The School of Aerospace Engineering will celebrate the grant that established it with a 75th anniversary program on Dec. 8.

Georgia Tech received a $300,000 grant from the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics in March 1930. The Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics was dedicated on June 3, 1931, and classes began in September with 18 students, two faculty members and a budget of $10,000.

Renamed the School of Aerospace Engineering in July 1962, Tech’s program now boasts about 750 undergraduate and 450 graduate students, nearly 90 faculty members and externally funded annual research expenditures of more than $18 million.

The Dec. 8 program at the Student Success Center on campus will begin at 1:45 p.m. with remarks from Robert Loewy, the William R.T. Oakes professor and school chair, followed by the keynote address, "Reshaping the Passion: Aerospace Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," delivered by Sheila Widnall of MIT.

Other speakers on the program include John Anderson, historian for the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum; Mark Miller, vice president of research and engineering for Sikorsky Aircraft Co.; Scott Horowitz, PhD 82, associate administrator for exploration systems at NASA; and Don Richardson, AE 51, retired vice president of SAIC Corp.

M.L. Brittain was president of the Institute when it received the Guggenheim windfall. In his 1948 book "The Story of Georgia Tech," Brittain called the $300,000 Guggenheim grant the "greatest honor ever bestowed upon the school or for that matter almost any Southern college."

Brittain wrote that he "secured Montgomery Knight, at that time engaged in research work at Langley Field, for the new head, planned for a building to cost $100,000, planned to expend $50,000 for a wind tunnel and other equipment and finally to invest one-half the funds in 5 percent bonds for endowment against financial troubles — already looming ominously in that year of 1930."

Groundbreaking research was conducted at the school from the beginning. Knight, who remained the school’s chair until his death in 1943, developed one of the first jet-powered rotors for a helicopter and tested it extensively at Tech in the 1930s. A blade he designed and had built is displayed in the lobby of the Montgomery Knight Building, constructed in 1967 after a model shop was demolished.

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