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SPEAKER 1: The Office of New Student Programs welcomes you to the Cornell Family Orientation Video Information Series. We've created this video series to provide information and connect you to the services, programming, and support available to Cornell's students.
In each installment, we will introduce you to the Cornell University staff and administrators who work closely with students. You will also hear student voices that will give you a closer look at the Cornell student experience. At the conclusion of each video, you will find contact information so that you can follow up as needed.
You are also welcome to reach out to the staff in New Student Programs. The first video in this series is an introduction to Cornell University. We hope you will enjoy a tour of the Cornell campus through aerial photography taken by Apurva Koti, College of Engineering class of 2020.
This video also features a Cornell history presentation by Corey Earle, class of 2007, who is a Cornell staff member and unofficial Cornell historian. He also serves as a lecturer for the popular course in American studies called The First American University.
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COREY EARLE: Welcome to the extended Cornell family. We are so excited to have you join us. My name's Corey Ryan Earle, and I graduated in 2007. And I love Cornell so much that I never actually left.
So I work at Alumni Affairs and Development, but I also serve as the de facto university historian, and I teach a class each spring on Cornell history, a class called American Studies 2001, The First American University. And each spring, we have over 400 students pack in the Uris Auditorium to learn some fun facts about Cornell University.
So my goal today is to help you understand a little bit more about what makes Cornell unique, particularly in the context of higher education history. And hopefully, you will learn some fun facts and some trivia as well that you can impress your friends with.
And so the first question I always ask my students is, why is my course called The First American University. Why would Cornell be called the first American university? And that's a phrase that a lot of different colleges and universities can claim some variation on.
A lot of schools claim to be the first American university. And the most obvious one that you probably are familiar with is Harvard University. It is the first higher education institution in America, so the first American University from a chronological standpoint.
But there are several other schools that use different definitions of university and claim some variation on that, like University of Pennsylvania, College of William and Mary. Yale University, for instance, gave the first PhD in America, so they claim to be the first American University.
But Cornell University is actually much younger than these institutions. We are the youngest school in the Ivy League, founded in 1865. But Cornell's claim on this title of first American University is a little more unique, and the term comes from an educational historian named Frederick Rudolph.
And he called Cornell the first American University because of the unique role that Cornell played in the history of modern higher education. And what he was sort of saying was that Cornell was founded as a university that is very similar to what we think of today as college of universities.
And some of those elements that we sort of take for granted in higher education today include things like coeducation. Cornell was committed to educating men and women from the start. Nonsectarianism, having no particular religious affiliation, which was pretty unusual for 1865.
Cornell was a land-grant institution, and Cornell has this mission of public engagement and serving the broader community. And that's much more common. A lot of schools have public engagement aspects of their mission today. Cornell was founded to have a broad curriculum, to teach both technical and more traditional classical fields of study.
And also, Cornell, from the start, had a diverse student body. And that was part of the Cornell commitment. And so all of these elements were pretty unique for the mid 19th century when Cornell was founded.
It wasn't necessarily the first school to do each one of these things, but it was the first school to do all of them together at one place, and really change what higher education was all about at a time when most college and universities were committed to educating wealthy white men and training them for the clergy, or going into the family business, or government service.
But Cornell was really founded to be different and to change what higher education in the United States was. And so I sort of summarized Frederick Rudolph's point about the first American University by saying, you've got a bunch of old, out of touch universities founded in the 1600s, 1700s. I won't name any names in particular.
And then you have Cornell University founded in 1865. And then after 1865, all of these other universities end up becoming more like what Cornell began as. So today, within the Ivy League in particular, most of these schools have a lot of similarities.
Certainly, all are coeducational now, nonsectarian, et cetera. But at Cornell's founding, we were this from the start, while the others had to catch up and become more like Cornell over the last 150 plus years. And so a lot of people don't appreciate how unusual Cornell was from its founding, how radical of a university, how revolutionary of a university it was.
