Peter Sachs Collopy

A Prank, a Story, and an Origin of Oral History at Caltech

2026-03-31T00:00:00-07:00

In 1932, Caltech undergraduate students planned a prank on their professor, astronomer Fritz Zwicky. Zwicky often put students on the spot in class, so, noticing that he struggled with pronouncing one of their names, they put him on the spot with a harder name by registering a fictional student, Helmar Scieite, for Zwicky’s course Analytical Mechanics. Unfortunately for them, Zwicky, perhaps suspecting mischief, entirely skipped the name when taking attendance and asked instead if anyone he hadn’t named was present. The students escalated their prank. When he administered the final exam, Zwicky wrote questions on the board and left the room; under Caltech’s Honor System, students were responsible for not cheating. Another student came into the room, copied the questions, and shared them with several graduate students, who each meticulously answered one question; the undergrad then copied the answers in uniform handwriting, “switching languages between questions,” recalled co-conspirator John Hatcher, “with interpolated insulting remarks.” This story mutated as it spread over the years. The student pranksters became fellow faculty who resented Zwicky’s tough grading, and the events ended with Scieite receiving an A. In 1974, *Caltech News* associate editor Kay Walker investigated the story, talking to longtime faculty and writing to several alumni, prompting Hatcher to write back with the story in detail. It was perhaps this experience of finding knowledge of the past in the minds of those present that prompted Walker to donate $300 to the Caltech Archives to begin an oral history project. In 1978, Institute Archivist Judith Goodstein hired three interviewers, Harriet Lyle, Ann Scheid, and Mary Terrall, who had previously worked for MIT’s short-lived oral history program and went on to become a history of science professor at UCLA. Before the year was out, they had interviewed chemist and Trustee Arnold Beckman, nutrition researcher Henry Borsook, soil mechanics expert Frederick Converse, economist Horace Gilbert, English professor and dean of admissions L. Winchester Jones, electrical and rocket engineer Frederick Lindvall, Jet Propulsion Laboratory co-founder Frank Malina, seismologist Charles Richter, physicist William Smythe, and chemist Ernest Swift. Each of these oral histories was transcribed and became a volume on the shelves of the Archives, where they were consulted by Caltech community members and visiting researchers alike. Caltech deemed the pilot a success, and the Caltech Archives continued to produce oral history interviews. Over the next 45 years, we developed a collection of more than 250 interviews; it continues to grow today, now with interviews from both the Archives and the Caltech Heritage Project. The Archives had begun a decade before the oral history project, in 1968, with the papers of George Ellery Hale, Robert Millikan, and Theodore von Kármán—unpublished records of their lives and careers, such as letters, diaries, lectures, and research notes. Faculty members and their heirs soon donated more such collections, some Caltech departments transferred their historical records, and Goodstein began bringing together thousands of photographs of Caltech and its people. Oral histories added another dimension to these collections. “History,” reported a *Caltech News* writer—perhaps Kay—“is recorded in the memories of human beings as well as in documents and letters, and Caltech is launching a program to tap this valuable, and perishable, resource for its archives.” Decades later, in 2002, oral history transcripts were among the first items the Caltech Archives published digitally on the web, making them perhaps our most widely used collection, especially among members of the Caltech community. They have been joined online by digitized photographs, film and video, and some of our many collections of faculty papers. Today, those faculty papers remain the heart of the Caltech Archives, and faculty and their families continue to donate more, along with increasing quantities of email and other digital media. Our collections include film, video and audiotape, dissertations, campus and student publications, websites, fine art, scientific instruments, and rare books dating back to the Scientific Revolution. We welcome appointments to visit and explore this history.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Explores Where Film & Science Collide in LA

2026-02-24T00:00:00-08:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} To celebrate the city of Los Angeles in the wake of last year's devastating fires, Architectural Digest asked a group of iconic Angelenos to share their favorite local places. This is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s love letter to LA. The actor joins Architectural Digest at Caltech to explore how science, technology, and Hollywood filmmaking intersect in one of the world’s leading research institutions. From founding the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which helped with the first moon landings, and NASA continues to manage today, to astrophysicist Kip Thorne’s collaboration with Christopher Nolan on Interstellar, discover why Joseph Gordon-Levitt believes the relationship between art and science makes Los Angeles one of the most important cities for science, and vital to its future.

Electrifying Los Angeles

2026-01-08T00:00:00-08:00

This term we will be exploring the meteoric rise of modern Los Angeles through two lenses: the history of its energy infrastructure and of our own institution, Caltech. These two histories intertwine in multiple ways, in the form of big personalities, grand ambitions, and feats of technical bravado. But innumerable smaller, less-visible parts of Caltech and Southern California history also play vital roles in the shaping of this region and our home institution. To trace these stories, large and small, we will be turning to the Caltech Archives and the digital collections of The Huntington Library. You will be learning how to research and communicate the history of archival objects, culminating in a final “group exhibition” of your curated pieces.

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

January 8: Caltech and Its Archives
- Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990), 54–62.
January 15: Thinking Critically About Infrastructure
- Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedelus 190 (1980): 121–136.
January 22: Electrifying America
- David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (MIT Press, 1992), ix–xi, 85–137.
- Explore the Southern California Edison Photographs and Negatives via the Huntington Digital Library.
January 29: Big Creek and the High Voltage Research Laboratory
- Donald C. Jackson, Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastman and the Control of Water in the West (University Press of Kansas, 1995), 59–83.
- Peter Sachs Collopy, “Iterating Infrastructure from High Volts to X-Rays to Nuclear Physics: Early Caltech Science in the Archives,” Caltech Physics Colloquium, January 13, 2022.
February 5: Gordon Kaufmann at Caltech
- Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Designing for the Genders: Curricula and Architecture at Scripps College and the California Institute of Technology,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985): 439–461.
February 12: Hoover Dam and the Technological Sublime
- David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (MIT Press, 1994), 133–142.
- Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (Oxford University Press, 1992), 64–78.
- Joan Didion, “At the Dam,” originally published as “A Piece of Work for Now and Doomsday,” Life, March 13, 1970, 20B.
February 19: Electric Los Angeles
- Daniel L. Wuebben, Power Lined: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 87–129.
- Visit from Prof. Brian Jacobson.
February 26
- No class: independent Archives visits
March 4: Chinatown screening
March 5: River Futures
- Vittoria di Palma and Alexander Robinson, “Willful Waters,” Places, May 2018.
- Visit from Dr. Nick Earhart.

