When the 20th century opened, the fields of crystallography, metallurgy, elasticity, magnetism, etc., dealing with diverse aspects of solid matter, were largely autonomous areas of science. Only in the 1940s were these and other fields consolidated into the newly named discipline of "solid state physics" which, two decades later, was enlarged to include the study of the physical properties of liquids and given the name "condensed matter physics" (CMP). At Harvard, for example, J. H. Van Vleck had several times taught a graduate course on magnetism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the first time a course called "solid state physics" was taught there was in 1949 (by the writer, at Van Vleck’s suggestion); it was based largely on the influential, comprehensive monograph Modern Theory of Solids by F. Seitz, which had appeared in 1940. In the early 1950s only a handful of universities offered general courses on solids and only a small number of industrial and government laboratories, most notably Bell Telephone Laboratories, conducted broad programs of research in CMP.