This group investigated the forty existing engineering experiments at universities around the country, and the report was compiled by Harold Bunger, Montgomery Knight, and Vaughan in December 1929.

[6] In 1933, S. V. Sanford, president of the University of Georgia, proposed that a "technical research activity" be established at Tech in order to boost the state's struggling economy in the midst of the Great Depression.

President Marion L. Brittain and Dean William Vernon Skiles asked for and examined the Research Club's 1929 report, and moved to create such an organization.

[7] He was the director of the station until 1940, when he accepted a higher-paying job as head of the Regional Products Research Division of the Tennessee Valley Authority and was replaced at EES by Harold Bunger (the first chairman of Georgia Tech's chemical engineering department).

[6][1] The ceramics department was subsequently (but temporarily) discontinued due to World War II, and all of the current students found wartime employment.