Shannon & Wilson was founded in 1954 as a partnership between William L. Shannon and Stanley D. Wilson. The two met at Harvard University, where Stan was a graduate student and Bill the director of a major research project. It was an exciting time to be at Harvard. A revolution in civil engineering was underway, and radically new concepts were taking shape in soil and rock mechanics under the direction of Professor Arthur Casagrande, a leading figure in geotechnical engineering. He and his colleagues were in the vanguard of a newly evolving discipline, establishing many of the early principles of what later came to be known as geotechnical engineering.