And so today, I'm going to talk a little bit more about that and what makes Cornell the first American University. It's important to know a little bit about who Cornell's founders were. They were the ones who really shaped these founding values, and they have a fascinating story. They came from very different backgrounds.
So Andrew Dickson White and Ezra Cornell are considered the two cofounders of Cornell University. Ezra Cornell was about a generation older than White, 25 years older than Andrew Dickson White. And White ends up becoming Cornell University's first president, while Ezra Cornell was the primary funder and got his name on the university.
And so they're the ones who really created what we know today as Cornell. Ezra came from a poor family. His father was a potter and a farmer, and Ezra had about a third grade education, formal education, so was not considered well educated.
But he really valued education. He saw that education was a means to greater success. It was something that he was passionate about throughout his life and wanted to make sure other people had access to a great education.
And although he grew up in a very poor family, he eventually does become quite wealthy thanks to the telegraph industry. Ezra gets hired by Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. And Ezra becomes this assistant and helps build the first telegraph lines in the United States.
This image here is of a telegraph receiver. This was the very first telegraph receiver. It received the first message ever sent by telegraph. And Cornell University has that telegraph receiver on campus in the University Archives, the very first one, as well as a 3D printed model of this in our Visitor Center.
But because Ezra Cornell was involved in this new industry, the industry took off. Ezra became the largest stockholder of Western Union, which was a conglomerate of small telegraph companies that merged together. And Ezra became a very wealthy man in a relatively short period of time thanks to the success of this industry.
Another impact of Ezra on the telegraph industry was actually he helped popularize the idea of stringing telegraph cables aboveground on poles, on telegraph poles, instead of burying the cable underground. And so when he was overseeing construction of the first telegraph lines, this was an innovation that he helped push for.
And so today, when you see a telephone pole, you can thank Ezra Cornell and his influence on telegraph poles 150 plus years ago. Ezra's cofounder, like I said, had a very different background. This is Andrew Dickson White sitting amongst his personal library.
He had one of the largest book collections, private book collections, in the country. A very educated man. Had attended Yale and then traveled throughout Europe studying at schools in Germany, France, England, and seeing what higher education was all about in Europe.
Came from a wealthy family of merchants, and bankers, and politicians. And so very different sort of experience than Ezra Cornell. But the two of them come together, because they actually both got involved in politics, and they both end up joining the New York state legislature.
They meet in the New York state senate in the early 1860s. And at the time, Ezra Cornell had recently become a wealthy man who was looking for what to do with his fortune, and wanted to do something to support his community, and he was particularly interested in education.
And White, on the other hand, had this dream of changing the higher education in the United States. He'd traveled many places. He taught at the University of Michigan for a while, seeing how a lot of different schools were doing higher education in different ways.
But he thought that the country would benefit from a new type of higher education that used more of the European model of discussion with professors, and laboratory work, and less of the American model at the time, which was a lot of rote memorization and recitation. Not a lot of real discourse with faculty and research being done, et cetera.
And so White had this dream of changing what higher education looked like, and it was fortuitous that the two of them came together while both thinking about these ideas in terms of education and making education accessible. And it was thanks to that combination of their ideas and values that Cornell University ends up being founded in 1865.
Thanks in part to the Morrill Land-Grant Act, which I won't get into all the details of the Land-Grant Act, but a piece of federal education legislation that would support higher education in each state, as long as they taught agriculture and engineering, in particular, which was the greatest need in the United States, the largest industries at the time.
So it's really important to understand Cornell's founding motto to understand the values of Cornell, because it's a particularly unique motto. And so Cornell's motto is, I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study. And this was a quote from Ezra Cornell about this new university that he was creating.
And so when you think about this compared to other mottos, particularly within the Ivy League, but really nationwide, this is an unusual motto for a lot of reasons. We're the only Ivy League motto in English, for instance. Most of the others are in Latin.
But also, just the ideas behind this motto really set it apart from other colleges and universities. Cornell is truly one of the only universities in the country that was founded on ideas of access and inclusion. Any person in any study where the key elements of this motto in 1865, at a time when, certainly, any person was not what higher education was all about.
