Biography | Bo Jondal — The Degree Taken in Lallerstedt's New Court at KTH

The first paper that made him an engineer was not a contractor's letterhead. It was a KTH diploma dated 1924.

Bo Eskil Jondal was examined that year at Kungliga Tekniska högskolan as a väg- och vattenbyggnadsingenjör, a civil engineer of roads and water works.

Vem är det 1997 records the degree in the compressed line "KTH 24."

Swedish Wikipedia follows the same handbook and does not add a month.

He was twenty-four.

The campus he walked was Erik Lallerstedt's new court on Valhallavägen, opened on 19 October 1917.

That brick court replaced the older city rooms KTH had used in the nineteenth century.

The same year he took a first job at Kreuger & Tolls Byggnads AB.

Ivar Kreuger's building company was then a Stockholm contractor.

It was not yet a byword for the 1932 crash.

Two years later Jondal was on a river in Jämtland as measuring engineer at Hammarforsen.

The diploma is what made that posting possible.

KTH's main building still faces the court at about 59.347 north, 18.074 east.

The visitor sees Lallerstedt's brick, not a vanished lecture hall.

Jondal's later titles all sit on this 1924 stamp: resident engineer on the Södertunneln, chief of the metro works, managing director of AB Skånska Cementgjuteriet from 1953 to 1965.

The handbook does not give a month or a day for the examination.

The year is the fact that survives.

Photo: I99pema, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons