Polytechnique

Polytechnique, or POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL (Gr. polys, 'many,' technê, 'art'), is an institute in which the technical sciences that rest in great part upon a mathematical basis, such as engineering, architecture, &c., are taught. The first school of the kind was established in Paris (1794) by the National Convention, under the name of School of Public Works. No students were admitted but those who intended to enter the public service, especially the corps of civil and military engineers and the artillery. The Polytechnic School, as it was called from 1795, has been repeatedly reorganised as the different political parties have succeeded to power. At the present time it is the institute in which France trains her artillery and engineer officers, her naval engineers, her directors of roads and bridges, and of mines, her telegraph officers, in short, all her officials who require to know something of the higher branches of technical science. Germany too has her polytechnics. Those that came into being during the first half of the 19th century were in great part training-schools for the higher branches of the industrial arts; but since Zurich established (1856) a polytechnic modelled on the plan of the German universities, most of the German polytechnics have followed suit. Of these establishments, thus increased in scope (now called also Technische Hochschulen), Germany has nine or ten, and Austria-Hungary half a dozen; though Germany has also several other colleges that might fairly claim the name of Polytechnikum in the old sense. The nine technical colleges of Berlin, Hanover, Aix-la-Chapelle, Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart, Carlsruhe, Darmstadt, and Brunswick have some 550 teachers and 6000 pupils—the chief departments of instruction being architecture, civil engineering, machine-making, shipbuilding, chemistry, and metallurgy. In America the oldest institutions of the kind are the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, at Troy, New York, and the Franklin Institute, at Philadelphia, both founded in 1824. There are now nearly a hundred technical schools in the United States, more than half of them endowed with a national land-grant. See TECHNICAL EDUCATION; also ART; and Pinet, Histoire de l'École Polytechnique (1886).