Palo Alto - Stanford University

Palo Alto owes its fame mainly to the fact that in 1891 the college, originally called Leland Stanford Junior University, came into being with 559 students (one being the future president Herbert Hoover). Stanford established the college in memory of his precocious son who, before he died in Rome at the age of 16, had undertaken archaeological expeditions on his own.

The original site covered an area of 8,250 acres/3,300 hectares, the driveway lined with palms and the rest of the parkland being the creation of Frederick Law Olmsted (known especially as the designer of Central Park in New York). By way of Palm Drive you come to the inner courtyard, bordered on one side by arcades and on the other by the Memorial Church; its stylistic forbears are to be found in the Romanesque and the Californian mission style.

Although the 1906 earthquake caused considerable damage to the slowly developing campus, including the collapse of the Memorial Church, this could not stop the growth of the university which, in its relatively short period of existence, showed itself equal to those eastern universities which were centuries older (especially Harvard and Yale), and in some disciplines, such as medicine, engineering and English literature, it even outstripped them.

The students, numbering some 15,000, attend lectures by 1200 professors. These include or have included no less than ten Nobel Prize winners and 75 members of the National Academy of Science.