In the late spring of 1917 Dr. Robert A. Millikan (1868-1953)—the Nobel Prize measurer of the electrical charge of the electron-asked me to come to see him in Chicago. This was just at the time when Dr. Millikan was shifting his interests to Pasadena, spending one academic quarter there each year, at the institution then known as Throop College but soon to be renamed the California Institute of Technology.
"That's correct," I replied.
I had never seen Dr. Millikan previous to this interview; but he was a good friend of Mason's and had heard of me from that source. I was at once charmed by this handsome, friendly, great man. He said, "I understand you have been studying electrodynamics under Dr. Max Mason."
"Do you understand it?" he asked
That was a poser. The interview might terminate abruptly if I said no, and it would be pretentious or even arrogant to say yes. So I said, "Dr. Millikan, I wonder if you would be willing to make the question somewhat more specific."
From his desk he picked up the classic German text Lehrbuch der Elektrodynamik by Max Abraham (1875-
1922) and August Otto Föppl (1854-1924), asked me if I
had read it, opened it at random, pointed to the double page, and said, "Tell me what this is about."
Fortunately I knew that volume backwards and forwards, and the passage involved was one with which I was very familiar; so at once I sketched for him the discussion of those and a few following pages. He said at once, "All right. Very good. Would you like to go out to Throop College with me next fall?" I agreed without delay, and September 1917 saw me in Pasadena.
Soon after arriving, both elated and nervous that I was to teach calculus for the first time, I went to the college bookstore-actually only a counter on the ground floor of Throop Hall—and asked what text was to be used in the course. The girl smiled and said, "Why don't you wait until tomorrow, when your teacher will tell you?" The gap between the 125-pound assistant professor and the husky Western freshmen was small indeed.
In those days the physical plant of the college consisted of Throop Hall, a chemistry building, and, in the orchard back of Throop Hall, the so-called Old Dorm and the "Greasy Spoon" (which had been moved there from the previous location in North Las Robles). The faculty was so small that its meetings were held in the modest-sized office of President James A. B. Scherer. But on the walls of the President's office were the drawings of the distinguished architect Bertram C. Goodhue, portraying a dream for a great future—a dream which was viewed by some at that time with great skepticism, but a dream that was destined to come to pass.
I thoroughly enjoyed my work. I was proud and happy to be accepted as a colleague by the rest of the faculty. Although the institution is now recognized as one of the top
leaders in our country, it was then modest in its equipment and largely local in its reputation, but nevertheless it already had some very able men on its faculty and-even more important—it was turbulent with fresh ideas and high ideals. A small engineering school with only the early beginnings of a real science faculty, it was dedicated to the proposition that engineers be solidly grounded in basic science and that scientists be thoroughly trained in the humanities.
The first year at Throop was not lacking in highlights for me. We had a rather sharp earthquake, which hit when I was sitting in my desk chair, tipped back against its spring suspension, so that I got a specially big initial shake. This event cleared up, as far as I am concerned, the often debated question as to whether one hears an earthquake in advance. I certainly did hear a strange, low-frequency sound. We had, for further excitement, a fire on nearby Mount Wilson. There always was, with fires in that locality, the special risk that the great observatory might be harmed; so the students (and the younger teachers) all were released from classes and transported up to fight the fire.
There was also a lively tradition that the students go on a rampage from time to time. This tradition has been maintained; not many years ago Cal Tech students stealthily but ingeniously got possession of the code for the display of the colored cards in the rooters' section for a football game in the Rose Bowl. They replaced the code by a modified one so that the amazed spectators saw, in the colored card display, references to Cal Tech instead of the teams actually playing
One of the civil engineering professors was wont to bore his classes with the account of a bridge he had designed; so one spring evening the boys got into his office, used several desks, tables, and chairs to build a ceiling-high "bridge" naughtily labeled in his honor; and then when leaving poured all the door locks full of hot glue. It may have been on that same evening that the boys painted the nude statue of Apollo which occupied the most conspicuous position opposite the entrance of Throop Hall, using lavender, scarlet, and green for his, shall I say, less public features.
