Norwegian Institute of Technology

The Norwegian Institute of Technology (Norwegian: Norges tekniske høgskole, NTH) was a science institute in Trondheim, Norway. It was established in 1910, and existed as an independent technical university for 58 years, after which it was merged into the University of Trondheim as an independent college.[1]

Hovedbygningen, the main building of the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH)

In 1996 NTH ceased to exist as an organizational superstructure when the university was restructured and rebranded. The former NTH departments are now basic building blocks of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

NTH was primarily a polytechnic institute, educating master level engineers as well as architects. In 1992 NTH had 7627 master and doctoral students and 1591 employees; it graduated 1262 chartered engineers (master level), 52 chartered architects, and 92 Dr.Ing. (PhD). The operating budget was equivalent to US$100M, and the total premises amounted to around 260,000 m2 (64 acres).

Since the merger, it forms a part of the university campus commonly known as Gløshaugen, from the geographical area in which it is situated.

History edit

 
Seal of the Institute

The decision to establish a Norwegian national college of technology was made by the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, in 1900, after years of heated debate on where the institution should be located; many representatives felt that the capital Kristiania (now Oslo) was self-evident as the place for this nationally important seat of learning. However, eventually Den Tekniske Høgskole was located in the geographically central city of Trondheim, based on an emerging policy of decentralisation as well as the city's existing and highly esteemed technical college, Trondhjems Tekniske Læreanstalt.[citation needed]

Hovedbygningen, the building of Norges tekniske høgskole was designed by architect Bredo Greve. It was built of granite block construction in the National Romantic style of architecture.[citation needed]

Five academical departments were originally present in the parliament's resolution of 31 May 1900:


Academic faculties edit

The academic structure of NTH during the last years before its inclusion in NTNU was as follows:

  • Faculty of Architecture, with 5 Departments:
    • Form and Colour Studies
    • Building Technology
    • Architectural History
    • Arch. Design
    • Town and Regional Planning
  • Faculty of Applied Earth Science and Metallurgy, with 3 Departments:
  • Faculty of Civil Engineering, with 8 Departments:
    • Building and Construction Engineering
    • Geotechnical Engineering
    • Road and Railway Engineering
    • Transportation Engineering
    • Hydraulic and Sanitary Engineering
    • Building Materials
    • Structural Engineering
    • Geodesy and Photogrammetry
  • Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with 5 Departments:
    • Electrical Power Engineering
    • Telecommunications
    • Engineering Cybernetics
    • Physical Electronics
    • Computer Systems and Telematics
  • Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, with 7 Departments:
    • Inorganic Chemistry
    • Organic Chemistry
    • Physical Chemistry
    • Chemical Engineering
    • Industrial Chemistry
    • Industrial Biochemistry
    • Biotechnology
  • Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, with 6 Departments:
    • Thermal Energy and Hydropower
    • Machine Design and Materials Technology
    • Production and Quality Engineering
    • Applied Mechanics, Thermo- and Fluid Dynamics
    • Heating and Ventilation
    • Refrigeration Engineering
  • Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, with two Departments:
    • Mathematics Sciences
    • Physics
  • Faculty of Marine Technology, with 4 Departments:
    • Marine Systems Design
    • Marine Structures
    • Marine Hydrodynamics
    • Marine Engineering
  • Faculty of Economics and Industrial Management, with two Departments:
    • Economics
    • Organisation and Work Science (Norwegian abbreviation: ORAL)
  • Center for Management Education (Norw. abbrev.: ULA)
  • Technical University Library of Norway (Norw. abbrev.: NTUB)
    • The national resource library of technology and architecture
    • Locations: Technical Main Library as well as six Faculty Libraries on campus

Notable alumni edit

Commercial impact edit

The following companies, or divisions of international companies, have been created directly or partly from NTH research and influence, including its contract research arm SINTEF with spin-offs:

  • 3d-Radar AS (advanced ground penetrating radar technology for shallow subsurface mapping in 3D) [1]
  • Atmel Norway (inventors and designers of the Atmel AVR RISC microcontroller family, incl HW/SW tools) (in Norwegian) [2]
  • Ceetron AS (3D visualization and technical computing for oil & gas, plus aerospace, automotive, and consumer electronics) [3]
  • Cybernetica (Norwegian company) advanced process control, specializing in nonlinear model predictive control
  • CorrOcean (industrial/off-shore Corrosion Monitoring) [4]
  • ErgoRunit AS (outsourcing services in IT system planning/administration and accounting) [5] (N)
  • Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) (inter/intranet search engines; developers of alltheweb.com) [6]
  • GE Vingmed Ultrasound, formerly Vingmed Sound (ultrasound-based imaging in medical diagnosis and surgery support systems) [7] (N)
  • Marine Cybernetics, specialising in the testing and verification of ship and offshore structure control systems [8] (N)
  • MARINTEK, The Norwegian Marine Technology Research Institute,[3] including MARINTEK (USA), Inc. [9]
  • Nordic Semiconductor ASA (ASIC design, SoCs, RF/mixed-signal hybrid IC's) [10]
  • Oceanor (oceanographic measurements and real-time environmental monitoring in oceans, freshwater, and soil) [11]
  • Powel ASA (IT products/services for energy production companies) [12]
  • Q-Free ASA; formerly Micro Design AS (radio systems for tolling, traffic information, parking, ticketing, access control, logistics) [13]
  • Schlumberger Information Solutions Trondheim, formerly VoxelVision AS (3D visualization, mostly for oil & gas applications) [14]
  • SINTEF, The Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research at NTH (contract research corp, 1700 employees) [15]
  • SINTEF Energy Research, SINTEF Petroleum Research, and SINTEF Fisheries and Aquaculture ²
  • Sinvent Ltd., SINTEFs development and investment company
  • Sun Microsystems Trondheim; formerly ClustRa Systems (high-availability, real-time database technology) [16]
  • Kongsberg Oil & Gas Technologies AS; acquired Systems in Motion AS (3D visualization software) [17] [18]

References edit

  1. ^ About the establishment of the University of Trondheim (Norwegian)
  2. ^ "Paal Kibsgaard, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Schlumberger Limited". Schlumberger. Archived from the original on 19 November 2012. Retrieved 18 May 2015.
  3. ^ A majority share is owned by the SINTEF Group

External links edit


63°25′10″N 10°24′9″E / 63.41944°N 10.40250°E / 63.41944; 10.40250