A student at the University of Michigan will at some point become indoctrinated into the rich history of Michigan football. Bo Schembechler. The House That Yost Built. The Game.

But what many students don’t realize is Michigan has another storied history, one filled with bombings, protests, clandestine activities and the invention of the Internet. No, this isn’t a plot from an old James Bond movie or a Tom Clancy novel. It’s the story of research.

From the mid-19th century to present day, the University of Michigan has been behind many of the world’s major technological developments. The University advanced the development of the Internet, developed the discipline of aeronautical engineering and is considered by many to be the first true research institution in America.

“Almost every area of scholarship has Michigan fingerprints on it,” former University president James Duderstadt said.

A new direction

The story of Michigan research begins with Henry Philip Tappan, the University’s first official president. Before Tappan took over as president in 1852, the University was primarily focused on teaching and the liberal arts, with Latin, Aristotle, logic and the classics the focus of most University classes.

But Tappan began steering the University down a different path, one without precedent in American higher education. He transformed the University into an institution focused on original research and knowledge generation, in the style of schools developing in Germany at the time.

“Tappan tried to do the same thing in North America and he tried to do it in the frontier town of Ann Arbor,” Duderstadt said. “He chased out the old faculty who were principally teachers and hired a number of new faculty who were expected to do scholarship and teaching.”

But Tappan’s radical changes came with a heavy cost. After only 10 years as president, the University's Board of Regents dismissed Tappan because his new model conflicted with its notions of scholarship.

Though the regents were opposed to Tappan’s emphasis on research, the University’s next president, Erastus Otis Haven, upheld the merging of research and instruction, which eventually became ingrained in the University’s mission.

Tappan’s ideology finally spread across America after some of his original faculty moved to other institutions to disseminate his philosophy. Andrew White, then a professor of history and English literature, took Tappan's idea of the university as a research institution and went on to found Cornell University in 1865.

Enter World War II

Today, the University receives more than $800 million annually in funding from the federal government, a number that represents approximately two-thirds of its total research budget.

What was markedly different about the University in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that most of its research funding came from internal University funds and foundations rather than Washington.

Everything changed once America entered World War II. Federal funding started to pour into America’s universities to develop radar technologies, nuclear weapons and electronics to fuel the war effort. These technologies ended up propelling America to victory and convinced the federal government that university research was a worthy investment.

“It made the case that research was so important on the campuses, to obviously national security but also to prosperity and health, that the federal government should play the dominate role in supporting it on university campuses,” Duderstadt said.

Though the federal government knew the importance of funding university research, most of its awards were limited to military and national security research. Only a small percentage of federal funds were granted to non-military experiments.

The University was no exception to the trend.

As the Cold War heated up, the federal government awarded the University millions of dollars to conduct classified military research in stealth technology, remote sensing and laser weaponry. At the time, the University did not have its own central apparatus for research and thus most of this classified research was conducted through the College of Engineering, according to Duderstadt.

Most of the classified research was conducted at Willow Run Laboratories near Ypsilanti, an off-campus facility that now functions as an airport. Duderstadt said the University chose an off-campus facility to limit outside exposure as much as possible. Only a small amount of classified research was conducted on-campus, according to Duderstadt.