And so this sets Cornell apart even further when you think about this was what they were thinking about with the founding motto, the founding ideals. And so I'm going to break it down into a couple different pieces and talk about what the founders truly intended when they picked this as the motto.
So any person in particular, I think, breaks down into five different elements that the founders were intentionally thinking about. And one of those is any gender. This is a time when higher education was nearly all male. Most colleges were male only.
There were some small women's colleges that had been founded at this point beginning to grow in terms of women's education. There were a few schools experimenting with coeducation. Oberlin had admitted women a few decades earlier, and a few other larger Midwest institutions were beginning to be coeducational.
But that was not the norm, and there was a lot of skepticism about coeducation. Educating men and women together in the same classroom was considered a dangerous thing for various reasons that don't make much sense today. But Cornell's founders said, no, we truly are committed to educating men and women at this new university, and that was part of Cornell's founding motto, that any person element.
They chose the word person in the founding documents for Cornell University instead of man very intentionally, because they wanted to show their commitment to educating women as well. When you look at the rest of the Ivy League, Cornell was much further ahead in terms of being coeducational. The first woman enrolls at Cornell in 1870.
While if you look at Columbia University, for instance, they don't become fully coeducational until 1983. And that's not that long ago. So it shows how Cornell was over 100 years ahead of many of its peers. And Cornell really was a role model for other institutions.
They saw coeducation was successful at Cornell, and some schools began to admit women because they saw the success at Cornell. But an important way that Cornell influenced higher education. Another element of the any person motto was any race.
And so Cornell was founded in April of 1865. This was the close of the American Civil War. Race is still a hot topic in the United States, absolutely. And so the founders said from the start that we are truly committed to any person, and race was something on their minds.
There's a famous letter that someone wrote to Ezra Cornell when the university opened. And he said, I know a young Black man. Can I send him to Cornell University? And Ezra wrote back, send him. And this image is from Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, which is a fraternity that was founded at Cornell in 1906, and it was the very first Greek letter intercollegiate fraternity for African-American men in the United States.
It began at Cornell in 1906, and chapters are now all over. But it's something that started at Cornell, thanks in part to Cornell's commitment to any person. Another element of the motto is any religion. And this was actually the most controversial part of the model. You might think it was gender or race, given that it was 1865.
But the idea that Cornell University was nonsectarian, or not affiliated with any particular religion, that was a very radical idea for 1865. Most of higher education had religious affiliations, and Cornell was attacked as the godless institution. We were called the heathens on the hill, for instance.
And this image shows Sage Chapel, the campus chapel, which was one of the first college chapels in the United States that had noncompulsory voluntary services for students to attend. And then the other image you see here is the published class statistics, where they would ask each student how tall are you, and what are you studying, and where are you from.
And they would also ask religion in those early years. And if you zoom in and look at this, you can see that some of the answers about religion, it goes from Hindu to Hebrew to heathen. And you can see the wide range of answers that students gave very early on in Cornell's history.
Some people wrote None. Some people left it blank. At any other school, if you said you were a heathen in an official university document, you probably would have been kicked out of that school. So it showed how progressive Cornell was in terms of this any person, any religion aspect of the university. And today, that is much more the norm in higher education, thanks in part to Cornell paving the way.
A fourth element of any person is any nationality. And so Cornell had international students in the very first entering class when Cornell opened in 1868. There were international faculty when Cornell opened. And Cornell was considered, at the time, it was called one of the most cosmopolitan of universities, referring to the fact that there were so many international students, students from around the world who had come to attend Cornell.
And if you think getting to Ithaca is hard today, imagine traveling from Japan to Ithaca in 1870, when the first Japanese student enrolled. That was not an easy trip, and that student was actually the very first Japanese national to become a permanent resident of the United States after enrolling in Cornell in 1870.
And so a very diverse population at Cornell. Cultures from around the world coming to Cornell. This image is of the Chinese Students Association, which was formed around the turn of the century, I think in 1904. But as early as the 1870s, Cornell had so many Brazilian students on campus that they formed their own club and published a Portuguese language newsletter on campus in the 1870s. So it shows the global impact of Cornell from the start.
