A Place to Make Gadgets
Haviland Hall was designed to include space for industrial fabrication, in support of the research of the School of Education. It would have “a special room furnished with wood-working and machine shop equipment. A mechanic working under the direction of the department of educational psychology will design and make apparatus which will be available for the schools of the state. Eye pacing apparatus for increasing the speed of reading, and exposure equipment for the flashing of drill cards in mathematics and other memory subjects[,] will be designed and built in this shop” (Daily Californian, July 3, 1923,
p. 3).
Professor J.V. Breitweiser relied on the production rooms for several of his experimental and laboratory equipment. In addition to his “pacing machine”—to train students’ eye muscles to scan texts faster, “thus enabling a busy man to peruse a printed page with a minimum loss of time” – the workshop also produced an “acoumeter” and a variator, which researchers used to test the auditory and frequency sensitivities of school children in the underground tunnel (San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 19, 1920, p. 53).
Professor Breitwieser even devised the “kissograph,” which he described to a luncheon of the San Francisco Advertising Club in March 1922. It was “a prosaic contraption which can weigh a kiss and tell you right off the reel exactly in terms of pounds, blood pressure, just what kick a kiss has the ability to register,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “When August Vollmer, police chief of Berkeley, invented the lie detector, it was thought that the limit had been reached when it came to delving into a man’s soul, but Professor Breitwieser’s invention goes a step, or maybe, a couple of steps further.” The device was intended to “register in unemotional figures, the linear measurement of an emotional kiss. More than that, the kissograph will unfailingly record the blood pressure augmented by those emotions which go with a real osculation” (San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 16, 1922, p. 13).
All of these devices were developed in the workshops of Haviland Hall, which occupied the south end of the basement floor. The south end featured two large rooms approximately 38 by 34 feet, the laboratory occupying the corner opposite the stairs. It had long workbenches against its walls, as well as stations with sinks and running water. Ten triplets of connections ringed the room, providing gas and electricity, with outlets not just for alternating current—the electrical standard today—but also for direct current. A ventilation hood for chemical fumes stood in the corner by the main door.
Adjoining this laboratory were additional work rooms with their own fume hoods, sinks, cold water, gas, and AC/DC electrical outlets. These rooms today are the Harry Specht seminar room and the doctoral student lounge, rooms 13 and 15.
In the other corner at the south end, adjacent to the stairs, was a specially-equipped lecture room, complete with a lecture cabinet with sink and connections for gas and AC and DC electricity. On the wall behind the lecture cabinet were a blackboard and, as with the other large seminar rooms of the building, a motion picture screen.
Sandwiched between these two rooms was an apparatus storage room to hold the gadgets developed in Haviland’s laboratories. As the Western Journal of Education described it, “The lecture room, apparatus room, and general laboratory form a compact inter-communicating unit for investigations in experimental psychology” (Western Journal of Education, May 1924, v.30:5, p. 5).
Fulfilling the symmetry of the building, there were two large rooms at the north end of the basement (38’ x 36’ each), although they were used for instruction rather than laboratory work. As at the south end, a storage room was sandwiched between them.
With the departure of the School of Education in 1962, the south end was occupied by the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, which operated the seismograph in the sub-basement tunnel. The stairs to the tunnel, which previously had been open, were enclosed. The Seismology Lab itself moved out in the mid-2000s, after which the rooms were completely reconfigured into a suite of offices.
Written by Craig Alderson