Archivist: Exhibit features WPI’s role in Byrd’s polar expeditions

The current Gladwin Gallery exhibit, Currents of Change: Electrical and Computer Engineering at WPI from the Dawn of the Electric Age to Present Day, explores the Institute’s role in electrifying industry, transportation, and daily life.

Hired in 1871 to lead the Institute’s physics curriculum, Alonzo Kimball had, within 10 years, successfully ignited interest in the study of electricity at a time when the concept was yet widely uncharted. Electrical engineering later became its own formalized department in 1896, with Professor Harold Smith at the helm. Together with the support of presidents Homer Fuller and Edmund Engler, these two visionaries shaped a program that both reflected and drove the nation’s surge into the electric age.

One especially fascinating item on display in the exhibit is the transmitter brought by Admiral Richard Byrd on his many Antarctic expeditions.

Byrd’s connection to WPI stems from his long-standing friendship with its sixth president, Admiral Ralph Earle. They were shipmates on the USS Dolphin when they served in the U.S. Navy, circa 1914. The two friends remained close despite subsequent assignments and other engagements taking them in different directions—Byrd as a pioneering aviator and polar explorer and Earle as an innovative engineering educator.

Correspondence among WPI’s records from the president’s office reveals Earle invited Byrd to speak about his May 1926 expedition to the North Pole, which—despite some controversy and debate—is on record as the first time an aircraft reached it. Byrd spoke on Feb. 9, 1928, to a record audience of staff, faculty, students, and alumni in the campus gymnasium. As is reported in the Tech News, Byrd described the special instruments and devices that he used when he encountered “the unique and severe conditions of the polar flight.”

Among these instruments was an invention by Albert Bumstead, Class of 1898. “If it had not been for the sun compass invented by Mr. Bumstead while Floyd Bennett and I were making preparations to fly over the North Pole, we would have had a great deal more difficulty than we did. A magnetic compass is of no avail when the North Pole is being approached, for the magnetic pole is some 1,200 miles away, somewhere over Canada,” Byrd explained to the WPI audience. Bumstead’s compass, in contrast, used sun-cast shadows to determine direction.

Later that year, Byrd—together with eight scientists, several Inuit guides, 100 dogs, and the transmitter that is on display in this year’s exhibit—embarked on what would become the first of several Antarctic expeditions. The goal was to study the geological and glacial conditions of the frozen region at the South Pole. Thanks to the modifications electrical engineering Professor Hobart Newell made to this transmitter, constant radio communications were maintained with the outside world.

In 1938, some of Byrd’s Antarctic radio equipment made its way back to WPI. In partnership with WPI Archives and Special Collections, these objects have been preserved for almost a century by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). A special thank you goes out to James O’Rourke, electrical engineer manager, and Rick Brown, Weston Hadden Endowed Professor in Electrical Engineering and head of the ECE department, for providing access to this transmitter, along with many other items on display in this exhibit.

Currents of Change will be on display in the Gladwin Gallery through July 2026.

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