Table of Contents
A World Without Dartmouth and its People Would Be Bereft of Radar, Sunday Papers, Nerf Ball, and Federal Withholding.
Then again, maybe not. But it certainly would be different; very, very different.
WHAT IF DARTMOUTH AND ITS PEOPLE HAD NEVER EXISTED? FOR ONE thing, Ronald Reagan might never have been President; or, at least, not a Republican President.
The GOP was brought together, and probably named, by Amos Tuck, Dartmouth class of 1835 see page 30
ANOTHER REPUBLICAN, ABRAHAMLINCOLN, MIGHT NEVER HAVE BEEN President either, and imagine the implications of that. As a young man Lincoln was by a Dartmouth-trained doctor, John Allen 1828 page 53 And it was Amos. Tuck who helped push through Lincoln's nomination for President page 53
IF DARTMOUTH AND ITS PEOPLE HAD NEVER EXISTED, THOUSANDS of American households might have been destroyed by errantly thrown balls; instead they are saved by the Nerf Ball, courtesy of Reyn Geyer '57 (page 35).
WTTHOUT DARTMOUTH, MUCH MORE OF THE NATION MIGHT LOOK like a shopping mall; it was George Perkins Marsh 1820 and his seminal book, Man and Nature, that gave practical justification to the environmental movement page 44
OUR CLOTHING MIGHT BE HORRIBLY WRINKLED WHEN WE TRAVEL if not for the luggage invented by a man with the appropriate name of Theodore Cart '20 page 14
DARTMOUTH STUDENTS MIGHT LOOK VERY DIFFERENT HAD THE College not been the first in the nation to institute selective admissions (page 17). Which in turn might never have come about without the first college outing club (page 33). A glowing National
Geographic article about outdoor life on the Hanover Plain caused applications to soar in 1920, compelling competition for placement.
JUST AS IMPORTANT, IF NOT FOR HORACE FLETCHER 1870 AND HIS best-selling admonition to chew each bite of food 100 times page 15 would the world have fad diets todays? Among the more zealous adherents of "fletcherizing" was Henry James.
Without the masticative care he devoted to every meal, the novelist's prose might well have been far less...ruminative.
WITHOUT DARTMOUTH AND FRATERNITY CHRONICLER Chris Miller '63 page 35 colleges' Greek systems might be the collections of earnest debating societies they once were.
OUR CARS MIGHT NOTE STOP AS WELL, HAD JOHN WOODHOUSE '2l not invented brake fluid page 7 Nor might they go as well; it was a Dartmouth professor, Dixi the first experiments on petroleum page 37
Imagine the world without such Dartmouth progeny as Sunday papers (page 20), radar (page17), federal withholding (page 17), Atlanta (page 43), a desegregated military (page 58), mood music (page 47)...
BUT WAIT A MINUTE. WHO SAYS THESE THINGS WOULDN'T HAVE existed without the College?
WELL, WHO SAYS THEY WOULD? SUCH SPECULATION FOLLOWS, more or less, the idea behind the 1947 Jimmy Stewart movie "It's a Wonderfhl Life." Both the movie and this issue of DAM illustrate a tenet of chaos theory that is the brainchild of Edward Lorenz '38 (page 54). Called the Butterfly Effect (or, more formally, "sensitive dependence on initial conditions"), the theory holds that small changes in the course of natural or human events can alter the future in huge and unpredictable ways. The flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil, for example, could conceivably set off a chain of events that would result in Texas tornadoes.
IF OTHER SCHOOLS CAN CLAIM LARGER AND MORE PREDICTABLE contributions—more Nobel more on-campus scientific discoveries--Dartmouth's gifts to society show a more personal of ties, connections that have made, as Robert Frost 1896 said (page 26), "all the difference."
IT IS, IN SHORT, A SMALL COLLEGE, AND THAT IS A GIFT IN ITSELF. —THE EDITORS
