overlooking Ithaca and the valley below a site that White held sacred because it was where he and Ezra Cornell twenty three years before had together first viewed the future campus. As late as 1916 White wrote in his diary &the site of Morse Hall which never ought to have been covered by a buildings utterly out of harmony with all the others on the upper Quadrangle. Morse Hall could not have been designed and constructed in one year, but there is no record of White complaining before he left for Europe.

The October 24, 1891 issue of Scientific American contains a two-page description of the New Chemical Laboratory, which they treat with some awe noting that slow burning construction was used throughout. The floor plans for Morse and two interior pictures contained in the article are reproduced here. From the description one can calculate that Morse Hall contained about 36,500 sq. ft. of gross space, a grand expansion from Chemistrys beginnings in the basement of Morrill Hall.

In 1899 a North Hall was added and in 1910 the building was expanded further with the Carnegie Addition. From the 1929 map it would appear that the combined new facilities had about as large a footprint as the original Morse Hall. The Chamot-Rhodes description implies that it had at least two floors although the Dennis pamphlet explicitly says one-story. With this uncertainty, Chemistry had available a gross area of about 45,000 to 55,000 sq. ft.

On a cold February night in 1916 a fire of undetermined origin destroyed all of the upper two stories and most of the basement. In spite of the appearance of total devastation in the picture taken after the fire, enough of the brick walls remained so that it could be roofed over to give a makeshift building with one-story, basement and sub-basement. Some of the other laboratories were transferred to other buildings. The Chamot-Rhodes account of the fire was:
Apparently it started in the attic, which was occupied by a firm of photographers. Professor Dennis and some of the other faculty were firmly convinced that the fire was of incendiary origin; that it was started by German saboteurs to stop the work that the Department was doing for national defense. It is much more probable that the fire started either from carelessness or from defective wiring.

There is a story passed down by word of mouth, that as the fire burned students formed a brigade and passed out the library books hand over hand and thus were able to save the library, Impossible today because yellow fire lines would have been set up and no one other than firemen allowed to pass. However, the picture showing the fire equipment in the front of the burned-out building, emphasizes how much simpler things were 90 years ago; perhaps the story is true.

Planning for a new building immediately, but United States entry into World War I in 1918, which put a dampener on these efforts. Mr. George F. Baker (no relation to the Baker Chemical Company) was persuaded to fund a new building. Andrew D. White appears to not have been too sad at the loss of his personal eye-sore; White died in 1918 and did not live to see the grand new replacement, Baker Laboratory, which was completed in 1923.

What happened to Morse Hall? When chemistry left, the ruins were turned into an Art Gallery. The makeshift Morse Hall was finally torn down in 1954 and eventually the site was occupied by the Johnson Art Museum in 1973." (Wilcox, 2004)