-
Foundation of Manchester Mechanics’ Institution
A group of Manchester businessmen and industrialists met in a public house, the Bridgewater Arms, to establish the Manchester Mechanics' Institution. -
Manchester Museum
Manchester Museum was opened in 1887 to house collections that had belonged to the Manchester Natural History Society. -
The Whitworth Art gallery
The Whitworth Art gallery, established in 1889, joins the University. Home to more than 55,000 works of art, the gallery has doubled in size and now includes an art garden, a sculpture terrace, a landscape gallery and a cafe in the trees. -
Manchester was the birthplace of the nuclear age, when Ernest Rutherford's pioneering research led to the splitting of the atom.
In the laboratory built at the University Rutherford created a world centre for experiments in atomic physics. Highlights included an experiment in 1909 by Ernest Marsden (still an undergraduate) and Hans Geiger, which suggested that atoms have dense nuclei; the nuclear model of atomic structure (1913); and the first artificial transmutation of an atomic nucleus (1917). He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.
The University of Manchester has a rich academic heritage, with 25 Nobel -
The computer revolution
The computer revolution started here in June 1948 when a machine built by Tom Kilburn and Sir Freddie Williams, known affectionately as 'The Baby', ran its first stored programme. -
A steerable radio telescope
A young Bernard Lovell built a steerable radio telescope in 1957. Even now, it remains one of the biggest and most powerful radio telescopes in the world, spending most of its time investigating cosmic phenomena which were undreamed of when it was conceived. The Jodrell Bank Observatory is part of the University of Manchester School of Physics and Astronomy. -
Foundation of the Computer Science Department
On 1st October 1964, the Computer Group broke away from the Electrical Engineering Department to form the Department of Computer Science. An undergraduate course in Computer Science was set up in October 1965, with around 30 undergraduates a year.
The School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester is one of the oldest in the UK. The University of Manchester has made a considerable contribution to the development of computing. This includes many firsts including the first stored progr -
The John Rylands Library
The John Rylands Library becomes part of the University in 1972. The John Rylands Library is a late-Victorian neo-Gothic building on Deansgate. The library, which opened to the public in 1900, was founded by Enriqueta Augustina Rylands in memory of her husband, John Rylands. -
The University of Manchester
The University of Manchester, in its present form, was created in 2004 by the amalgamation of the Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). After 100 hundred years of working closely together both institutions agreed to form a single university, and on 22 October 2004 they officially combined to form the largest single-site university in the UK. -
The Whitworth Art gallery
On 1 July, 2015 at a prestigious ceremony at Tate Modern, the Whitworth Art gallery was awarded the Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year 2015. It’s the largest arts award in Britain and the biggest museum prize in the world.