The Beckmans at Caltech, 1923–1939

2025-06-10T00:00:00-07:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} From 1923 to 1939, Arnold Beckman was first a graduate student and then a professor at Caltech. Peter Sachs Collopy, PhD discusses Arnold and Mabel Beckman’s relationships with Caltech and how Caltech changed during this period.

Art and Science at Caltech: Four Histories

2024-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} The *Crossing Over* exhibition, which unfolds across three independent spaces on the Caltech campus, draws on the research of 12 scholars in the visual culture of Caltech science. Their collective work is captured in the exhibit and a companion exhibition catalog that weave together the history of science with historical and contemporary art. In a discussion, moderated by Caltech archivist Peter Sachs Collopy, four of the contributing scholars discuss the many forms of collaboration between art and science: from drawings of molecules to the architecture of the Caltech campus itself, and in the context of films, from a Frank Capra television special on subatomic particles to how outer space is illustrated by scientists and engineers at JPL and producers in Hollywood.

Passing in the Hallway: Art and Technology at Caltech, 1968–1972

2024-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

In 1969, Caltech converted seven rooms in its defunct Earhart Plant Research Laboratory into an art studio, hosting artists who worked in the media of plastics and computer animation. In the long 1960s, artists and scientists embraced each others’ professional practices, and universities created new centers for art and technology. Artists and scientists did not come to these new programs with the same motivations and expectations. Many artists were interested in synthesizing art with science and engineering, but most scientists and engineers who engaged in art were seeking a break from their technical work rather than a different mode of it, making genuine collaboration the exception rather than the rule.

Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020

2024-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

Science is as much a visual practice as a textual or quantitative one. For centuries, scientists have used microscopes, telescopes, painting, illustration, printing, and photography to perceive nature and communicate what they see in it, often in collaboration with artists. In the twentieth century, scientists also came to view creativity as an essential resource and looked to art to foster it. *Crossing Over* is an interdisciplinary publication that looks at one prominent university—the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena—as a site for scientific and artistic image production. Uncovering the rich pictorial record embedded in its Archives and Special Collections, a team of visual culture scholars examines Caltech through a series of tightly focused case studies. How, the authors ask, have science and engineering institutions like Caltech used scientific representation, art, and architecture to construct themselves and produce discovery and invention? This book reveals new facets of life and work at Caltech that will be illuminating even to those familiar with the school, showcasing views that informed—and were informed by—the vibrant visual culture of Southern California. This volume was published to accompany [an exhibition](/exhibits/2024/crossing-over) on view at the California Institute of Technology from September 27 to December 15, 2024. It was a [finalist](https://www.collegeart.org/news/2025/11/13/announcing-the-2026-morey-book-award-and-barr-awards-shortlists/) for the College Art Association’s 2026 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions.

Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020

2024-09-27T00:00:00-07:00

*Crossing Over* was an expansive public exhibition that wove together the history of science with historical and contemporary art. How, it asked, have scientists and engineers used images and collaborated with artists to discover, invent, and communicate? How have artists been inspired by Caltech science? Spread across six sites at Caltech, the exhibition featured displays of over 200 objects, most drawn from the Caltech Archives and Special Collections, including rare books, paintings, drawings, photographs, scientific instruments, molecular models, and video. September 27 – December 15, 2024 Honorable mention for The Architect’s Newspaper’s 2025 Best of Design Award for Exhibition Design and finalist for the 2026 Architizer A+ Award for a Sustainable Interior Project, both for design by Tim Durfee Studio.

Art and Science Collide at Southern California’s Third Annual PST ART Series

2024-09-12T00:00:00-07:00

Touted as the “largest cultural event in the United States” by organizers, the PST ART series (formerly known as Pacific Standard Time), returns for its third year in Southern California. This year’s theme Art & Science Collide celebrates the interrelationship of art and science with over 800 artists and more than 70 cultural institutions participating across Southern California. The series, which will take place from September 15, 2024 - February 16, 2025, looks to bring science to the public with conversations touching on the crossroads of climate change and social justice, the future of Indigenous knowledge and technology, and exploring the science behind the colors in some of your favorite films.

Curating Art and Science

2022-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

This is a syllabus for Curating Art and Science, a course offered in museum studies, history, and cultural studies in fall 2022 at Claremont Graduate University. This course will explore the history of interactions between art, science, and technology, and how to curate exhibitions on the subject. It is partly based on the instructors’ work, as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time 2024 program on art, science, and LA, to develop a multi-sited, campus-wide exhibition at Caltech on Caltech’s own uses of visual culture over the last century to produce science, to communicate it, and to foster scientific identity and community. Our readings will emphasize the 20th century US, and sometimes specifically Caltech’s own history, but student projects may extend beyond this geographical and chronological context.

The course will be divided into three modules:

Art and Science: During the first part of the semester, we will think about the relationships between art, science, technology, and visual culture more generally, studying foundational texts on scientific illustration, the influence of science on modern and contemporary art, technological art, and the architecture of scientific institutions.
Curating: The second part of the semester takes an in-depth look at the history of exhibitions, both in the science and visual arts realms, and explores the nature and roles of archives and collections as sources for display. We will pay particular attention to contemporary curatorial theory and practice as it has evolved from the 1960s to the present. There will be site visits to the Benton Museum at Pomona College, where we will see an installation by California Light and Space artist Helen Pashgian; the Huntington Library, where we view a site-specific installation by artist Lita Albuquerque and meet with senior curators working on art and science exhibitions; and the Caltech Archives and Special Collections, where we will explore the records kept by scientific institutions. Other guests will join the conversation to deepen our understanding of discourse and standards in the field.
Disciplinary Histories and Student Presentations: During the third part of the semester, we will focus on the histories of visual culture in specific scientific disciplines, as well as art and architecture, often reading case studies from Caltech’s own history. Students will curate, design, and present possible exhibition displays on these topics drawing on the Caltech Archives and other local collections.

Throughout the semester, students will investigate a range of visual practices at Caltech and other scientific institutions according to the specific scientific, artistic, and institutional functions they serve. What kinds of information do scientific images convey, and how do we best look at them in their varying contexts? How do we account for the choices scientists and artists make when they represent their work, and what cultural biases or preferences might their images contain? How do scientific images relate to other images in art, technology, and popular culture?

This course does not require any specific background preparation. For those unfamiliar with the academic study of visual culture, additional reading in James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini, Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 2020) may be useful for context.