Some academic institutions spring fully developed not from the forehead of Jove but from the hip pocket of an inspired multimillionaire, but the California Institute of Technology had a curiously interesting origin. In 1891, Amos Gager Throop, a wealthy retired Chicago businessman, alderman, and enthusiastic Universalist, decided to found an academic institution at Pasadena. He overambitiously named it Throop University, and it was indeed his original idea that in addition to a school of letters and science, it should have a law school, a musical institute, an art studio, and faculties devoted to elocution, stenography and typewriting, and physical culture. He may have had grandiose ideas, but he also had a grand idea, for "he was determined that it should be the best."
The "University" opened on November 2, 1891, but by the following March it had become evident that too much had been attempted, and the trustees decided to concentrate on "a Manual Training Institution . . . second to none in the land," and to change the name to Throop
Polytechnic Institute. This coeducational institution started with thirty students, but it prospered and grew.
Besides the college and the normal branches, it developed a preparatory school called the academy, and a subpreparatory school renamed the grammar school. By 1905 it had begun to shift emphasis from the junior work and the manual training to engineering, and by 1907 there were 529 students enrolled.
In the fall of 1906 a critical event occurred there. Norman Bridges, the chairman of the Board of Trustees of Throop Polytechnic, called on George Ellery Hale (18681938), the great American astronomer who had founded the Mount Wilson observatory, and asked, "What can we do to become first class?" Hale's reply was, "Scrap practically the whole thing and start over." In April 1907, the trustees voted to make the institution "a high-grade technical school," decided to abandon the elementary school, and appointed James A. B. Scherer the new president. It was Hale who found the new president, as it was Hale who, from this point on, was a chief guiding spirit.
In this reorganization there were retained only a college and an academy, but the latter was doomed by the fact that many good polytechnical high schools were then being developed in Southern California. The academy was discontinued and Throop Institute, now exclusively a college, opened on its new and present campus in the fall of 1910. That year there was a total of thirty-one students, but the determination to maintain quality was demonstrated by the fact that only fifteen freshmen were admitted, although thirty-three applied.
In 1913 Throop Polytechnic Institute became Throop
College of Technology. That same year Hale brought to
the college Arthur Amos Noyes (1866-1936), the distinguished American chemist who had been vice-president of Technology. Noyes originally agreed to spend February and March at Pasadena, but by 1916 he was there at least half of each year. During 1916-1917 Hale brought Robert A. Millikan there for the first time, again originally for three months of the year.
In 1919 Noyes resigned at MIT to give full time to Throop. After World War I, Millikan resumed his annual three months at Pasadena as director of physical research. When Scherer's health failed, the trustees used every effort to have Millikan replace him, and he was in fact offered the presidency in April 1921. Dr. Millikan accepted the offer with the condition that he not be named president, but be designated chairman of the Executive Council, which consisted of three trustees and three faculty members. The institution he led was the California Institute of Technology, for the trustees of Throop College of Technology voted that change in name at their final meeting in February 1920. The timing of the transition was just such as to permit me to be an assistant professor of Throop and then an assistant professor of Caltech.
Although many doubtless think of Caltech as the MIT of the West Coast, it may not be widely recognized that there was an original close connection, not large in numbers but large indeed in spirit and significance, between MIT president, Noyes, one of the three great human forces in the development of CIT, Dr. Hale, at the western end of and CIT. For not only was the MIT professor and vice-president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was sufficiently valued by MIT so that he was offered the presidency of the eastern institute in 1906.
The role of these three men, Hale, Noyes, and Millikan, in creating Caltech was so important that it is hard to evaluate. Certainly it cannot be overestimated. Everyone who was there at that time had the greatest respect and admiration for all three. They were, first and foremost, great scholars and splendid persons. Although all were great practical assets from the point of view of public relations and, to be blunt about it, money raising, Rob Millikan was the supreme artist at this. He could talk to an audience of fifty middle-aged or elderly wealthy women and come away with fifty permanent and fanatically devoted allies.
