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President Kedzie’s bid to lift the quarantine on the Michigan Agricultural College campus was overruled by Dr. R. M. Olin of State Health Board.

Facemasks were distributed to students at the University of Michigan; public gatherings including a concert by Caruso on the the Unviersity of Michigan campus were cancelled.

MAC President Frank Kedzie and Governor Albert Sleeper announced that the MAC-University of Michigan football game scheduled for the coming weekend has been cancelled due to the mounting number of Spanish influenza cases that had  afflicted the college campus and communities across Michigan.

A plea for help came from Boyne City, a town of 5000, with 2000 cases of Spanish influenza, and only one doctor.

For more information, see 41 DIE, 1,821 STATE GRIP CASES IN DAY: Michigan-M. A. C. Football Game Cancelled; Caruso Concert Cancelled in Ann Arbor…Special to The Free Press, Detroit Free Press (1858-1922); Oct 17, 1918; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Detroit Free Press (1831-1922)

Eighteen-year old Detroit Red Wing rookie, Gordie Howe scored a goal in his first appearance at Olympia Stadium. Howe played for 32 seasons in the National Hockey League and in the World Hockey League where he played with his sons.

Sources :

Michigan History

“He just kept going and going and …”, article by Larry Schwartz, ESPN Sport Century.

Gordie Howe wikipedia entry

The Dewey Cannon, captured in the Spanish-American War by Admiral Dewey, was presented to Three Oaks when its citizens raised $1,400 for a memorial to the men of the battleship Maine. This was the largest contribution, per capita, of any community in the nation. “Three Oaks Against the World,” a local paper proudly boasted. This park was dedicated October 17, 1899, by President William McKinley, and others. Presentation of the cannon took place on June 28, 1900. Guest of honor was Helen Miller Gould, called the Spanish-American War’s “Florence Nightingale.” Thousands of people were in attendance on each occasion.

Sources :

Emily Hopcian, “President McKinley visits Three Oaks“, Detroit Free Press, October 14, 2007.

The Dewey Cannon, Michigan Historical Marker

To this day, the MSU Archives and Historical Records maintains records from the event.

According to Madison Kuhn’s Michigan State: the first hundred years, 1855-1955 (MSU Press, 1955), MAC’s first actual homecoming game took place on October 17, 1914, when 400 alumni returned to M.A.C. and gathered for lunch in the basement of Peoples Church prior to the Michigan game. The alumni office obtained 635 tickets – most of them good seats in the center of the field – and sold them for $2 apiece to alumni.

“I did some digging and am convinced the 1914 game vs. Michigan was our first Homecoming,” says Ed Busch, archivist at the MSU Archives. Busch, incidentally, is the grand nephew of Oscar Rudolf “Dutch” Miller, MAC’s quarterback in 1914.

If one reviews MAC media guides, the 1915 game against Oregon State  was hiped as the “Alumni Game”, and the 1916 game against Notre Dame was the first one officially identified as “Homecoming”.

More About the History of Homecomings:

There is something special about Homecoming that every Spartan should know (besides the next date).

The whole concept of Homecoming, by some accounts, was established and popularized nationally a century ago by a former Spartan!

Several schools claim to have invented Homecoming, including Illinois in 1910, and Baylor and Northern Illinois before then. The idea of alumni returning to campus for a football game was not novel; as far back as the 1870s, alums returned to the annual Harvard-Yale game. Around 1910 the idea of staging a special celebration for alums was brewing on many campuses. But the NCAA (and Jeopardy! and Trivial Pursuit) credits Missouri with inventing the modern Homecoming model – an event for returning alumni centered around a football game, complete with such trappings as a parade, a spirit bonfire and a gathering of alumni, perhaps around a meal of some kind.

The driving force behind this first Homecoming was an MSU Hall of Famer, one after whom a major MSU annual award is named.

The name is Chester Brewer.

Chester Brewer was MSU’s football coach from 1903 until 1910, and then in 1917 and 1919. He also served as our basketball and baseball coach, and as our first full-time athletics director. A native of Owosso, he was considered a defensive genius. Of the 88 football games he coached at MSU, 49 were shutouts – including a shutout of Fielding Yost’s 1908 team and a 17-0 drubbing of Notre Dame in 1910.

Brewer moved to Missouri as both football coach and athletic director in 1910. In 1911, he staged the first college homecoming in the United States, creating the model for what colleges and high schools today celebrate every year.

An entry in Wikipedia tracing the origins of Homecoming notes that in 1911, Missouri hosted rival Kansas at its Columbia campus for the first time. To assure interest in the game, Brewer launched a concerted effort to invite alumni back. Some 10,000 alumni returned to what he called “homecoming.” The effort was clearly a huge success.

This tradition quickly caught on nationwide, and it didn’t take long to reach East Lansing.

Here are some additional facts:

The Chester Brewer Award is given annually by MSU to a senior athlete who excels in athletics and scholarship, and who is deemed most likely to succeed. The 2009 winner was hockey goalie Jeff Lerg. Other winners include former trustee Pat Wilson, Earl Morrall, Shane Bullough, Pat Shurmur, Eric Snow and Kristin Haynie.

The first Homecoming game between Missouri and Kansas ended in a 3-3 tie – a tribute partly to Brewer’s defensive acumen.

Whichever date you designate as our first Homecoming, what remains beyond dispute is that our first Homecoming victory was in 1918 – a 13-7 win over Notre Dame. It was the only loss suffered by the legendary Knute Rockne in his first three seasons as head Irish coach. George Gipp (the Gipper) was Rockne’s star running back on that team. Credit Aggie coach and alumnus George Gauthier for the coup.