And then the fifth element of Cornell's any person motto is any socioeconomic status. Ezra Cornell was a poor farmer. He wanted to make sure that poor farmers of New York state could get a world class education. And what he did was he created one of the first work study programs in the United States on campus.
He said, if you can't afford your tuition at Cornell, at the time it was about $20. It's gone up a little bit since then. But he said, if you can't afford tuition, show up, come to campus, and we will put you to work on campus to pay for your tuition.
And so early students actually helped build the Arts Quad, the very first buildings on campus. The one in the middle there is McGraw Hall. It was under construction in those early years at Cornell. And some of the students helped do the carpentry work inside. They helped carry the corded stone from the slope on campus.
They helped build the pathways on the Arts Quad and leveled the quad, which at the time was a cow pasture. And that was how they paid their tuition. And so another fairly unique element of Cornell was its commitment to truly educating people from all walks of life, any socioeconomic class, regardless of ability to pay for higher education, which was not the norm in the United States.
And then the other element of the motto, which is equally as revolutionary, is the any study part of the motto. And it sort of represents the two founders, where you have Ezra Cornell, who was a farmer and engineer with little education, and Andrew Dickson White, who was a classically trained scholar and historian.
And so you have two very different backgrounds coming together at one university, and they wanted to show that truly all fields of study are academic equals. All fields of study will be welcome at Cornell. And at the time, it was very unusual for practical applied sciences to be considered academic equals to a more traditional curriculum like languages, and literature, and history.
And so Cornell taught engineering and agriculture at a time when those were considered somewhat lowly trade school-type subjects. But at Cornell, they were just as important as any other subject. And throughout Cornell's history, we have helped legitimize different fields of study that weren't considered worthy of academia, weren't considered the sort of thing you would teach in a college environment.
And I'll touch on a few of those that Cornell pioneered here. Cornell had the very first courses in the United States in things like colloid chemistry, the first courses on East Asian languages. The first journalism course in the United States was taught at Cornell. The first course in limnology, or the study of fresh water.
We had the first doctorates granted in the United States in things like agricultural engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering. The first DVM, or Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, in the United States was given by Cornell. In fact, it was given to a student named Daniel Salmon. So next time you get salmonella poisoning, you can think of Cornell's very first DVM grad, the namesake of salmonella.
Cornell had the very first professorships in the United States in American history, American literature, bacteriology, musicology. You can see it's not any one college at Cornell or any one sort of field, but really across the board, Cornell was pioneering different academic subjects.
We had the first departments in the United States in electrical engineering, entomology, plant pathology, poultry science. You can see some of the influence of the College of Agriculture here with these fields of study. And we had the first four year programs and architecture and forestry, hotel administration, labor relations.
The last two, hotel administration and labor relations, are a great example of Cornell taking fields of study that were not considered real academic fields and legitimizing them. We were the first place to say, no, there's a true science to hotel administration. There is research to be done here. There is training to be taught.
And the same with labor relations. Our ILR school, one of the best of its kind and a pioneer, along with the Hotel School. Very unique programs that, today, there are other programs around the world in these fields of study, but Cornell was the first.
So your next question. What is the Cornell mascot? I mean, any member of the Cornell family should know this as a bit of Cornell trivia. And it's kind of a trick question. A lot of you might be thinking the bear, Touchdown the bear. But our official mascot is just this.
We are officially The Big Red. That is our official mascot. And Cornell's colors date back to the very beginning of the university. In fact, our colors are officially carnelian and white. And when Cornell opened back in 1868, at the official inauguration ceremony, there were two banners at the front of the room.
Actually, it was one banner that had the two names of the founders. It said Cornell and White as the two founders of the university. And the banner happened to be red and white. And it didn't take long for someone to point out that the names of the founders were similar to colors.
For instance, Cornell, Cornellian, is like carnelian, a shade of red. And the name White is like the color white. And so thanks to our founders' names, we became carnelian and white as our school colors, and they've stuck ever since. And the term Big Red actually comes from a song that was written in 1905 for the football team.
