If Ezra Cornell were alive today he would have felt at home with the competition that led to the selection of Cornell University and The Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology to build a science and technology campus in New York City. The founding of Cornell University involved intense competition for New York state's share of the Morrill land-grant funding.

And he might see plans for the new campus as a reiteration of everything he intended, a fitting present for the university as it approaches its 150th birthday in 2015. New York sees it as a catalyst for economic growth. In 1866 Cornell wrote about his new school, "It will become a power in the land which will control and mold the future of this great state, and carry it onward and upward in its industrial development."

Ezra Cornell was one of America's early tech entrepreneurs, making his fortune in the telegraph industry, which we might think of as the Internet of the 19th century. While he devoted some time to farming and purchased the grassy slope overlooking Cayuga Lake with that in mind, most of his career was spent tinkering, inventing and managing technology.

In a chance meeting with F.O.J. Smith, an early partner with Samuel F.B. Morse in the development of the telegraph, Cornell conceived a machine that would simultaneously dig a trench and lay telegraph cable, which landed him a job in the new industry. Underground wiring proved impractical and was replaced by wires strung on poles, using glass insulators Cornell developed, but by then he was an indispensable part of the enterprise, organizing and supervising the installation of telegraph lines between eastern cities, solving technical problems as they came along.

In the years after the Civil War, telegraph companies sprang up like dot-coms in the 1990s, and Cornell progressed from employee to wire-stringing contractor to startup business maneuverer. A merger of his companies into the new Western Union (which he named) left him comfortable, and subsequent investments made him so rich he began to wonder what he would do with all his money. He fastened on the idea of creating an institution that would teach the practical knowledge that had led to his own success and would serve every qualified student, not just children of the rich.

Cornell University soon attracted attention as the first major institution where teachers and students not only discussed what was already known but engaged in research, creating new knowledge. Ezra Cornell would probably see that as a logical extension of his "Any person…any study" principle and would watch eagerly to see what might emerge from the new campus.