A Brief History of the Forrestal Campus
Forrestal Campus, the home of the AOS Program, had serendipitous beginnings. About the same time as Princeton’s Aeronautical Engineering Department was rapidly outgrowing its main campus facilities, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research had made the decision to relocate from its sprawling U.S. 1 campus to New York City . Daniel Sayre, the department’s first chair, seized the opportunity and urged the University to purchase the property to house his department’s growing operations. Laurance Rockefeller, a member of the class of 1932 and of the department’s advisory council, facilitated negotiations between his family’s foundation and Sayre and the University for the property. According to J.I. Merrit, author of Princeton’s James Forrestal Campus: Fifty Years of Sponsored Research, although some trustees “questioned the wisdom of more than doubling of the size of Princeton ’s land holdings,” the perseverance of Rockefeller and Sayre paid off. The dedication of the James Forrestal Research Center took place on May 17, 1952, named in honor of the first Secretary of Defense and avid supporter of scientific sponsored research.
Subsequently, the campus served as the home of Princeton’s aerospace and mechanical sciences research and was the headquarters for Project Matterhorn, a U.S. funded, classified initiative that explored the use of fusion in building the first hydrogen bomb. In 1958, Project Matterhorn was declassified and converted into a project on harnessing fusion as a peacetime energy source under what became known as the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). Two years prior to the declassification of Project Matterhorn, construction began on another Forrestal project of massive proportions, the Princeton-Penn Accelerator. Merrit describes this state-of-the-art atom smasher as “a device for probing the secrets of nuclear physics” and as a collaborative effort between Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania . The Princeton-Penn Accelerator was completed seven years after it began in the fall of 1957.
Although dominated by programs in aerospace and in plasma and atomic physics, other significant work has been carried out at Forrestal – from efforts that contributed to the first lunar landing, to explorations in chemical kinetics that led to significant medical advances, to investigations into animal hearing. In October 1968, The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) joined PPPL and the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) department’s Gas Dynamics Laboratory as one of Forrestal’s research centers. By the late sixties, however, MAE began its gradual relocation to the main campus, driven in part by the three miles that separated Forrestal from the main campus and the sense of isolation that accompanied them. In 1972, the Princeton-Penn Accelerator, now obsolete, was shut down. The following year, the University launched the Princeton Forrestal Center , a long-term real estate venture to include commercial development of the area, dedicated open space, and to generate income to support the University’s educational objectives.
Today, despite the fact that much of the campus is going over to private use, the three remaining research facilities – PPPL, GFDL, and MAE’s Gas Dynamics Laboratory remain the heart of the Forrestal campus. At the very least, they are ties that bind the Forrestal of today to the Forrestal of yesteryear.
Adapted from J.I. Merritt ’66, Princeton ’s James Forrestal Campus: Fifty Years of Sponsored Research, copyright Princeton University Press (2002)