And the football team song caught on, and we became known as The Big Red Team thanks to a lyric in the song. What you might not know is that Campbell's Soup cans are also carnelian and white, not just red and white. And that's thanks to a Campbell's executive attending a Cornell football game in the 1890s and being so impressed with the colors of the Cornell jerseys, even though Cornell lost the game.
But he went back to Campbell's and said, we should make our cans red and white. It's a great color scheme. And Campbell's officially credits Cornell University with the reason for its red and white color scheme. But here's the unofficial mascot, the reason you might see bears around campus, Touchdown the bear.
And that's because, in 1915, the football team actually bought a real live bear cub to be their mascot. All the other big schools had animal mascots, and the Cornell team was a little jealous of that. And so they went out and bought a bear, and the bear would travel with the team to away games.
It would travel by train. It would stay in hotels with the team, and became part of the halftime entertainment at football games. And 1915, that first year we had a bear, we were national champions in football, which was not something we think of in terms of Cornell these days. But Cornell had a powerhouse football team at the time.
And so over time, there were several bears. We had Touchdown 1 2, 3, and 4. They weren't the most creatively named. But the last year that we had a bear cub as a mascot was 1939. And that also happens to be the very last year that we were a national champion in football.
So the first year we had a bear and the last year we had a bear were national championship years. So clearly, it's not a matter of coaching or skill. It's all about the live bear mascots that contributed to Cornell's success.
Today, of course, we have the bear costume mascot, still known as Touchdown the bear. But entertaining crowds at Cornell events. And even at hockey games, you'll see the bear ice skating around at Lynah Rink.
And there is a bear statue on campus honoring the very first Touchdown the bear, and the bear cub of the 1915 team. None of the bear cubs actually lasted more than one season, because they would no longer be cubs by the end of the season. And so they weren't quite as fun to bring around with the team by train, et cetera. So the bear would be let free after the end of the season.
So there have been a lot of innovations and inventions that have come out of Cornell and thanks to Cornell alumni. So I thought I'd touch on a few of those by looking at what would the world look like without Cornell and without Cornellians, as a way of reviewing some Cornell fun facts and trivia for you.
So a world without Cornell, summers would be a lot less comfortable. And that's thanks to a guy named Willis Carrier, who was a Cornell engineer. A name you might recognize, because he is known as the father of air conditioning. The inventor of air conditioning was a Cornell alumnus from the class of 1901.
And the Carrier Corporation, the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, all named after Willis Carrier, this Cornell engineer who made us all much more comfortable in summer weather. Without Cornell, drinking milk wouldn't be as safe, and that's thanks to a pioneering microbiologist named Alice Catherine Evans, who was Cornell class of 1909.
And she was a pioneer for women in microbiology, women in science. But also one of the reasons that we pasteurize milk in the United States, because she studied some of the bacteria in milk and lobbied for the safety of milk, for pasteurizing milk to make sure it was safe to drink. So we can thank a Cornellian for that.
Travel would be less comfortable without Cornellians, and that's thanks to one of the very first female railroad engineers, a Cornellian named Olive Dennis from the class of 1920. And she popularized a number of railway travel amenities that made railway travel much more comfortable. Things like window vents, reclining seats, liquid soap and paper cups, dimmable ceiling lighting, stain-resistant upholstery, air conditioned compartments on the trains.
And these amenities gradually caught on as buses became a more popular form of transportation, and then air travel. And so thanks to her, all three forms of travel are considerably more comfortable thanks to her innovations. Without Cornell, football would be a very different game. And here you can see a photo of football being played at Cornell in the 1940s.
You can see Schoellkopf Field is pretty crowded for football games back then. We don't draw quite as big a crowd these days. But you might have heard of the name Pop Warner and Pete Gogolak, both famous Cornellians who revolutionized the sport of football.
