Tours

 

The accompanying material relates to scientists and engineers buried in the Grove Street Cemetery. It was prepared to be recorded on tape and, with the aid of a portable player, to serve for three self-guided tours, each requiring about thirty minutes time. Actual recording never occurred.

 

The scripts contain only a partial listing of all scientists and engineers in the cemetery. There is, for example, no one who died recently. The date of most recent death is 1976.

 

Individuals are listed accompanied by a brief summary of information about each one. So as to help a stranger find a particular grave, preceding this individual information is a description of where the gave is located, in terms of street and number, and of the type of gravestone.

 

The material was assembled initially following a question from Elona Vaisnys, Editor, Faculty of Engineering. She had found a newspaper story about a civil engineering professor at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. He had his class meet in a local cemetery at the grave of Hardy Cross. Cross was a native of the area who, in the 1930s, devised a numerical procedure for calculating stresses in complicated structures with many interconnected parts. The resulting “Hardy Cross Method” was widely used for structural design in the era before computers. Ms. Vaisnys wondered whether there was anyone in the Grove Street Cemetery at whose gave it might be appropriate for a Yale engineering class to meet. When it turned out that there are a number of possibilities, it was she who proposed tape recording the material.