Getting ready for the electrical age: Virginia Tech, General Electric, President McBryde, and the scientists in the 1890s

International Social Science Review, Spring-Summer, 2002 by Ellen A. Brown

   ... part time paying positions [that] included running engines and dynamos,
   maintenance of machines, firing boilers and furnaces in the various
   buildings and laboratories; maintaining the electric light plant, creamery,
   dairy, gardens, greenhouses..., assisting in manufacturing operations at
   the foundry, forge, woodworking and metal-working shops; waiting on tables
   in the mess hall. (13)

By 1895, there were 24 graduate students at VPI, and many of them had assignments as assistants in the laboratories, workshops or the classroom. Information about these individuals is sketchy, but a few of the students left letters and journals that allow us some insights into their interests and career plans. Two brothers from Marion, Hull and John Apperson, attended VPI during the 1890s, and both of them landed in Schenectady by 1900, seeking employment with the General Electric Company. Like so many others of their classmates, Hull and John were attracted to electrical engineering, but they could not imagine exactly what an electrical engineer might do.

Alfred Hull Apperson was born in Chilhowie, near Marion, Virginia, in 1869. His father was a Civil War Veteran who served as a medic and hospital steward throughout the war. Hull, the oldest of seven children, attended local schools and was just finishing high school in 1887 when his sister Mary died of typhoid, followed soon thereafter by his mother. Dr. Apperson, his father, had been working at the newly opened Southwest Virginia Insane Asylum in Marion, but he gave up that job and began to look into developing industrial concerns, including mining, railroading and a foundry. He also became a commissioner to the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, putting together a display featuring Virginia's natural resources.

Hull's life was certainly affected by his mother's death, his father's remarriage and by the financial uncertainty of his father's career changes. A note left among Hull's papers indicates that the attended the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College for a year or so, but he resigned in 1890. He worked in a retail store in Roanoke for three or four months in 1891, and in January of 1892 he made a trip to Cuba. The letters he received from his father and the journals of Hull himself indicate that he was there to work in a factory with some sort of machinery. He was homesick, he did not like his room, and he could not speak the language, so the adventure only lasted about three months. By April of 1892, Hull headed back home, and returned to Blacksburg. His stepmother's brother, Alex Black, offered him a part-time job, and President McBryde accepted him as a special student for the coming term. (14)

He graduated in 1894, with a B.S. in electrical engineering, and stayed on as a graduate student/paid assistant. At his graduation, Hull presented a paper he had written on the "incandescent light bulb." According to family tradition, he installed much of the electrical wiring on campus, and other records indicate that he became an officer in the cadet corps, starting the school's first artillery battalion. He learned carpentry and probably had some responsibilities in the school's woodworking shop.