Pop Warner is considered one of the most notable college football coaches in the history of the sport. He graduated from Cornell, and some of you might know of Pop Warner Youth Football, the youth football program named after him. But he liked to say that there were more rules in the sport of football written because of him than because of anyone else.
And that's because he would break these rules. They'd have to come up with a rule because of the things he was doing. For instance, he was famous for the old hide the football under the jersey play. He would tell his players to do that until they wrote a rule saying you can't do that.
He sewed leather patches on all of his players' jerseys to make it look like they all had a football, and so they had to make a rule saying you couldn't do that. But he also developed a lot of the strategies and plays that are used in the sport today. Designed some of the early padding and helmets used in football.
Credited with helping popularize putting numbers on jerseys, developing early tackling dummies. Really had a huge influence on the sport, and coached at Cornell as well as a number of other institutions, and won some national championships.
Pete Gogolak, on the other hand, a more recent Cornell graduate, class of 1964, he's credited with being the first football player to kick soccer style, to the kick with the side of his foot. And broke all the records in college football, and then in professional football as a kicker. And that became the norm in kicking. And so changed the sport of football considerably.
I've already mentioned Campbell's Soup cans. Campbell's Soup cans wouldn't be red and white without Cornell and our carnelian and white colors. Without Cornell, the world's libraries wouldn't be as full, and that's thanks to Cornell's rich literary tradition.
You're probably familiar with a lot of different Cornell authors over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut is a Cornellian, Pearl Buck. Jessie Fauset, a notable influence in the Harlem Renaissance. Kenneth Roberts, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Northwest Passage. EB White of Charlotte's Web, and Stuart Little.
And Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Toni Morrison, more recently, author of Beloved, Bluest Eye, and many other novels. But all Cornellians, and just a few of the names of notable Cornellians who have written noted books and novels over the years. And so Cornell has quite a strong literary tradition.
Without Cornell, we wouldn't have portable music. And that's thanks to the transistor radio and the Apple iPod both being developed by Cornellians. Some Cornell engineers were the people behind these devices that changed the way we listen to music. Richard Koch, class of '44, and Jon Rubinstein, known as the Pod Father at Apple, class of 1978. Both had a pretty significant influence in the world of portable music.
Without Cornell, childhood would be less fun because Play-Doh would only be hard and white. It wouldn't be colorful. And that's because of a Cornell chemist, a guy named Tien Liu, who got his PhD from Cornell. He's the one who refined Play-Doh's formula and reduced the salt content, and kept it from drying out and losing its color.
And because of his changes to the formula, Play-Doh became a much more successful product and changed many of our childhoods. And without Cornell, science fiction would have no space battles, ray guns, or alien abductions. And that's thanks to one of the first pioneering sci-fi authors, a guy named Garrett Serviss, who graduated in 1872 from Cornell.
But he was the first science fiction author to introduce a lot of these concepts. Ray guns, spacesuits, space flight, space battles, alien abduction, and even the concept of aliens building the Egyptian pyramids. That all came from his novels.
But he was also known as a science communicator. He would give lectures around the country on astronomy and science topics, and try to bring science education and knowledge to the public. And he was really the first in a long line of Cornellians who are known as notable science communicators.
You might know about Carl Sagan, a Cornell astronomy professor, the creator of the Cosmos TV series and author of countless novels. But really an important figure in science communication and bringing knowledge to the public.
And then one of his students, Bill Nye the Science Guy, class of 1977 from Cornell is the latest generation of science communicators who has done many TV shows and different ways of bringing science to the public.
And things would fall apart without Cornellians, and that's thanks to super glue and cordless power tools, both being invented by Cornellians. Alonzo Decker Jr, the son of the founder of Black & Decker. He's the one who developed their cordless power tools line.
And then Harry Coover, a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, invented super glue. And so without these things, things would fall apart. I like to say Cornell helps hold the world together thanks to these inventions.
But what is the most influential invention to come out of Cornell? I always ask my students, or in orientation, I'll ask the incoming students, what do you think is the most important invention to come out of Cornell. And I get a lot of good answers. Some people will name some of the things we've talked about. Air conditioning, perhaps.
