`MIT Food Nutrition Department closure`

Historical aside on canning of foods (1880s) and the political closure of the department by a provost (John Deutch).

The one that came first in society was ceramic. Second was glass. Third was steel. Aluminum came fourth, plastic came fifth, and composites came sixth. There's the rank ordering chronologically. Steel goes back to the 1880s. There's an MIT person, Samuel Prescott — anybody know who Samuel Prescott is? If you walk from Building 8 to Building 16, I think there's a big placard there that everybody ignores. It talks about Samuel Prescott. He was one of the guys who perfected canning of foods in the 1880s. When I was a student, MIT had a food nutrition department. He got killed by a provost who didn't make president because he killed this department without bothering to tell them he was going to do it. He was sort of John Deutch — a loose cannon, later head of the CIA.