William Barton Rogers

William Barton Rogers (1804 to 1882) was an American geologist and physicist and the founder and first president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An acclaimed lecturer in the physical sciences, he taught at the College of William and Mary from 1828 to 1835 and at the University of Virginia from 1835 to 1853, where he served as Virginia's first state geologist and led the state's first geological survey. He believed that a university for the useful arts could be essential in an age of industrial progress, and in 1861 he secured funding for an institute of technology from the Massachusetts legislature. When MIT opened in 1865 he was its first president and physics instructor; he stepped away in 1868 because of ill health, returned as president in 1878, stepped down three years later, and died in 1882 while giving MIT's graduation speech.