Florida Tech's start: Brevard Engineering College, 1958
Florida Institute of Technology began in 1958 as Brevard Engineering College, the idea of Jerome P. Keuper, an RCA physicist on the Cape's missile range. Its first evening classes for missile-range engineers were held in rented rooms at Eau Gallie Junior High, starting September 22, 1958.
Florida Institute of Technology “was founded in 1958 as Brevard Engineering College,” according to the university, and “it all started as an idea in the mind of Jerome P. Keuper, a visionary physicist working at Cape Canaveral.”
The missilemen’s college
Keuper came to Melbourne in early 1958 to work as a senior engineer for RCA on the missile range, according to the university’s own history of its founding. He had a doctorate from the University of Virginia and had spent five years at Remington Arms in Connecticut, teaching evening classes at the Bridgeport Engineering Institute, a school founded in 1924 for people who wanted to become engineers but could not attend college full time. That was his model. Bridgeport’s founder, Arthur Keating, had told him not to open a Florida branch but to start his own college.
The idea took shape over drinks. After work, Keuper met three colleagues from RCA’s Systems Analysis group, the mathematicians George Peters and Donya Dixon and the computer scientist Robert Kelly, at the Pelican Bar on A1A. The university’s history has a bystander overhearing them one night and tossing 37 cents in change on the bar to start the college with. Harold Dibble, an inertial guidance engineer with a Cornell doctorate who’d taught in UCLA’s evening engineering program, joined that spring. Keuper would be president, Dibble dean, Peters head of mathematics, Kelly the financial officer and Dixon the secretary. Together they planned a college that would hold classes in the evenings, draw its faculty from the range, and teach “missilemen” who wanted to advance.
The plan they drafted, the university’s history says, called for classes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings from seven to ten, in mechanical and electrical engineering and possibly business administration. The Brevard County schools agreed to rent three classrooms at Eau Gallie Junior High School, now Westshore Junior/Senior High. The county’s business leaders were less sure. The Brevard Joint Chamber of Commerce tabled Keuper’s request for an endorsement and instead voted to invite the University of Miami to run a similar program. Miami’s dean of engineering declined and, by Keuper’s account, told the chamber to let Keuper do it.
To raise money, Keuper’s group held an Engineer’s Cotillion at the Trade Winds Club in Indialantic on June 6, 1958; it raised enough to print a catalog.
The first semester
By then the school had a new name. It had been announced in May as Brevard Engineering Institute, but the people signing up made it plain they wanted to go to a college, not an institute, and Keuper agreed. The story goes that he took a razor to the “I” on the institute’s parking decal and pasted in a “C.” The catalog for Brevard Engineering College appeared in July 1958 with nine classes. Tuition was $35 for one course, $68 for two and $96 for three, and classes were scheduled to start on September 22, 1958. The courses were pitched at people already doing the work: advanced calculus, transients in linear systems, servomechanisms, electromagnetic fields, transistor theory and numerical analysis among them. A rocket propulsion course was taught by Sebastian J. D’Alli of a local engineering firm. The college also announced plans for graduate courses leading to a master’s degree in electrical engineering and applied mathematics, and Alten Thresher, MIT’s dean of admissions, wrote that MIT would consider credit for equivalent Brevard courses.
By early September, 154 students had registered: 114 undergraduates and 40 graduate applicants, with an average age of 33. Six were women. Forty-five prospective faculty came to the first faculty meeting, a dinner at Hensel’s Red Rooster Restaurant in Eau Gallie on September 18, four days before classes began. The university’s history traces the school’s purpose to the same moment as the space program’s: Explorer 1 reached orbit on January 31, 1958, just as Keuper was driving south to his new job.
From BEC to Florida Tech
The name lasted eight years. In 1966 Florida’s Secretary of State approved the college’s request to change its name to Florida Institute of Technology. Eau Gallie, where the first classes met, joined Melbourne three years later; that story is on our merger page.
Further Reading
- Live from Cape Canaveral: Covering the Space Race by Jay Barbree
Sources
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