I suppose that once in a great while a colt is foaled on the blue grass meadows of Kentucky that so obviously has all the attributes of future greatness as to be evident from the first. Certainly it was perfectly clear, when I went there just a half century ago, that Caltech was destined for greatness. In addition to the great triumvirate, there were outstandingly fine and able men on the faculty-Royal W. Sorenson, a great electrical engineer; Franklin Thomas, a distinguished civil engineer; Stuart J. Bates in physical
The most complex of the three was unquestionably Millikan. He was completely dedicated to his students, and would, without any public knowledge, lend them his personal funds; but he rigorously insisted that his name go down as senior author on scientific papers, even including some for which he had written not a word. Though he had refused the title of president, as chairman of the Executive Council he ruled with all the devious dexterity of a dictator, making private oral commitments that would have been fatal had it not been for his power to meet any emergency with a smiling new triumph.
chemistry; Harry Bateman in mathematics; Clinton K. Judy in literature.
One day at a faculty meeting President Scherer unrolled an impressive scroll, sat looking at it, and explained to us that it was an invitation from a large sister institution to send a representative to the celebration of their fiftieth anniversary. He handed the scroll to Professor Judy with the remark, "Perhaps you will read this to the group here."
Professor Judy looked thoughtfully at the scroll, and then began, in his rich, deep voice, to read to us the elegantly phrased and dignified sentences of the invitation. After he returned it, showing no surprise or any other emotion, Dr. Scherer said, "Well, gentlemen, I guess I must explain that the joke is on me: the document is written in Latin."
I doubt whether many small engineering colleges had a professor of literature who could have equaled that performance. But then I doubt whether many small engineering colleges of that time had student assemblies at which Amelita Galli-Curci sang, or the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra played, or John Masefield spoke. Not many such schools were then (or now) demanding that the engineering students take a course in the English department every semester of their four years. Not many small technological institutions had such a poet as Alfred Noyes as a Lecturer in English Literature—as we did in 1920-1921.
the most advanced courses for the engineers were a first course in differential equations, a course in advanced calculus, and a course in least squares which I taught! But by
During my first year there were just four graduate students. In mathematics—how unbelievable in retrospect—
1919-1920, when I went back after World War I, there were nine graduate students and the growth had begun.
There was considerable scientific activity at Throop, which, in the early months of our national participation in World War I was oriented toward defense, particularly in the aeronautical area. The submarine menace being an obvious and indeed a terrifying one, there also were various studies related to high-frequency sound production, transmission, and detection. I read up on the piezoelectric effect, whereby a block of crystal can be electrically driven to oscillate at high frequencies. Harry Bateman, the English mathematician previously mentioned, was investigating, with his powerful but extremely theoretical methods, the possible advantage of electrically driving a hollow spherical shell of crystal, so that it could be used as a source of underwater sound waves. One day I asked him how serious would be the effect of the discontinuity where the two halves of the hollow spherical shell were cemented to form a complete hollow sphere. It turned out that Harry had not thought of that. He just calmly assumed that some practical chap could put a concentric spherical hole inside a solid crystal sphere without tampering in any way with its homogeneity! Bateman had been a First Wrangler at Trinity College, Cambridge, was a profound scholar with a vast store of knowledge about partial differential equations, and a sweet and gentle person. But he was not precisely practical.
Toward the end of the spring semester at Throop in 1918 I was inducted into service at the request of Charles E. Mendenhall, Chairman of the Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin. Mendenhall was then a major in
an organization closely related to the National Research Council, set up in World War I (as was Vannevar Bush's Office of Scientific Research and Development in World War II) to bring science to the service of the armed forces. I went in as a private, but after some months was made a second lieutenant.
I worked chiefly at the Bureau of Standards in Washington, in a group which-how ridiculous and ineffective this seems in retrospect-consisted of myself and an expert mechanic. There were few aircraft flight instruments available in those days, and I was primarily concerned with the design and test of turn and bank indicators. It was very easy to design and construct a gyroscopic device that would tell the pilots when they were flying in a straight line. But bank indicators, especially ones which would continue to operate with useful accuracy during the acrobatics of aerial dogfights, presented difficulties we never overcame. I did get to do some very exciting acrobatic flying at Langley Field, where returned fighter pilots would subject the instruments (and the testing scientist!) to the latest flying tricks. But this was not the sort of participation in the war I craved, and I was relieved when I was discharged.
