The institution most responsible for launching the e-culture of today — the one that experimented with the prototype of the Internet (ARPANET); that gave us Alan Turing, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence; and whose graduates went on to found Cisco Systems, Google, Hewlett-Packard, LinkedIn, and Yahoo!, among others — rose from humble beginnings as a farm. Leland Stanford, railroad tycoon and former California Governor, purchased 8,000 acres of what became Palo Alto for his stock farm, intending to pass it on to his son, Leland Jr., who succumbed to typhoid fever at childhood. In his memory, Leland and his wife opened a university.

On this day, October 1, in 1891 Leland Stanford Junior University opened in Palo Alto, California. The Stanford family wished to give all the children of California a future they wanted for their son, and to that end the university included women and all religious denominations.

The East Coast newspapers were skeptical of yet another university in the California, with The New York Mail and Express saying the professors for years would “lecture in marble halls to empty benches,” yet the students came —  555 men and women in the first year alone. Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape artist who designed New York’s Central Park, was commissioned to create university grounds, coming up with an east-west axis quadrangle structure that became the base of the university.