Cochran Hall Anxiety, 1917
As the school year of 1917-18 opened at Otterbein College, female students living in the Cochran Hall dormitory were trying to adjust to a relatively new thing: electricity. Lights were one benefit, but some of the residents were using appliances. This was brought to President Clippinger’s attention by Dean of Women Cora McFadden. Clippinger in turn asked the advice of trustee Fred N. Thomas. On September 1, 1917 he wrote to Thomas, saying in part:
The executive committee raise a serious question of the use of chafing dishes and electrical appliances such as electric irons, toasters, etc in Cochran Hall. It is a matter for grave consideration . . . I feel that Miss McFadden would like to have the executive committee require that the girls do not use them because of the fire risks to which they subject us.[i]
A chafing dish is familiar to us today mainly at meals served buffet style. A metal contraption holds an alcohol burner, whose blue flame keeps menu items warm or hot. Some of the Cochran Hall girls were apparently using the chafing dish to either keep warm, or to cook or at least heat edibles in their rooms. Cochran Hall had a strict rule limiting meals to the large dining room.
This was also the first era of electrical appliances. If electricity was initially seen mainly as a source for lighting, the busy minds of inventors were finding thousands of ways to use the power source. If many consumers kept their gas or even wood-burning stoves, they were more than happy to adopt electric toasters, electric skillets, electric waffle irons, and the like. Even today, our microwave ovens and Internet recipes need electricity to power them.
President Clippinger and Dean McFadden were not technophobes or Luddites. They were however friends of rule and order. Faced with what was then an untried and unproven technology, they were (perhaps) justifiably concerned. Early electric appliances, with their frayed power cords, haphazard placement, and lack of polarized plugs were useful, but a bit chancy. And this tiny letter of worry had to wait sixty years, but eventually became a prophecy.
Many alumni and retired faculty still remember April 6, 1976 as the day Cochran Hall caught fire. It was successfully evacuated and claimed no fatalities, although a few students suffered from smoke inhalation and at least one student was rescued by a fireman from an upper floor. Cochran Hall, which had survived decades and whose basement housed the first computer lab, was deemed too badly smoke damaged to be repaired, and was demolished the following year.[ii]
And what caused the fire? Faulty electrical wiring.
Cochran Hall 1914
[i] Walter G. Clippinger to Fred N. Thomas, September 1, 1917. Presidents Papers, Otterbein University Archives.
[ii] http://faculty.otterbein.edu/DVDLDVR/stories/Fire.html; https://otterbein.libguides.com/historical-scavenger-hunt/overview (both accessed January 8, 2023)