The Academy rented space to other organizations to raise money, 
as Trelease expected it would. Among those who rented from the 
Academy were the Angle School of Orthodontia, the St. Louis Avia- 
tion Club, the International Correspondence School Fraternity, and the 
St. Louis Chemical Society. Its star tenant, however, was the Engineers’ 
Club of St. Louis. 
The Engineers Club’s tenancy turned out to be a mixed blessing. 
Its association with the Academy as a tenant provided benefits and created 
problems. On one hand, the Club provided much-needed capital. On 
the other hand, it made demands that tried the patience of its landlord. 
For example, the club insisted that the Academy wallpaper its rooms 
or at least share the cost. The engineers also changed the wiring in the 
library ‘‘in a way to endanger the building’’, and they pestered the 
Academy for permission to erect a large electric sign with the name 
of their Club on it above the main entrance to the building. '6 
Like a good landlord, the Academy tried to accommodate the 
Engineers’ Club and all its tenants. This was quite an administrative 
task, especially when one remembers that the Academy’s council con- 
sisted of the unpaid elected officers. 
The Academy thrived in the beginning because of its unique posi- 
tion on the frontier. It was held together by a tightly knit elite com- 
prised of amateur and professional scientists as well as accomplished 
and influential dilettantes. The former group, steeped in the traditions 
of European science societies, was intensely interested in science as 
the American industrial revolution. Historian Daniel J. Kelves has written 
eloquently on the disdain the ‘“cultivated”’ affected for industrializa- 
tion and on how they turned to Science as a way to reach higher cultural 
ground. In his book The Physicists, Kelves wrote: 
To applaud science was to set Oneself apart socially in a country 
so exuberant over mere gadgets and machinery. To discuss it was to 
mark oneself as a cultivated man. Patrician and landed gentry, profes- 
38 
