Welcome tomorrow: 150 years ETH Zurich : Country focus: Switzerland

Theirs was a visionary decision and their approach a bold one: The founders of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School acknowledged the need for modern Switzerland to have its own national university which would enable the recently founded Federal State to play its part in the industrial age and, by doing so, safeguard its own future. In many respects, our own era resembles those years of innovation and rapid change in which the Polytechnic laid the foundation stone of ETH Zurich as we know it today. In the 19th century, technology and industrialisation spread at an unprecedented pace across Europe and the USA, establishing new forms of work and life in a vast process of societal change. Today, we are at an equally important crossroads. The world is everyone's horizon. Knowledge and technical expertise are no longer the preserve of a privileged global minority, but have become a universal asset. Meanwhile, discoveries and developments of exceptional quality are being made all over the world. Production and services are being liberated at an incredible pace from their traditional sites. The industrial and service society of the 19th and 20th centuries is being transformed into a knowledge-based society whose dominant feature is the intellect instead of material and whose driving force is information instead of energy. With their conventional approaches and behaviour patterns, the traditional economic powers are increasingly losing their hold on this global development.