Home sweet home - AIEE, IRE, and IEEE headquarters and facilities

AS IEEE AND PES MEMBERS, WE are somehow aware that somewhere, someplace there are IEEE employees who serve our needs. This article is an attempt to explain the somewheres and someplaces that have housed these generations of employees through the many years of IEEE and our predecessor organizations’ history. In the Beginning At the 1902 American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) annual dinner, Andrew Carnegie was the featured speaker. Charles F. Scott, the AIEE president at the time, broached the subject of the need for a single building to house the engineering societies and bring about greater professional unity in the engineering profession. To his great surprise, the next day Carnegie invited Scott and others to call on him. He requested to see the plans for this building, which were nonexistent. The following week this group returned with ideas somewhat solidified, and Carnegie suggested a donation by him of $1,000,000 “more or less.” In 1904, the “more” became an additional $500,000, which Carnegie provided to complete the building. A site was chosen at 33 West 39th Street in New York, and plans were made to accommodate American Society of Civil Engingeers (ASCE), American Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Engineers (AIME), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the AIEE in a 13-story building. These organizations were to become known as the “Founder Societies,” the first societies in the engineering field in the United States. It was to this group that Carnegie made his gift. To complete the field, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) was grandfathered into the “Founder Societies” upon its formation somewhat later in time and technology. ASCE soon asked to drop out of the project. The society at that time occupied an adequate building of its own, and many of its members felt that, if unity was desired, it should occur within the ASCE. AIEE President Scott, by inviting several smaller societies to join, managed to show sufficient unity to maintain Carnegie’s interest in the completion of the project. The building was dedicated in April 1907, and it served until the move to a new engineering societies building at 345 East 47th Street in 1961. In 1917 though, the civil engineers recanted and decided to come unto the building, paying $250,000 to finance the erection of two additional floors for their use.