James Packard, Class of 1884, was an engineer both in and out of the classroom. He wired the door and alarm clock of his dorm room with switching mechanisms and rigged telegraph lines to friends’ rooms. Five years after graduating, he applied for the first of over forty patents.

In 1890, Packard opened the Packard Electric Company with his brother in their hometown of Warren, Ohio. Thanks to the company’s electric lightbulbs, Warren became the first U.S. city with incandescent-bulb street lamps. Packard is best known, however, for the Packard Motor Car Company, whose first automobile, the “Ohio Model A,” was the finest American-produced luxury vehicle of the time.

Packard’s $1.2 million gift to Lehigh led to the construction of Packard Lab, home of the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science. His legacy lives on there, as well as in the “Ohio Model A” on display in the main lobby, known affectionately as “Old Number One.”