I did not return directly to Pasadena, but finished out the spring semester of 1919 at Wisconsin, where the short-age of teachers was so acute that they were glad to give me temporary employment.
Late in the summer of 1919 I went down to Carlsbad, New Mexico, where Mary was living. We were married there on September 1, this date being after my twenty-fifth birthday but three days before Mary's twenty-fifth. According to her discontinuous theory of ages she was twenty-four until the day when she became twenty-five, so she had the satisfaction of being "one year younger" than I on our marriage day. In the evening of our wedding day we were driven in a broken-down Ford by a local New Mexico character to the nearby town of Artesia, so that we could there catch the train for Los Angeles. The lights on the car became very dim, and our driver contributed a permanent saying to our family vocabulary by remarking that "The Ford's got the sorriest lights in the world." He also commented wryly on what he called "the stubble" of the cottonwood trees, giving that word an extended meaning which has also become part of our private patois.
The trip west on the Sante Fe Chief was our only honeymoon excursion. I think Mary has never really forgiven me for not stopping to see the Grand Canyon—it was a good deal like a newly married couple passing through Niagara without stopping to see the Falls. I made this up to her later.
At Pasadena we lived in a room for a few days and then rented a small but adequate cottage at 789 South Mentor, about a ten-minute walk from my office at the college. It was modest indeed, but it had two palms, an orange tree, two very prolific lemon trees, and a loquat tree. It fit our $1,800 salary very well, for the rent was $17 a month. Our first guests for a meal were Ethel and Harry Bateman.
We had been married less than a month before I was horrified to learn that my wife knew absolutely no physics. With naive and, as it turned out, entirely misguided zeal, I decided I must teach her. I brought home the first volume of the introductory text by Robert Millikan and Henry Gale, and we started to read it aloud.
All our long life together we have read aloud, and with the greatest mutual pleasure. As I write these lines my wife Thompson's fine biography of Robert Frost. But a physics text turned out to be a very poor start for the reading pro- is waiting for me to stop and read to her while she knits— in this particular instance the book being Lawrance gram. Things went not too badly for a few pages, but then we came to the first equation, f = ma, or force equals mass times acceleration. Mary promptly fell off the toboggan, and has been off ever since.
I was in love, and I didn't propose that force, mass, or acceleration should come between us; but this was a disturbing experience. It was, in fact, the beginning of my education to the fact that there are various complementary ways of approaching life and its problems, the logical and usually quantitative procedures of science constituting one good way, and the intuitive, artistic, and more philosophical approach being an equally valid way.
This first year of married life was as idyllic as the storybooks say it ought to be. My work was engrossing. We both hugely enjoyed the privilege of attending the luxurious Presbyterian church on Colorado Street, where we heard truly wonderful sermons by Robert Freeman. We hiked up into the mountains, sometimes acting as overnight chaperones for two student couples we liked very much. Ernest Watson, later to be Dean of the College but at that time a very special sort of assistant to Millikan, took us on an occasional trip in Dr. Millikan's car, of which he had the use. We had the earth by the tail with a downhill pull.
In the spring of 1920 I received communications from Dean Slichter and from Max Mason, as well as the more official word from George Clark Sellery, the Dean of the sin. They wanted me to come back. Max said, "We can College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconwork together—in fact, let's write a book on electromagnetic field theory." This was irresistible.
In response to my note to him Dr. Millikan sent me a handwritten letter:
Dear Warren:
If you insist on going back to the University of Wisconsin, of course I can't stop you. But I can refuse to accept your resignation. In fact I do not accept your resignation, and you will continue to be a professor of The California Institute of Technology, on leave
Very cordially yours, Robert A. Millikan
I have had the pleasure, several times over the years, of reminding the authorities of Galtech that they live under until your return.
the threat of my return.