Sources :

Robert Bao, “MSU and the invention of“, Michigan Alumni Association, March 28, 2011.

Madison Kuhn, Michigan State: the first hundred years, 1855-1955 (MSU Press, 1955) via HathiTrust

New York Times Obituary:

Stanford Robert Ovshinsky (November 24, 1922 – October 17, 2012), an iconoclastic, largely self-taught  and commercially successful scientist who invented the nickel-metal hydride battery and contributed to the development of a host of devices, including solar energy panels, flat-panel displays and rewritable compact discs, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He was 89.

Placing Mr. Ovshinsky in “the league of genius inventors,” The Economist magazine once titled an article about him “The Edison of Our Age?”

If not quite that, he was certainly among the 20th century’s most inventive breed of scientists who, like Edison, parlayed their ideas into practical commercial applications.

He gained particular attention for upsetting common wisdom about the nature of semiconductors. Semiconductors, which block or carry electrical current depending on the voltage to which they are exposed, typically consist of crystals in which molecules line up in ordered ranks. But in the late 1950s Mr. Ovshinsky became convinced that less regimented materials could also act as semiconductors.

He argued that products using these so-called amorphous, or disordered, materials could be much cheaper to make than those built from the workhorse compounds of the electronics industry, like silicon crystals.

His ideas drew only scorn and skepticism at first. He was an unknown inventor with unconventional ideas, a man without a college education who made his living designing automation equipment for the automobile industry in Detroit, far from the hotbeds of electronics research like Silicon Valley and Boston.

But Mr. Ovshinsky prevailed. Industry eventually credited him for the principle that small quantities or thin films of amorphous materials exposed to a charge can instantly reorganize their structures into semicrystalline forms capable of carrying significant current.

With a bit of a promotional twist, he christened the field “ovonics.”

In 1960, he and his second wife, the former Iris L. Miroy, founded Energy Conversion Laboratories in Rochester Hills, Mich., to develop practical products from the discovery. It was renamed Energy Conversion Devices four years later.

Energy Conversion Devices and its subsidiaries, spinoff companies and licensees began translating Mr. Ovshinsky’s insights into mechanical, electronic and energy devices, among them solar-powered calculators. His nickel-metal battery is used to power hybrid cars and portable electronics, among other things.

He holds patents relating to rewritable optical discs, flat-panel displays and electronic-memory technology. His thin-film solar cells are produced in sheets “by the mile,” as he once put it.

The Ovshinskys were champions of alternative energy and sounded early alarms about the industrial world’s insatiable demand for oil, saying it could lead to resource wars and climate change. More than 50 years ago, Mr. Ovshinsky began promoting hydrogen fuel cells as an alternative to the internal-combustion engine.

In his so-called hydrogen loop, water is converted to stored hydrogen through solar-powered electrolysis, and from hydrogen back to water, generating electricity through a fuel cell. Automotive companies have begun producing hydrogen-based demonstration models.

Mr. Ovshinsky’s promotional flair helped Energy Conversion Devices attract investors, including giants like Standard Oil, Texaco, Chevron, Canon, 3M, Intel and General Motors. They collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars in his ventures, some of which failed.

Mr. Ovshinsky’s business maneuvers came to be considered every bit as creative and extraordinary as his inventions. Energy Conversion Devices lost money decade after decade, surviving by periodically selling control of patents, rights to royalties from them or new stock.

In all Mr. Ovshinsky was granted well over 400 patents, and wrote legions of scientific articles.   Not bad for a man whose formal education ended with a high school degree.

Although his early life was spent outside Michigan, he moved to Detroit in 1951 to work as director of research at the Hupp Motor Company (where he invented electric power steering) and ended up spending the rest of his life in Michigan.

Because of his independent and radical contributions to science, he has been compared with Einstein. Because of his many inventions in digital memory, solar energy, battery technology, optical media, and solid hydrogen storage, and his hundreds of basic scientific patents, he has often been compared with Thomas Edison. In the area of alternatives to fossil fuel, his pioneering work has caused many writers to refer to him as “the modern world’s most important energy visionary.”

Ironically, he was more famous internationally than in Michigan.  PBS’s NOVA program did a major TV documentary called “Japan’s American Genius.”  The Economist magazine called him the Edison of our age, but I.I. Rabi, the Nobel laureate, scoffed.  He was no Edison, he said, but something better.  “He’s an Ovshinsky, and he’s brilliant,” he said. 

Not long before he died, some told the inventor that if he had moved to Silicon Valley he would have been a billionaire.  “I never had any intention of becoming a billionaire,” he said.  Stan Ovshinsky preferred Detroit, the “declining capital of the industrial age,” even though that made for a harder struggle.

“Without struggle, we can’t change the world,” he said.

No wonder Jack Lessenberry called him “The Greatest Michigan Mind You Never Heard Of“.

Sources:

Stanford R. Ovshinsky wikipedia entry

Barnaby J. Feder, “Stanford R. Ovshinsky Dies at 89, a Self-Taught Maverick in Electronics“, New York Times, October 18, 2012.

“The Edison of our Age?” The Economist, December 2, 2006, pp. 33–34.

Jack Lessenberry, “The Greatest Michigan Mind You Never Heard Of“, Dome, May 25, 2018.

The Man Who Saw Tomorrow: The Life and Inventions of Stanford R. Ovshinsky, by  Peter Garrett and Lillian Hoddeson.  MIT Press, 2018.