Student Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

Understand the complex interactions between art, science, technology, and visual culture in the 20th and early 21st centuries, especially as they relate to the California Institute of Technology, other American science institutions, and Southern California.
Navigate art and science discourses in the humanities.
Reflect on and engage critically with trends and issues in contemporary curatorial practice.
Collaborate with project partners.
Strengthen research, writing, and presentation skills, communicating in a variety of formats and for diverse audiences.
Create compelling exhibitions with an understanding of different spaces and their design, as well as the selection, care, and management of display objects.
Know artists, scholars, curators, and design professionals working in the field.

Assignments

Exhibition review (500 words) of a local exhibition of your choice which engages with both art and science. Specific guidelines for this review will be posted online and discussed in class. Reviews are due electronically before class on October 24, 2022.
Exhibition proposal of a concept, items, didactic text, and layout for a small display on an art/science theme either chosen from a list provided by the course instructors or proposed by the student. Elements of the proposal will include a short introductory text (500 words), a checklist of 15–30 display items, a sample wall text (250 words) and didactic exhibition label (100 words), and space selection and layout/fabrication ideas. You may work independently or collaborate with one or more partners. In addition to handing in proposal materials, each student will present on their proposal during the third portion of the semester. Your presentation will be assessed based on the comprehensiveness and originality of your ideas; their viability in a real-life gallery, museum, or library setting; and your creative communication skills. Specific guidelines for a successful exhibition proposal will be posted online and discussed in class. Proposals are due on your assigned presentation day, between November 7 and December 12.
Curatorial essay (15–20 pages, no more than 5000 words) providing historical, cultural, aesthetic, or other scholarly analysis of your proposal exhibition, or, with permission of the instructors, of another topic. Specific guidelines for the creation of a curatorial essay will be posted online and discussed in class. Curatorial essays are due electronically on December 16.

Your grade for the course will be based 20% on the exhibition review, 30% each on the exhibition proposal and curatorial essay, and 20% on your engaged and insightful participation in class.

We’ll discuss readings during every class, so please read everything assigned before the class meeting it’s listed under. Please submit assignments by email to both instructors.

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

August 29: Introduction

Art and Science

September 12: Scientific Images
- James Elkins, The Domain of Images (Cornell University Press, 1999), 3–51.
- Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1–45.
- Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 1–40.
- Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Zone, 2007), 9–53.
September 19: Science in Art
- James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini, Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 2020), 339–362.
- Chiara Ambrosio, “Cubism and the Fourth Dimension,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 41 (2016): 202–221.
- Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists,” Art Journal 47 (1988): 323–340.
- Vanja V. Malloy, “From Macrocosm to Microcosm: Examining the Role of Modern Science in American Art,” in Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein, ed. Vanja V. Malloy (Mead Art Museum, Amherst College and MIT Press, 2018), 71–97.
September 26: The Architecture of Science
- Sophie Forgan, “The Architecture of Science and the Idea of a University,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20 (1989): 405–434.
- Robert E. Kohler, “Labscapes: Naturalizing the Lab,” History of Science 40 (2002): 473–501.
- Thomas F. Gieryn, “Two Faces on Science: Building Identities for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology,” in The Architecture of Science, ed. Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (MIT Press, 1999), 423–455.
- Thomas F. Gieryn, “Laboratory Design for Post-Fordist Science,” Isis 99 (2008): 796–802.
- Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio: Dispersing Sites of Production,” in Galison and Thompson, Architecture of Science, 497–540.
October 3: Art and Technology
- Fred Turner, “Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative Labor in Cold War America,” Journal of Visual Culture 7 (2008): 5–26.
- Anne Collins Goodyear, “From Technophilia to Technophobia: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Reception of ‘Art and Technology,’” Leonardo 41, no. 2 (2008): 169–173.
- Matthew Wisnioski, “Why MIT Institutionalized the Avant-Garde: Negotiating Aesthetic Virtue in the Postwar Defense Institute,” Configurations 21 (2013): 85–116.
- W. Patrick McCray, “Fallout and Spinoff: Commercializing the Art-Technology Nexus,” in Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s, ed. David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner (University of California Press, 2019), 61–77.

Curating

October 10: Showing Is Telling: Contemporary Curatorial Practice
- Guest: Tim Durfee, Principal of Tim Durfee Studio and Professor of Media Design Practices, Art Center College of Design
- Robert Storr, “Show and Tell,” in What Makes a Great Exhibition? ed. Paula Marincola (Reaktion, 2006), 14–31.
- Kate Fowle, “Who Cares? Understanding the Role of the Curator Today,” in Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, ed. Steven Rand and Heather Kouris (apexart, 2007).
- Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 14–16, 22–35.
- Jens Hofmann and Maria Lind, “To Show or Not to Show,” Mousse Magazine, no. 31 (November 2011).
- Adrian George, The Curator’s Handbook: Museums, Commercial Galleries, Independent Spaces (Thames and Hudson, 2015), 152–206.
October 17: Archives and Collections
- Guest: elin o’Hara slavick, artist and curator
- Elizabeth Yale, “The History of Archives: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 18 (2015): 332–359.
- Lorraine Daston, “The Sciences of the Archive,” Osiris 27 (2012): 156–187.
- Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, no. 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.
- Jennifer Tucker, “The Historian, the Picture, and the Archive,” Isis 97 (2006): 111–120.
- George, Curator’s Handbook, 30–48 and 56–87.
October 24: Exhibiting Art, Exhibiting Science
- Guest: Dan Lewis, Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science and Technology, Huntington Library
- Sharon Macdonald, “Exhibitions of Power and Powers of Exhibitions: An Introduction to the Politics of Display,” in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, and Culture, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Routledge, 1998), 1–24.
- Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 1–56.
- Tony Bennet, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Fergusson, and Sandy Nairne (Routledge, 1996), 81–112.
- Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2012), 57–100.
October 31: From White Cube to Black Box: Contemporary Curatorial Thought
- Guest: Rebecca McGrew, Senior Curator, Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College
- Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, Part I,” Artforum, March 1976.
- Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” in Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition, Catalogue (Hatje Cantz, 2002).
- Carolee Thea, “Okwui Enwezor,” in On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators (Distributed Art Publishers, 2009), 43–53.
- Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (MIT Press, 2016), 9–49.
- Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 178–246.
- Irit Rogoff, “‘Smuggling’: An Embodied Criticality,” August 2006.

Disciplinary Histories and Student Presentations

November 7: Astronomy and Planetary Science
- Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, “‘Stars Should Henceforth Register Themselves’: Astrophotography at the Early Lick Observatory,” British Journal for the History of Science 30 (1997): 177–205.
- Omar W. Nasim, “Handling the Heavens: Things and the Photo-Objects of Astronomy,” in Photo-Objects: On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives in the Humanities and Sciences, ed. Julia Bärnighausen, Costanza Caraffa, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider, and Petra Wodtke (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 2019), 161–175.
- Elizabeth A. Kessler, “Technology’s Palette: Voyager’s Eyes and the Hyperchromatic Enhancement of Jupiter and Saturn,” Technology and Culture 62 (2021): 1087–1118.
- Janet Vertesi, “Drawing As: Distinctions and Disambiguation in Digital Images of Mars,” in Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, ed. Catelijne Coopmans, Janet Vertesi, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar (MIT Press, 2014), 15–36.
November 14: Biology
- Nick Hopwood, “Copying Pictures, Evidencing Evolution,” Public Domain Review, May 18, 2016.
- Maura C. Flannery, “Images of the Cell in Twentieth-Century Art and Science,” Leonardo 31 (1998): 195–204.
- Christopher Kelty and Hannah Landecker, “A Theory of Animation: Cells, L-Systems, and Film,” Grey Room, no. 17 (2004): 31–63.
- Soraya de Chadarevian, “Models and the Making of Molecular Biology,” in Models: The Third Dimension of Science, ed. Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood (Stanford University Press, 2004), 339–368.
November 21: Chemistry
- Christoph Meinel, “Molecules and Croquet Balls,” in de Chadarevian and Hopwood, Models, 242–275.
- Alberto Cambrosio, Daniel Jacobi, and Peter Keating, “Arguing with Images: Pauling’s Theory of Antibody Formation,” Representations 89, (2005): 94–130.
November 28: Art and Architecture
- Stefanos Polyzoides, “Bertram Goodhue and the Architecture of Caltech, 1915 to 1939,” Classicist, no. 15 (2018): 8–19.
- Zabet Patterson, “From the Gun Controller to the Mandala: The Cybernetic Cinema of John and James Whitney,” Grey Room, no. 36 (2009): 36–57.
- Stephen Nowlin, “@Caltech: Art, Science and Technology, 1969–1971,” Leonardo 50 (2017): 443–447.
- Lisa Lynch, “‘Out-liers,’ ‘Insiders,’ and Practical Harvest: Art as Technology Transfer in a Research Environment,” Research in Science and Technology Studies 13 (2002): 239–265.
December 5: Physics
- Peter Galison and Alexi Assmus, “Artificial Clouds, Real Particles,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 225–274.
- David Kaiser, “Stick Figure Realism: Conventions, Reification, and the Persistence of Feynman Diagrams, 1948–1964,” Representations 70 (2000): 49–86.
- James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980–2000 (Stanford University Press, 2008), 156–223.
- Colleen O’Reilly, “Pedagogical Interventions: The Physics Photographs of Berenice Abbott,” RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 41, no. 2 (2016): 77–90.
December 12: Conclusion

Behind the Book: Escape from Earth

2022-03-24T00:00:00-07:00

Robert Millikan, Eugenics, and Justice in the Laboratory and the Archives

2022-02-07T00:00:00-08:00

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Iterating Infrastructure from High Volts to X-Rays to Nuclear Physics: Early Caltech Science in the Archives

2022-01-13T00:00:00-08:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} In the 1920s and 1930s, Caltech iteratively developed infrastructure for research on high-voltage electricity, x-rays, and nuclear physics. In 1923, the Institute built the High Voltage Research Laboratory, now the Ronald and Maxine Lind Hall of Mathematics and Physics, with funding from Southern California Edison, which used the unique million-volt high-bay research facility to test high-voltage transmission equipment. Among Caltech's faculty, electrical engineer Royal Sorensen invented the cascade transformer for the facility, and physicist Robert Millikan planned to use its power to dismantle the atom and achieve the alchemists' dream of transmutation of matter. Instead, though, Millikan's student Charles Lauritsen made High Volts a key site for high-voltage x-ray research, including on the uses of radiation therapy for cancer, bringing medical physics to Caltech in the early 1930s. Lauritsen and his students in turn modified their x-ray tubes to conduct research in nuclear physics, realizing Millikan's vision of deconstructing the atom. These three research programs built on each other, repurposing apparatus and thus ultimately the resources of the electricity industry to develop experimental physics in new directions. In this talk, I will use this early history of Caltech physics to think about both how research programs are shaped by the material resources of earlier projects and what we can learn from the collections of the Caltech Archives.

Archiving Communities of Resilience and Resistance in Caltech’s Present & Past

2021-04-07T00:00:00-07:00

The legacy of Caltech is marked by stories of injustice. It is also marked by the communities forged in the face of that injustice, exclusion, and bigotry. In this virtual event hosted on April 27, 2021, a panel of current and former members of Caltech’s staff, faculty, and student body (Rochelle Diamond, Dr. Melany Hunt, and Dr. Edray Goins) offered reflections on their personal histories of organizing, agitating, and advocating on campus. In doing so, we consider the ways that remembering those histories - through practices of archiving and other forms of memory work - can inform, ground, and inspire present and future activism at Caltech. The event also included remarks from Dr. Peter Collopy, Caltech’s University Archivist, and was facilitated by Nivetha (Niv) Karthikeyan as part of her 2020 Milton and Rosalind Chang Prize project, “Intersections: Building Solidarity Through Community Archives.” This event was hosted by Athena Castro and Greg Fletcher in the Caltech Y.

Caltech’s House of Lightning

2020-10-08T00:00:00-07:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} In 1923, Caltech and Southern California Edison Company built the High Voltage Research Laboratory to test high-voltage equipment and conduct research in physics and electrical engineering. Designed by architect Bertram Goodhue, with sculpture by Lee Lawrie, it became home to electrical demonstrations and research on x-rays and nuclear physics.

Sitting Down with Uncomfortable Things in the Caltech Archives

2020-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} In this event, members of the Caltech community presented their reflections on a collection of digitized materials curated from the Caltech Archives. The “uncomfortable things” selected for this discussion were artifacts of experiences of exclusion, inequality, discrimination, and bigotry in the history of Caltech. In this session, we acknowledged that the legacy of Caltech is intertwined with stories of injustice. By asking participants to personally reflect on that legacy, this event highlighted how there is no single solution or perspective sufficient to answer the multitude of questions and concerns that our community has about its history. This event took place on October 2, 2020 as part of the series “Critical Intersections: Conversations on History, Race, and Science,” sponsored by the Caltech Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Ready, Set, Spark

2020-08-13T00:00:00-07:00

When Caltech’s former Sloan Lab reopened in January 2019 as the Linde Hall of Mathematics and Physics, staff, faculty, and students encountered a structure with a transformed interior that was originally built 97 years ago. Over the course of a century, it has witnessed many changes, evolving to suit the needs of the disciplines it has served: physics, mathematics, and electrical engineering. In its earliest years, the building was known by several names, including Edison High Tension Laboratory and High Voltage Research Laboratory, but was generally referred to as High Volts. It came into being out of a partnership between Caltech and the Southern California Edison (SCE) company, which contributed money to its construction in exchange for use of it for research. SCE had recently decided to change its transmission lines from 150,000 to 220,000 volts. The lines and associated equipment would need to be able to withstand a massive surge if they were struck by lightning, so SCE wanted to conduct research at a million volts, a higher voltage than could be reliably produced by any existing American laboratory.

Biology Returns to Caltech

2020-08-06T00:00:00-07:00

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From High Volts to High Energy Physics

2020-07-23T00:00:00-07:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} Last year, Caltech rededicated a building on its campus following a major renovation. The Alfred P. Sloan Laboratory for Mathematics and Physics became the Ronald and Maxine Linde Hall of Mathematics and Physics. Linde Hall occupies a structure which is now 97 years old and has evolved over that time with the disciplines of physics, mathematics, and electrical engineering. The building, constructed in 1923, originally had a few names, including Edison High Tension Laboratory, High Voltage Research Laboratory, and High Potential Research Laboratory, but was generally referred to as High Volts. It was the fifth permanent building constructed on Caltech’s campus, after Throop Hall, Gates Laboratory of Chemistry, Culbertson Auditorium, and the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics. Astrophysicist George Ellery Hale, as a Caltech trustee, conceived of the laboratory as part of a strategy of persuading experimentalist Robert Millikan to come to Caltech. Millikan was tortured—his word, not mine—by his decision of whether to come to Caltech or stay at the University of Chicago. Hale’s fellow trustees Henry M. Robinson and Arthur Fleming—both of whom became namesakes of buildings on campus—were also on the board of directors of the local electric company, Southern California Edison. Hale proposed to them that if the Edison Company bought Caltech a new laboratory, both parties would benefit: “I believe the Company would get its money back in the form of new information regarding insulation and other problems connected with high voltage lines, not to speak of the advertising value.” He was right: The company's interest came from a decision they made around 1920 to change their transmission lines from 150,000 to 220,000 volts. Such lines and associated insulators, transformers, circuit breakers, and other equipment would need to be able to withstand a massive surge if they were struck by lightning, so the Edison Company wanted to conduct research at a million volts, a higher voltage than could be reliably produced by any existing American laboratory. The lab cost $139,915, of which Edison paid $105,000. The design of High Volts was also a collaboration. Millikan provided specifications, including a requirement that the building have ventilation to allow ozone to escape but also not let in light. The interior was dominated by a single large industrial space packed with high-voltage apparatus, including two key pieces of million-volt equipment. A million-volt surge generator produced rapid impulses of artificial lightning. In addition, Royal Sorensen, who founded electrical engineering at Caltech when he was hired in 1910, invented the cascade transformer in 1922 (an innovation which was simultaneously made by others in Germany) and designed a million-volt model, composed of four 250,000 volt transformers built by Westinghouse which each weighed 22 tons, for High Volts; it stepped an externally-supplied 15,000 volts up to a million volts of continuous current. Edison engineers designed a steel frame, the second constructed in Pasadena, and prominent architect Bertram Goodhue designed the exterior, which used a diamond pattern to provide texture in the absence of windows. The similarly prominent architectural sculptor Lee Lawrie produced a relief over the entry which conveyed the high voltage research performed within. Sorensen regularly gave a public lecture and demonstration on high voltage electricity, with the latter portion taking place in High Volts. “It proved to have its usual strong draw this year when, on a rainy Friday evening, almost 1000 people stormed East Bridge,” reported *Engineering and Science*, Caltech’s research magazine, in 1949. “Prof. Sorensen obligingly gave his lecture twice, and the lab ran off three demonstrations, while a special police detail coped with the crush.” In [his oral history](http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Roberts_J), Caltech chemistry professor John Roberts recalls visiting Caltech as a teenager for these demonstrations: >The High Voltage Lab was a fabulous attraction. What is now the Sloan building then had no windows in it. It was deep down inside—just a great big basement-like room with no upper floors. And they had these big girders up at the top. The floor of this room was filled with all kinds of electrical equipment—enormous transformers, and condensers, and so on, big swooping insulators. It looked like Frankenstein’s laboratory. Great transformers topped with big mushroom rings, you know, they used to shoot sparks off of.… They’d have a “horn gap,” where a pair of wires would be close together at the top of the transformer and far apart at the top of the room. They would start an arc at the bottom and it would grow in length and rise to the ceiling. That was really impressive to watch as the arcs got up to the ceiling, and then crack, and disappear. They’d make this crackling noise as they’d go up. And then they’d charge up the condensers and shoot off big sparks, and blow up some blocks of wood, and stuff like that. According to the February 1949 issue of *Engineering and Science*, “these facilities have been used to aid Southern California Edison in the development of high voltage transmission lines, to furnish lightning protection of oil storage tanks for the oil industry, to test insulators for numerous utility companies.” The transmission lines tested at High Volts made it possible to transmit electricity to Southern California from the Hoover Dam in Nevada. Among the significant inventions of the lab was a vacuum switch designed by Sorensen and Millikan which was manufactured for aircraft and other industries. Going back to 1921, though, as Hale saw it in his letter to his fellow trustees, though, High Volts would have an entirely different benefit for the physicist he was trying to recruit. “Millikan,” he wrote, “would also have the advantage of using enormous voltage to bust up some of his atoms. This possibility, which no other laboratory could match, is what excites him.… When a man gets on the trail of the philosopher's stone, even if he isn't after gold, you can accomplish a great deal by offering it to him!” Millikan's interest did indeed come from his interest in taking apart atoms and discovering what they were made of. He was also seeking, as Hale's reference to the philosopher's stone suggests, to transmute matter from one element to another by reconstructing the nucleus. In 1904, Millikan had already written that “the dreams of the ancient alchemists are true, for the radioactive elements all appear to be slowly but spontaneously transmuting themselves into other elements.” In 1912, he believed he and his student George Winchester produced hydrogen ions from aluminum using high-voltage electricity. In 1919, Ernest Rutherford persuaded more physicists that he had caused nitrogen atoms to eject protons by bombarding them with alpha particles. Several scientists claimed they had turned various metals into gold in the 1920s using electricity—it was a renaissance of alchemy. Although Millikan submitted a grant proposal for support for this research in 1921, and although he, Hale, and Caltech as an institution occasionally referred to the High Voltage Laboratory as intended for investigations inside the atom, Millikan never published the results of his efforts to transmute matter at Caltech, nor can evidence of it be found in his surviving laboratory notebooks. In his article on the subject, historian Robert Kargon, suggests that “these efforts may have in fact been made but were unsuccessful,” adding that Millikan “preferred to bury quietly unfruitful enterprises; he position as fundraiser for an exciting new research center made such unpublicized interment a practical necessity.” Ultimately, then, the new lab would find other uses. Charles Lauritsen, who received his PhD from Caltech in 1929 and remained here for the rest of his career, made High Volts a key site for high-voltage X-ray research, building the first million-volt X-ray tube there in about 1930. Lauritsen soon became interested in the medical applications of this device, writing in his patent application that “radiations substantially the frequency of the gamma radiation from radium may be obtained from the tube” and that “such tubes can therefore be employed as the full equivalent of radium in the treatment of disease, or for therapeutic purposes.” Although Caltech biologists steered clear of medical applications at this time, its physicists did not. Millikan enlisted local physician Seeley G. Mudd, whose mother was already donating a geology building to the Institute in memory of his father, mining tycoon Seeley W. Mudd. That building is now typically called North Mudd, as the younger Mudd later donated an associated building named after himself as well, South Mudd. I for one didn't realize until I was preparing this talk that the two buildings are named after two different men. To return to our story, Millikan enlisted the younger Mudd in a partnership researching the therapeutic effects of Lauritsen's million-volt x-ray tube compared to lower voltage radiation already available in hospitals, and the Los Angeles County General Hospital began to bring cancer patients to High Volts for radiation therapy. Although he was independently wealthy and didn't receive a salary, and indeed donated money as well as his time to the project, Caltech appointed Mudd became Research Associate in Radiation, and later, in 1935, Professor of X-Ray Therapy. Physician Clyde Emery was made Assistant Professor of X-Ray Therapy at the same time. Caltech's medical physics research was so active that it became one of the main reasons for the Institute to construct a new building, Kellogg Radiation Laboratory, in 1932. Meanwhile, Lauritsen’s students, funded by their work maintaining x-ray tubes for radiation therapy, began modifying High Volts equipment for nuclear physics, making Millikan's vision of deconstructing the atom there a reality; H. Richard Crane, for example, produced neutrons by ion beam for the first time in the early 1930s. “The transmutation of the elements, now an accomplished fact,” wrote Millikan to their funder, W. K. Kellogg, “plus artificial radioactivity, plus neutron beams—all three effects producible by Lauritsen tubes—plus the manifold uses of ultra-short wireless waves, therapeutic and otherwise, open up endless opportunities.” As with many research programs, radiation therapy came to an end at Caltech when funders—not only Kellogg but also the National Academy of Sciences’ National Cancer Advisory Council and the Childs Foundation, decided to stop funding it. In the early 1940s, Kellogg was dramatically repurposed for research on rocketry as the US prepared to enter World War II. High Volts retained its unusual, single-room architecture until 1960, when Caltech renovated it into the Alfred P. Sloan Laboratory of Mathematics and Physics, producing a more conventional internal structure, with windows and five floors of space, including new basements, rather than a single large room. By this point, it had had a storied career contributing to electrical engineering, nuclear physics, radiation therapy, spectacular public demonstrations, and even science we might call alchemy.

Chemistry Comes to Caltech

2020-06-25T00:00:00-07:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} As we mentioned in our presentations two weeks ago, the Throop of the 1910s and the Caltech of the 1920s were deeply shaped by astrophysicist George Ellery Hale’s vision for the institution. Hale came to Pasadena to found and direct Mount Wilson Observatory, but had just as much influence as a trustee of the local college. Hale’s own education had been at MIT, which became a model both for what Throop should be and for what it should not. Among his instructors in 1887 was the chemist Arthur Amos Noyes, who was only two years older and had just earned his BS and MS, also from MIT. The two men became friends. At the end of the year, Noyes—like many young American scientists of his time—travelled to Germany to study for his PhD. He conducted research on the solubility of salts in the laboratory of physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, and earned his PhD from the University of Leipzig in 1890, the same year Hale earned his BS. Noyes returned to MIT and taught organic, analytical, and physical chemistry, publishing a textbook on each. “A characteristic of *Chemical Principles* was the use of problems so phrased as to lead the student to derive the basic equations,” wrote one of Noyes’ students’ students, Linus Pauling. His “books have been described as revolutionizing the teaching of analytical chemistry and physical chemistry in America.” Noyes also founded the *Review of American Chemical Research*, which became *Chemical Abstracts*. In 1904, he became the youngest president yet of the American Chemical Society. Noyes’ research, meanwhile, concerned the chemical properties of rare elements and incorporating them into chemical analysis. In 1903, Noyes founded the Research Laboratory of Physical Chemistry at MIT, which trained the first MIT students to receive PhDs. Even though he had spent his entire career there, Noyes often found himself at odds with his colleagues, particularly about pedagogy. Engineers should study physics, chemistry, and mathematics, he argued, telling a group of freshmen that without science “you would be only rule-of-thumb engineers, who could imitate, but not initiate.” Noyes and Hale also agreed that engineers should study the arts and humanities. From 1907 to 1909, Noyes served as acting president of MIT. He left the position frustrated, and Hale began wooing him to come to Throop and build a new research institute together. “If you chose,” wrote Hale, “you would be given a free hand to develop the Engineering School [or] to devote yourself entirely to chemical research, simply giving us the privilege of discussing with you the problems encountered in working out the educational scheme.” At first, Noyes declined, but in 1913 Hale sweetened the offer. If Noyes would only visit and teach for two months, wrote Hale, Throop would provide him a new laboratory building. Noyes agreed, and all that remained for Throop was to raise funds to build the laboratory. “I don’t know where this building is coming from,” Hale confessed in a letter to his wife. Trustee Charles Warner Gates, who had amassed his fortune in the Arkansas lumber industry before retiring to South Pasadena, pledged $25,000 toward the project. He soon recruited his brother and business partner Peter Goddard Gates to contribute as well. Arthur Fleming, who had donated more to Throop than anyone else, promised another $20,000 for equipment and salaries, but only on the condition that Noyes agree to resettle permanently in Pasadena. College president James A.B. Scherer, who until now had left negotiations to Hale, wired Noyes to urge him to accept the offer, calling it “Throop’s superlative opportunity.” Noyes, though, made a counteroffer. He would split his time between Throop and MIT for two years as an experiment. In 1915, the parties agreed on this arrangement. Noyes, a lifelong bachelor, would travel across the country alone by train several times over the next few years. On one visit to Throop, he addressed the school’s 91 students on his belief that science was necessary for engineering: “Industrial research is not the main research opportunity of educational institutions,” he told them. “The main field for education institutions is research in pure science itself—a study of fundamental principles and phenomena, without immediate reference to practical application.… Scientific investigation is the spring that feeds the stream of technical progress, and if the spring dries up the stream is sure to disappear.” Given the option of leaving the university, Noyes became still more assertive about his opinions at MIT as well; “I have become much more warlike,” he wrote to Hale. As we heard from Loma two weeks ago, Throop’s leaders selected Los Angeles architect Elmer Grey to design the Gates Laboratory of Chemistry. They also asked Bertram Goodhue, who they had hired to develop a campus plan for Throop, to consult, and he designed a facade in the Spanish Colonial Revival style for which he was known. On March 10, 1916, three years after it was first proposed, construction of the two-story, reinforced-concrete building began. When completed a year later, it contained, floor-by-floor, supply rooms and dedicated laboratories for technical analysis, chemical engineering, industrial chemistry, and photochemistry in the basement. The first floor contained a lecture hall, an additional supply room, and laboratories for organic and inorganic chemistry. The second floor contained a library, a shop, and additional laboratories for physical chemistry, analytical chemistry, and research. Here are some of the laboratories. “I remember very specially the aromatic smell of the Gates Laboratory,” Caltech chemist John Roberts later recalled of touring the building as a teenager. “They used to run chemistry demonstrations in the big lab, and those were absolutely fascinating. It was a marvelous thing for a young person to be exposed to that.” Noyes’ himself sometimes preferred not to leave the laboratory, and kept a cot and food in his office. The building’s exterior featured carved stone and wrought-iron trim. Here you can see Gates in the foreground with Pasadena Hall—soon renamed Throop Hall—beyond it, and the Old Dorm beyond that. The road to upper right is California Boulevard; the one the lower left is the part of San Pasqual since replaced by a path through campus. Noyes began spending a few months a year at Throop, and in 1919 he left MIT and made Pasadena his fulltime home. In Boston, Noyes was an avid sailor and named his yacht Research. In Pasadena, he bought a large touring car, a Cadillac, and invited new graduate students on camping trips in the desert. During conversations about changing Throop’s name in 1919, Noyes voiced a strong opinion: “Even more vital” than new buildings, he wrote to Scherer, “both on the financial and on the educational and research side, would be the change of its name to the California Institute of… I do not care very much what word or words are put in place of the dots. I am still inclined to think that Science and Engineering is the best. The main thing is to remove the name Throop and to get attached to the Institution the name of the great state of California.” Two months later, the trustees followed Noyes’ advice, more or less, adopting the name California Institute of Technology. During that first visit as faculty, Noyes brought along his former student Charles Lalor Burdick from MIT. Burdick had also studied in Germany, where he had travelled in July 1914, the month World War I began, on the last regular German ship to sail from New York to Hamburg. As he completed his PhD, Burdick worked alongside “then two young, comparatively unknowns by the names of [Otto] Hahn and [Lise] Meitner,” who later discovered nuclear fission. He then conducted postdoctoral research with Fritz Haber, famous for his work on the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fixation in order to synthesize ammonia, which made possible the production of synthetic fertilizer and explosives. Haber would become equally famous for the poison gas he developed during World War I; Burdick seems to have worked on more basic research in physical chemistry, but was part of Haber’s lab during the same period of time. Burdick also attended lectures by physicists Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Then, in early 1916, at the advice of Noyes, Burdick moved on London to work with William Henry Bragg. “Noyes expressed his strong belief,” wrote Burdick, “in the importance of x-ray atomic structure analysis for the future of theoretical chemistry, and his wish to get something of the kind started at MIT. It was not so simple for an impecunious, young, PhD of American neutrality without connections to get from Berlin to London during the period of the Zeppelin raids and unrestricted submarine warfare, but… it was accomplished.” Bragg and his son Lawrence had founded the field of x-ray crystallography, determining the structures of crystals by observing how they diffract x-rays. “An interesting presentation could be made,” wrote Burdick, “of the primitiveness of the equipment then available, the old-fashioned induction coil with Leyden-jar containers and a mercury interruptor, the gas-filled x-ray tubes of unpredictable and uncertain output and ‘hardness,’ and gold-leaf electroscopes with the strangest static aberrations when it came to measuring ionization intensities.” Burdick spent six months in London, then returned to MIT, where Noyes asked him to build an improved x-ray spectrometer. A few months later, when Noyes brought Burdick to Throop, Burdick, Throop chemist James H. Ellis, and Pasadena instrument maker Fred Hensen built another spectrometer. “The things which made the original Caltech spectrometer probably the best of its day,” wrote Burdick, “were its high-power output and relative constancy of measured electrical energy to the tube. This gave possibilities for narrower spectrometer slits, precise angle measurement, sharp reflection peaks, and better measurement of relative reflection intensities of the spectral orders than had probably ever been made before.” The US entered World War I in April 1917, redirecting research towards the war effort. Hale had recently founded the National Research Council for precisely this purpose, and Noyes served as chairman of both the Council itself and its Sub-Committee on Nitrates and Ammonia, among many other administrative appointments. Now on the other side of the war from his advisor Haber, Burdick worked on a problem Haber had tackled earlier, nitrogen fixation, for the US Ordnance Reserve. After the war, Throop chemists returned to x-ray crystallography, which dominated chemistry research here for several years. In 1920, the newly-renamed Caltech awarded its first PhD to a student of Noyes, Roscoe Dickinson, for using x-ray crystallography to determine the structures of wulfenite, scheelite, sodium chlorate, and sodium bromate. “By the end of 1922,” wrote Linus Pauling later, “twenty papers had been published by members of the Division [of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering], of which fifteen were on the determination of the structure of crystals.” Pauling himself arrived as a graduate student that fall, and began studying crystal structures under the direction of Noyes and Dickinson, who remained at Caltech as a professor and became his advisor. Here you can see his glass plate x-ray diffraction photograph of nickel chlorostannate hexahydrate crystal, one of several in the Caltech Archives. And the accompanying envelope with Pauling’s notes, and the publication resulting from this research. Pauling earned his PhD for x-ray crystallography work in 1925, then spent two years in Europe studying quantum physics with scientists including Neils Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger. In 1927, he returned to Caltech as a professor and began researching the quantum mechanics of the chemical bond, work for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1954. With additional funding from Charles and Peter Gates, Caltech expanded Gates Laboratory in 1927. Bertram Goodhue had passed away in 1924, but his associates designed an annex that originally contained a new library and additional laboratories, offices, and classrooms. The Gates Annex incorporated Byzantine, Native American, Mayan, and Spanish influences. Gates Laboratory of Chemistry remained a hub of research and teaching until the 1971 San Fernando earthquake left it so badly damaged that all activities in the building had to be relocated. After the earthquake, Gates was slated for demolition. Instead, the Institute elected to save the laboratory for future renovation. Its interior was gutted and the walls reinforced with structural steel and gunite. The building remained empty for nearly a decade, awaiting further repair. Then, in 1980, funding from the Ralph M. Parsons and James Irvine foundations made possible the renovations necessary to convert the former laboratory into an administrative center. The building reopened in 1983. A year later, the Los Angeles Conservancy awarded the project its Preservation Award for “leadership in restoration and adaptive reuse of the Parsons-Gates Hall of Administration.”

