Universities Where Science Was Taught: Twelve Foundings From 1209 to 1891

Cambridge was founded in 1209 by scholars who had left Oxford, and it is organized into thirty-one self-governing colleges. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell and Ernest Rutherford studied or worked there, and its Cavendish Laboratory is where the electron and the neutron were identified and the structure of DNA was worked out.

Heidelberg was founded in 1386 and is the oldest university in Germany. In the nineteenth century Robert Bunsen, Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz worked there, and Bunsen and Kirchhoff developed spectroscopy in its laboratories.

Uppsala was founded in 1477 and is the oldest university in the Nordic countries. Carl Linnaeus, Anders Celsius and Anders Ångström held chairs there, which is why the Celsius temperature scale and the angstrom unit of length carry the names of its scientists.

Copenhagen was founded in 1479 and is the oldest university in Denmark. Hans Christian Ørsted and Niels Bohr both worked there, and the Niels Bohr Institute, where Bohr and his colleagues developed quantum theory, belongs to the university.

Leiden was founded in 1575 by William of Orange and is the oldest university in the Netherlands. Its physics laboratory under Heike Kamerlingh Onnes liquefied helium and discovered superconductivity, and Hendrik Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman worked in the city.

Edinburgh was founded in 1582 by the town council under a royal charter from King James VI, and it is one of the ancient universities of Scotland. James Hutton, Joseph Black, Charles Darwin as a student and Peter Higgs studied or worked there, and it is known for its medical school and its work in physics, geology and informatics.

Harvard was founded in 1636 and is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Its scientists have worked in observatories, laboratories, museums and medical schools across the university, from Harvard College Observatory to the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Göttingen was founded in 1734 by King George II and opened in 1737. Carl Friedrich Gauss, David Hilbert, Max Born and Werner Heisenberg made it the world center of mathematics and physics in the early twentieth century.

The University of Berlin was founded in 1809 on the plan of Wilhelm von Humboldt, which joined teaching to research, and it took his name in 1949. Hegel, Einstein, Planck, Helmholtz and Robert Koch held posts there, under the earlier names Friedrich Wilhelm University and University of Berlin.

University College London was founded in 1826 as London University and was open from the start to students of any religion. William Ramsay, who discovered the noble gases, and Karl Pearson held its chairs, and it became a center for physics, chemistry, medicine and the study of statistics.

Johns Hopkins opened in 1876 and was modeled on the German research universities, so that graduate study and original research stood at its center from the start. Its schools of medicine, public health and engineering, and its physics and chemistry departments, have produced many Nobel laureates.

Caltech began in 1891 as a vocational school founded by Amos G. Throop and took its present name in 1920. It is a small school with a strong emphasis on physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology and engineering, and it manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA.