1794 - Education

Education

The Ecole Normale is founded at Paris. It will employ mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre as professor of mathematics beginning next year.

The Ecole Polytechnique is the world's first technical college. France's revolutionary government founds it to provide training for scientists with special emphasis on mathematics and applied science.

A museum for the popularization of science opens at Philadelphia under the direction of portrait painter Charles Willson Peale, a veteran of the War of Independence who is well known for his nearly 60 portraits of George Washington based on seven that he has painted from life.

Bowdoin College is founded at Brunswick, Massachusetts (later to be part of Maine) by an act of the Massachusetts General Court signed by Governor Samuel Adams June 24; it is named in memory of the late governor James Bowdoin and will construct its first building, Massachusetts Hall, from 1799 to 1802.

The University of Tennessee has its beginnings in Blount College. It will become East Tennessee College in 1804, East Tennessee University in 1840, and the Knoxville-based University of Tennessee in 1879.

College of New Jersey (later Princeton) president John Witherspoon dies at Tusculum, New Jersey, November 15 at age 71. The only clergyman to have signed the Declaration of Independence, he has taught students who went on to become prominent educators and statesmen.