Europe/United Kingdom/England/Manchester/University of Manchester/

University of Manchester

• Address: Oxford Road, Manchester, England, United Kingdom M13 9PL
• Phone: +44 (0) 161 306 6000
• Website: [1]
• Overview

The University can trace its roots as an academic institution back to the formation of the Mechanics' Institute in 1824 and it is closely linked to Manchester's emergence as the world's first industrial city. The English chemist John Dalton, together with Manchester businessmen and industrialists, established the Mechanics' Institute (later to become UMIST) to ensure that workers could learn the basic principles of science. Similarly, John Owens, a Manchester textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1846 for the purpose of founding a college for the education of males on non-sectarian lines. His trustees established Owens College at Manchester in 1851. It was initially housed in a building, complete with Adam staircase, on the corner of Quay Street and Byrom Street which had been the home of the philanthropist Richard Cobden, and subsequently was to house Manchester County Court. In 1873 it moved to new buildings at Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock and from 1880 it was a constituent college of the federal Victoria University. The university was established and granted a Royal Charter in 1880 to become England's first civic university; it was renamed the Victoria University of Manchester in 1903 and then absorbed Owens College the following year.

By 1905, the two institutions were large and active forces in the area, with the Municipal College of Technology, the forerunner of the later UMIST, forming the Faculty of Technology of the Victoria University of Manchester while continuing as a technical college in parallel with the advanced courses of study in the Faculty. Although UMIST achieved independent university status in 1955, the two universities continued to work together.

Before the merger, Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST between them counted 23 Nobel Prize winners amongst their former staff and students. Manchester has traditionally been particularly strong in the sciences, with the nuclear nature of the atom being discovered at Manchester by Rutherford, and the world's first stored-program computer coming into being at the university. Famous scientists associated with the university include the physicists Osborne Reynolds, Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Arthur Schuster, Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and Balfour Stewart. However, the university has also contributed in many other fields, such as by the work of the mathematicians Paul Erdős, Horace Lamb and Alan Turing; the author Anthony Burgess; philosophers Samuel Alexander, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alasdair MacIntyre; the Pritzker Prize and RIBA Stirling Prize winning architect Norman Foster and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies all attended, or worked in, Manchester. Well-known figures among the current academic staff include computer scientist Steve Furber, economist Richard Nelson, novelist Colm Tóibín and biochemist Sir John Sulston, Nobel laureate of 2002.

In 2004, the Victoria University of Manchester (established in 1851) and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (established in 1824) were formally merged into a single institution.

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