40 Fun Facts About Case Western Reserve University

Case graduate M. Frank Rudy, an aeronautical engineer, invented which shoe brand's air sole?

Nike first used his cushioning in the 1978 Air Tailwind, and every Case Western Reserve varsity team wears a patch on its uniform in his honor.

Case Western Reserve alumni Anthony and Joe Russo directed which 2019 superhero blockbuster?

Avengers: Endgame briefly became the highest-grossing film of all time; the brothers had paid for their first feature with student loans and credit cards.

Which website began in 1995 as a Case Western Reserve graduate's emails to friends?

Craigslist grew out of Craig Newmark's messages about San Francisco events; he had earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Case Western Reserve in the 1970s.

Which physicist visited the Case campus in 1921 during his first trip to the United States?

Albert Einstein came out of respect for the physics done at Case, and sat down with professor Dayton Miller to discuss his research.

Case Western Reserve graduate Paul Buchheit created which Google service, launched on April 1, 2004?

Gmail launched with one gigabyte of storage, far more than rivals offered; Buchheit had begun building it at Google in 2001.

Case president T. Keith Glennan became the first head of which federal agency in 1958?

NASA kept Glennan until January 1961; he then went back to running Case and helped negotiate its merger with Western Reserve.

Which abolitionist, later hanged in Virginia, was the son of a Western Reserve College founder?

John Brown's father Owen sheltered fugitives on the Underground Railroad and secured the site for the college; John led the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859.

Steve Belichick, father of coach Bill, scored as Western Reserve won which 1941 postseason game?

The Sun Bowl was the Red Cats' first bowl game, and they beat Arizona State Teachers College 26-13 after trailing at halftime.

Fred Gray, a 1954 Case Western Reserve law graduate, soon defended which civil rights figure?

Rosa Parks was among his first clients, after 15-year-old Claudette Colvin; Gray later sued on behalf of the men in the Tuskegee syphilis study.

Frank Ryan, quarterback of the 1964 champion Cleveland Browns, taught which subject at Case?

Mathematics was Ryan's other career: he earned his doctorate in 1965 and joined the Case faculty in February 1967 while still on the Browns roster.

Which Case physicist, who measured light's speed, was the first American to win a science Nobel?

Albert Michelson, who started the physics departments at both Case and the University of Chicago, won the physics prize in 1907.

What invisible medium did an 1887 experiment in a Western Reserve basement famously fail to find?

The ether was thought to carry light waves through space; finding no trace of it helped clear the ground for special relativity.

Case physicist Dayton Miller began experimenting in early 1896 with which newly discovered radiation?

X-rays had been found by Wilhelm Röntgen only the year before, and Miller soon used them to reveal a bullet lodged in a man's limb.

The 'Western Reserve' in Case Western Reserve was Ohio land once claimed by which colony?

Connecticut kept a strip of northeast Ohio south of Lake Erie after ceding its other western claims, then sold much of it to land speculators.

Western Reserve College copied its motto, curriculum and campus design from which Ivy League school?

Yale was copied so closely, down to the entrance standards, that the frontier college was nicknamed the Yale of the West.

Which Ohio town did Western Reserve College leave in 1882, a move still marked by a student relay?

Hudson gives its name to the 26-mile Hudson Relay; a class that wins all four years earns a champagne and steak dinner with the university president.

Which orator, born into slavery, gave Western Reserve College's commencement address in 1854?

Frederick Douglass spoke at the first college west of the Appalachians to enroll and graduate a Black student, John Sykes Fayette, in the 1830s.

What nickname did Case Western Reserve teams adopt in 1970, replacing the Red Cats and Rough Riders?

Spartans became the shared name three years after the merger; Western Reserve had been the Red Cats since 1928 and Case the Rough Riders since 1940.

Which fellow University Athletic Association founder is Case Western Reserve's primary sports rival?

Carnegie Mellon names Case Western Reserve as a primary rival in return; both Pittsburgh's Tartans and the Cleveland school joined the conference at its founding in 1986.

Which vice president debated John Edwards at Case Western Reserve's Veale Center in 2004?

Dick Cheney and Edwards met there in the only vice presidential debate of 2004; the university later hosted the first presidential debate of 2020.