But probably the most common answer I get is the chicken nugget. The chicken nugget was invented by Cornellian Bob Baker. Robert C. Baker, class of 1943. And Bob Baker, after graduating, he returned to Cornell and joined the faculty and was a poultry science professor.
But he was sort of the George Washington Carver of chicken. Came up with hundreds of different uses of chicken and chicken byproducts. And one of those became the chicken nugget, which was popularized by McDonald's as the Chicken McNugget. But Bob Baker also credited with the Cornell chicken barbecue recipe, that if you're from upstate New York, you're certainly familiar with. Very popular throughout upstate New York, a vinegar-based chicken barbecue recipe.
But if you look at the fast food industry as a whole, Cornell has actually had quite a large influence in a lot of different ways. Burger King was founded by two Cornellians who graduated from the Hotel School here. Arby's was founded by a Cornellian and his brother, the Raffel Brothers, which is where the name Arby comes from. RB, Raffel Brothers.
KFC even has a Cornell connection in that Colonel Sanders himself attended a brief course at the Hotel School on restaurant management. When he was opening the first KFC restaurants, he wanted to go and get the best training in restaurant management there was, and so he came to the Cornell Hotel School to learn a little bit more about running his business.
Another Cornellian was at McDonald's as the vice president of product development. And he developed the Filet o Fish, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and the McDonald's apple pie and cherry pie. So a lot of the products at McDonald's actually came from a Cornellian as well.
Even though the way that McDonald's freezes their French fries and ships them between franchises was one of the developments that he came up with to make it possible for fries to be prepared even faster at fast food restaurants. So some would say that, perhaps, Cornell has had a bit of an influence on the obesity epidemic in America.
But we also do healthy foods. It's not just fast food. But it does tie in nicely where, this is Ezra Cornell's birthplace in the Bronx. Today, that location is a McDonald's, but he was born in a house on this corner in the Bronx in New York.
But I mentioned healthy foods. Cornell scientists have developed over 16 different apple varieties over the years. Some of the most popular apple varieties like the Empire, and Cortland, and Pound. All those apples were developed by Cornell researchers.
Great varieties as well. Many of the most popular wine varietals in upstate New York came from Cornell. I think it's also over 60 different varieties of grapes have been developed at Cornell. The Arabella, one of the more recent ones.
Without Cornell, we wouldn't have blueberries, even. It was a Cornellian named Frederick Coville who was the first person to domesticate blueberries and allow them to be propagated and able to be sold in grocery stores. So thanks to Frederick Coville, we have blueberries more available as well.
And if you like Chinese food, you might be thankful for a Cornellian named Yuen Ren Chao, class of 1914. Because he wrote one of the first, or really the first major English language Chinese cookbook. And it was in that cookbook that he coined the term pot sticker and stir fry.
And so next time you have pot stickers or stir fry, you can think of Cornell and the Cornellian who coined those terms in this famous cookbook. And so really, Cornell has had an incredible influence in a lot of different ways. And hopefully you've learned a little bit more about Cornell in today's presentation.
And so if any of you have questions about anything, I'm certainly happy to answer anything about Cornell, Cornell trivia, Cornell history. Feel free to reach out. And I do tweet fun facts about Cornell on Twitter for any of you who are users. I'm always sharing some fun Cornell history and trivia there.
So welcome to the extended Cornell family. We're fortunate to have all of you, and best wishes for the Cornell experience. It's a wonderful place, and I encourage you to learn more about the institution during your time affiliated with it. Thanks for tuning in.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you for watching this installment of the Family Orientation Video Information Series. We hope that you will join us for the other sessions in the series, which are listed here.
The first video in the Family Orientation Video Information series is an Introduction to Cornell University. We hope you will enjoy a tour of the Cornell campus through aerial photography taken by Apurva Koti, College of Engineering, Class of 2020. This video also features a Cornell history presentation by Corey Earle, Class of 2007, a Cornell staff member and unofficial Cornell historian, who also serves as a lecturer for the popular course in American Studies called The First American University.
