UP Trivia

Congratulations to the Gonzaga Bulldogs, West Coast Conference Champions, for their appearance in the Championship Game of the 2017 NCAA Basketball Tournament.  UP and Gonzaga were founding members of the WCC in 1952, two Catholic colleges competing before and since.

A not always polite rivalry.  Although the last Men’s Conference game held in venerable Howard Hall occurred in spring 1981, earlier in December 1978, the Portland – Gonzaga game in Howard so rocked the court, stands, and the building itself that Fire Marshalls and student fans feared the worse (but no worries, the Pilots were off to a 5-0 start that season, defeating the Bulldogs 91-76).  All later appearances in rivalry against Gonzaga have commanded a larger, sturdier venue.  In recent years Gonzaga sells out the Chiles Center as visitors meeting us on our home court.

Positioned above the interior doorway of the University Museum is a large-scale yellow Pickett N4-ES Vector Hyperbolic Log Log Dual-Base Slide Rule.  With moving parts.  Somewhat easier to use than a Rubik’s Cube.  The moving parts were the point, allowing classroom demonstrations.

Slide rules are the trombones of scientific equipment (the abacus = the xylophone?), an early improvement on the humble pencil, and a short-cut saving pages of parchment in calculating large equations.  The invention of the slide rule arriving in the seventeenth century, having to wait for the discovery of logarithms (1614), which had to wait for Copernicus to give us large-distances — planetary orbits in a heliocentric dynamic — to measure.  (But before Newton & Leibniz and the discovery of calculus.)

Aristarchus of Samos [fl. 250 BCE] according to the report of Archimedes (trans, Thom. Heath, 1897), considered the distances of the heliocentric system to be too incomprehensible to measure (like the interior angles of a chiliagon or the enumeration of the sand-grains on all the beaches of all the oceans).  John Napier in 1614 in Mirifici Logarithmorum Cannois Descriptio found a way to fold complex equations answering the problems of scale and celestial magnitudes.

Slide rules were used by Engineering and Physics students at UP through the 70s.   The slide rule was a useful tool for solving equations in analytics and trigonometry.   Once a required school supply, the microchip revolution doomed this plastic analog technology.  The introduction of the (affordable) pocket calculator in the mid to late 1970s eliminated the slide rule from shirt-pockets and belt-holsters, leading to a different aesthetic in geek chic.   Even so, the slide rule is a tool requiring neither batteries nor electricity for those who appreciate (or enjoy) manual computations in case of power-outages.

(Researched by the University Archivist)

Photo gallery, click on images to enlarge

Slide rules with deluxe leather pocket protectors (University Museum)

Slide rule sold in UP bookstore (University Museum)

Large slide rule close up, ca1959 (University Museum)

Large slide rule, ca 1959 (University Museum)

The Limit y = f(x), retired after many years on display in the Math department

During March Madness and the bowl season contests leading up to the National Football Championship it sometimes appears that the NCAA is the sum and summit of collegiate sports.  In highlighting the achievements of Pilot Athletics we tend to focus on our brushes-with-greatness in terms of NCAA honors.  But before UP hooked-up with the NCAA, we used to go steady with the NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics).

And while the NCAA National Championship Women’s Soccer teams (2002 & 2005) won trips to Washington, D.C. and the White House, and a parade in downtown Portland….

https://sites.up.edu/museum/up-trivia-bar-bets-medal-of-the-year/

The University of Portland’s first National Championship athletic title was earned at the NAIA by the women of the 1985 Cross Country Team.  A rapid and amazing development, as related in the 1983 Track Media Guide, “In 1980 the University of Portland women’s track team consisted of two women –  Teresa Holmes and Diana Brink.  Three years later the track team has 19 athletes and the foundation of a solid program” (p. 17).  A confidence well-founded.  The Women’s Cross Country team entered NAIA competition in 1982 winning the District II title, and repeating as District II champs in 1983, 1984, 1985.  In 1985 going on to take national honors and emerge as the team to bring the University of Portland its first national title.  The pioneering achievements of the 1985 squad were recognized in 2010 when the National Championship Cross Country Team was inducted into the University of Portland Athletic Hall of Fame (see Hall of Fame Citation, below).

(Click on image to enlarge)

Catalogues and Bulletins reaching back to the beginning of the University list at least ten general usage phone numbers and exchanges for the outside caller seeking to reach someone on campus.   Though the very first phone number was not even a number at all.  In 1901-1902 callers would simply pick up a telephone and ask an operator to be connected with “Columbia University”.   There was likely just one phone in West Hall (the only building then, now Waldschmidt Hall) and by the mid-1920s (with two campus buildings!) there were two or three phone lines serving the campus, including a pay telephone in Christie Hall.

From two or three phones in the mid-1920s, campus telephone service added stations on individual wires in the 1930s.  These moved back to a switchboard exchange passing through West Hall in 1938.  Christie Hall had a private pay telephone on each floor for student use; the student residents were responsible for answering the phone for an entire floor or wing.   An arrangement recalled by Fr. Barry Hagan, C.S.C., ’53, former University Archivist, in an oral history conducted by Archivist Brother David Martin, C.S.C, in 1968: “The telephones; there was one telephone per floor; it was located right next to the steam pipe.  You walked into a room lined with a kind of iron or steel sheeting and pulled shut behind this heavy fire door; …  you stood inside and absolutely sweat profusely while you made your telephone calls.”

A switchboard operator fielded calls placed to the University at UNiversity2626, UN1641, TWinoaks 8841, TW5541 from the 1930s through the mid-50s.   The expanding demand for telephone service in the 1950s ushered in a 7-digit number-system nationwide and the university’s number changed to BUtler 9-5541; the West Hall UP switchboard then successively becomes 289-5541, 286-7911, 283-7911 through the 1960s.  Today, cell-phone demand has created a ten-digit system, and we are 503-943-8000.

The first private telephone in a dorm room was installed in 1957 in Christie Hall by sophomore student, Don Gorger.   In 1966, The Beacon notices that phones were installed in all rooms in Mehling Hall.  The University provided phones for student rooms until about 1985.

Portland Magazine reports 1,415 telephones on campus in 1993: 800 for faculty and staff; 600 for students; and 15 pay phones.  Today (January 2016) Information Services reports there are 956 VoIP telephones running on the University’s network: 946 for faculty and staff; 10 for students.  There are no pay phones operating on campus.  And no count at all accounting for wireless mobile devices, which seem to be issued in multiples far in excess of one per-person.

(click on photos to enlarge)

Additional photographs and artifacts about telephones are on display on the first floor of Buckley Center (across from the Studies Abroad Office) until the end of February 2016.