Which architect designed Case Western Reserve's Peter B. Lewis Building, completed in 2002?

Frank Gehry finished the five-story management school five years after his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened; Lewis gave $36.9 million toward its construction.

Peter B. Lewis, namesake of a Case Western Reserve landmark, chaired which auto insurer?

Progressive was co-founded by his father in 1937; Lewis and his mother took control in a 1965 leveraged buyout and he built it into a national giant.

Case Western Reserve's Film Society has held a nonstop marathon of which movie genre since 1976?

Science fiction features, cartoons, trailers and shorts run for more than 34 hours at a student-run event billed as the oldest festival of its type.

Case doctoral graduate Robert Kearns sued Ford and Chrysler over which car feature he invented?

Intermittent wipers were modeled on the blinking of the human eye; Kearns argued much of his Chrysler case himself, and the 2008 film Flash of Genius retold his fight.

George Crile, a Western Reserve surgeon, pioneered which donor-to-patient procedure in the 1900s?

Blood transfusion directly from one person to another first succeeded in Crile's hands; he went on to help start the Cleveland Clinic in 1921.

Western Reserve surgeon Claude Beck saved a boy in 1947 with the first successful use of what?

A defibrillator that Beck had designed himself did the job after about 45 minutes of massaging the boy's heart by hand had failed.

John Macleod, who taught at Western Reserve for 15 years, shared a 1923 Nobel for which discovery?

Insulin was isolated in Macleod's laboratory at the University of Toronto, and he shared the medicine prize with Frederick Banting.

Case graduate Paul Lauterbur shared a 2003 Nobel Prize for work behind which imaging method?

MRI scans became possible through research Lauterbur carried out at Stony Brook in the 1970s; he shared the medicine prize with Peter Mansfield.

Which industrial giant was founded by a Case graduate who extracted bromine from brine?

Dow Chemical was formed in Midland, Michigan, after Herbert Dow's first backers fired him for spending too much time on research.

Which Case Western Reserve graduate won the 2017 economics Nobel and co-wrote 'Nudge'?

Richard Thaler earned his bachelor's degree in 1967, the year of the merger, and joked that he would spend the prize money as irrationally as possible.

Which Case graduate created TeX and wrote 'The Art of Computer Programming'?

Donald Knuth arrived at Case on a physics scholarship in 1956 and two years later wrote a program to help the school's basketball team win games.

Which Case Western Reserve graduate became Cleveland's mayor at 31 and twice ran for president?

Dennis Kucinich collected bachelor's and master's degrees in speech and communication together in 1973, four years before he won City Hall as the boy mayor.

Which rail magnate funded Western Reserve's move to Cleveland and named its college for his son?

Amasa Stone gave $500,000 in 1880 and asked that Adelbert College carry the name of his son, who had drowned at the age of 20.

The Case School of Applied Science opened in 1881 with its labs upstairs in what kind of building?

A barn behind the Case family home on Rockwell Street housed the chemistry and physics labs for four years, while classes met in the house itself.

Critics said Case Western Reserve's short-lived 2003 logo looked like a fat man carrying what?

A surfboard was the punchline, and a 2006 review found the rebrand had gone so badly that the university restored equal weight to both halves of its name.

What did Western Reserve College build in 1838 that is America's oldest still on its original site?

An observatory put up by astronomer Elias Loomis holds that title because the only older one, at Williams College, has been moved twice.

In 1971 Case Western Reserve set up the first degree program in the United States in which field?

Computer engineering at Case was also the first program of its kind to be accredited by ABET, the body that vets American engineering degrees.

Case Western Reserve was among the earliest universities connected to which internet forerunner?

ARPANET went online in 1969 and reached the campus in January 1971; in 1989 the university built the first all-fiber-optic campus network.

At which NCAA level do Case Western Reserve's teams compete, alongside Emory and Chicago?

Division III has been home since the level was created in 1973, and the men's tennis team won the school's first national team title there in 2023.

Case Western Reserve's Maltz Performing Arts Center occupies a domed landmark first built as what?

A synagogue completed for the Tifereth Israel congregation in 1924, its seven-sided sanctuary under a 90-foot dome is now the music department's main stage.