MIT was founded in 1861 by William Barton Rogers, a distinguished natural scientist, who wished to create a new kind of independent educational institution relevant to an increasingly industrialized America. The Institute's opening was delayed by the Civil War, and it admitted its first students in 1865. In the following years, it established a sterling reputation in the sciences and in engineering, but it also fell on hard financial times. These two factors made it a perfect fit in many peoples' eyes to merge with nearby Harvard University, which was flush with cash but much weaker in the sciences than it was in the liberal arts. Around 1900, a merger  was proposed with Harvard University, but was cancelled after protests from MIT's alumni. In 1916, MIT moved across the river to its present location in Cambridge.

MIT's prominence increased as a result of World War II (see radar) and the United States government's investment in science and technology in response to Sputnik. MIT's contributions to the twentieth century advancement of science and technology include project Whirlwind, the pioneering computer built under the direction of Jay W. Forrester between 1947 and 1952, and notable for its technological achievement (including the invention of magnetic core memory), as well as for its cultural contribution to the development of personal computing.

In 2001, MIT announced that it planned to put all of its course materials online as part of its OpenCourseWare project. The same year, president Charles Vest made history by being the first university official in the world to admit that his institution had severely restricted the career of women faculty members and researchers through sexist discrimination, and to make steps to redress the issue. In August 2004, Susan Hockfield, a molecular neurobiologist, was appointed as MIT's first female president. She took office as the Institute's 16th president on December 6, 2004.

Admission to MIT is extremely competitive, and it has been ranked by The Atlantic Monthly and other publications as the most selective university in the United States. It also consistently ranks among the highest in nationwide reports on quality of faculty and effectiveness of teaching. Entrepreneurship is a core value at MIT; an illustrative 1997 report  showed that the aggregated revenues produced by companies founded by MIT and its graduates would make it the twenty-fourth largest economy in the world.

Well-known MIT faculty and alumni include linguist Noam Chomsky, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former CIA director John M. Deutch, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Nobel laureate John Nash.

The motion pictures Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, and Blown Away have story lines which include MIT settings. However, MIT does not normally grant permission for location shooting on its campus, and most of the scenes set at MIT were actually filmed at substitute locations. Blown Away was allowed to film on MIT's Killian Court though [1] .