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August 18, 2006 Vol. 77, no.
1F
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| ONE HECK OF THE HOLE :
A peek into the mine shaft across from Hearst Memorial Mining Building. Students once trained to be mining engineers in here.
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If these walls could talk
Facts and lore on the College’s building
Welcome Berkeley engineers! Check out the collection of fun facts and interesting stories below. (Disclosure: There’s no ghost of an old professor haunting the halls … that we know of).
On the east side of Hearst Memorial Mining Building, across the access road, is a padlocked door. Peer through the grating and you’ll see a dark tunnel. This is an old adit, a horizontal mine shaft that the College once used to teach students how to mine. It goes a quarter of a mile into the Berkeley Hills, right under Stern Hall and across the Hayward Fault. In its heyday, the adit had a small rail system of carts and tracks to haul and dump ore. The middle of Hearst looked like a train station with all the activity. Fraternities also used the tunnel to haze pledges, no doubt scaring the bejeezers out of those who had to venture in. It was closed by the 1980s, and today, only seismologists use it to study the fault.
Evans Hall is the birthplace of UC Berkeley computing. Computers were first introduced to campus within these walls, and it housed the first computer lab. Evans was also one of the first buildings in the world to be connected to the Internet. Until 2004, it housed the main servers on campus, which occupied all of the basement except for the lab. Rumor has it that the server’s bandwidth was, at one point, second only to the Pentagon’s. The CS division used to be here until it outgrew its space and moved into its own building, Soda Hall. Evans is also where former Assistant Professor of Mathematics Ted Kaczynski had an office.
Kaczynski, a.k.a the Unabomber, seemed to prefer Cory Hall. In 1982, he planted a bomb in the Cory Hall faculty lounge, injuring a professor. In 1985, a second bomb went off in the student computer lab, injuring a student. Cory has the dubious distinction of being the only building hit twice by the Unabomber.
Otherwise known as CS Residence Hall, Soda Hall comes complete with showers, kitchenettes and a volleyball court. Your home away from home!
The gymnasium-sized basement of Etcheverry Hall once housed a complete nuclear reactor. It was removed when the City of Berkeley declared itself nuclear-free, and its absence permitted the building of Soda Hall. Keep an eye out for the nuclear-powered robotic ant that supposedly lives there according to Nukees, a comic strip written by an NE grad and published in the Daily Cal.
Davis Hall used to have a “bone room” where human bones were kept for a CE professor’s research on bones and prosthetic devices. Structural engineering, indeed.
If you haven’t fallen asleep by now, the Bechtel Engineering Center used to be known across campus as the “Bechtel Sleeping Center.” Says Interdisciplinary Studies staff member Pat Berumen, “We used to have long blue couches without arms here that were really comfortable, and students slept there all the time. We even had one guy complain about noise. The women’s bathroom door squeaked, and he told us to fix it because it was disturbing his sleep!”
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