A Tufts professor wired up a working telephone before Bell's patent
In 1875 Tufts physicist Amos Dolbear strung a working telephone line from his campus lab to his house, two years before Alexander Graham Bell received his patent. The college also counted P. T. Barnum as a benefactor, which is why a stuffed circus elephant named Jumbo became its mascot.
Tufts began in 1852, when Universalist Christians who wanted a nonsectarian college in New England received 20 acres of bare hilltop from Charles Tufts. Asked what he planned for the land, one of the highest points around Boston, he said he would put a light on it. That plot, then valued at 20,000 dollars, remains the core of a campus now 150 acres wide, straddling Medford and Somerville. Hosea Ballou II became the first president in 1853, modelling teaching on the tutorials of Oxford and Edinburgh, and classes opened in August 1854.
The college backed the Union in the Civil War; a mansion on the grounds served as an Underground Railroad station, and 63 graduates fought. Its early faculty were inventive. William Leslie Hooper designed the first slotted armature for dynamos, and Stephen Babcock devised a test for butterfat in milk that has barely changed since. Barnum paid for a natural history museum in 1884 to house his animal specimens and Jumbo's hide, all lost when fire gutted the building on April 14, 1975.
Trustees voted on July 15, 1892, to admit women on the same terms as men, but in 1910 created Jackson College for Women as a coordinate school, partly from fear that men would shun a heavily female Tufts. Jackson shared courses and faculty, became harder to get into than the men's side, and issued diplomas to women until 2002. The first known Black graduate, Forrester Blanchard Washington, finished in 1909. In 1933 Tufts opened the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the country's first graduate school of international affairs, initially together with Harvard.
Wartime travel limits sent the Boston Red Sox to train at Tufts in 1943, and the college became Tufts University in 1955, though its corporate name still says Tufts College. President Jean Mayer, from 1976 to 1992, added veterinary, nutrition and biomedical schools and grew the endowment fifteenfold. Today it enrolls over 13,000 students across ten schools, with a campus in Talloires, France, and by 2015 computer science had become its largest major.
Source: Tufts University