Influenza Comes to Throop

2020-06-11T00:00:00-07:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} Like many institutions, Throop College of Technology confronted the 1918 flu in the context of mobilization for World War I. Indeed, throughout the United States and Europe, the context of war shaped people’s experience of the epidemic so deeply that after, many only described or wrote about the disease as an aspect of wartime. I’ll begin, then, with the story of World War I at Throop. In 1908, Throop’s board of trustees, including astrophysicist George Ellery Hale, recruited James A. B. Scherer to be the college's third president. Scherer was a Lutheran minister and historian of Japan who had previously served as president of Newberry College in South Carolina, where he had developed an engineering curriculum, as Throop’s board hoped he would at their college. World War I began in 1914, but under President Woodrow Wilson the United States maintained neutrality. Scherer’s personal experience of the war was deeply shaped by his identity as an “American of German descent” (he rejected the hyphenate “German-American”) and as a Lutheran minister. Scherer had grown up admiring Germany, but when he visited in 1907, he found the experience disillusioning. Rather than the spiritual culture “of Luther and Goethe and Beethoven,” wrote Scherer, he found “a marvelous but soulless machine,” a modern industrial society. The war, he later believed, was the result of the unchecked ambition of the German state. “Since the spring of 1916,” he wrote, “I have postponed my pacifism indefinitely, and devoted such strength as I have to the cause of civilisation against Germany.”[^1] Scherer’s personal conviction matters for the history of Throop, and the college’s experience of the flu, because he brought the institution along with him. In summer 1916, Scherer attended a military training camp in Monterey, California.[^2] That September, Throop began offering military training in its curriculum. Scherer’s initial plan was for these courses to be optional, but 80% of the students—all men since Throop had stopped admitting women in 1910—petitioned the administration to make them compulsory. “The Throop College Battalion,” wrote one of the first historians of Caltech, Imra Buwalda, “became the first ROTC unit in southern California and the first for engineers in the country.”[^3] In April 1917, the US entered the war. Scherer attempted to establish an intensive summer military training camp at Throop in 1917, but had to abort his efforts when, a week before training was to begin, the War Department denied requests for weapons and instructors.[^4] On October 1, 1918, all Throop students became enlisted soldiers under the Students Army Training Corps. By this point, Throop was not unusual in its mobilization for the war effort; 524 other colleges became SATC camps the same day.[^5] Nonetheless, SATC requested Throop enroll more students than it had, leading to a near-doubling from 189 to 340 enrolled; to supplement the buildings already standing on campus—Pasadena Hall, Gates Laboratory of Chemistry, and a dormitory—the Army began building a mess hall and three barracks, and temporarily housed students in a large circus tent. Several Army officers were assigned to the campus to train them as infantrymen and military engineers.[^6] We now have to context to understand what Throop was like during the flu epidemic of 1918, and in particular how the work of students and physical arrangement of the campus were different from any before or since. A week into this new arrangement, the first cases of influenza were reported in Pasadena. According to Pasadena City Health Officer Stanley P. Black, the virus came to Pasadena not from Los Angeles—where cases had appeared a few weeks earlier—but with “a woman who arrived a few days ago from the East,” who then infected her family and physician.[^7] The disease soon arrived at Throop as well. As students wrote in their yearbook, > The first men to fall before the disease were sent to the Pasadena Hospital, but the facilities there were soon over-crowded, and the necessity of equipping our own hospital was apparent. It was at this time that the Red Cross came to our aid.… From October 11th to October 19th a steady stream of hospital supplies flowed from the Red Cross headquarters, in the old Throop Institute buildings, to our hastily improvised hospitals.[^8] Around October 17, the college’s military commanders decided to send all students home, only to receive orders from Washington a few hours later prohibiting them from issuing passes or furloughs. “As a result,” reported the *Los Angeles Evening Herald*, “a large number of students who had already left the college were recalled, some of them from as far away as San Diego.… No quarantine will be placed on Throop College, and parents will be allowed to visit their sons. But none of the students will be issued passes or allowed off the grounds during the epidemic.”[^9] “The influenza epidemic,” wrote students, “completely demoralized the routine of the post, as it was necessary to suspend all class work, and most of the formations, during the quarantine period. At one time, there were over eighty men in the dormitory, which had been turned into a hospital.” Twelve nurses, all women, staffed the hospital. In an effort to raise morale, the YMCA organized film screenings three nights a week in a tent; according to electrical engineering professor Royal Sorensen, a fellow engineering professor operated the projector and “passed the hat after each movie in order to rent another film.”[^10] Meanwhile, outside of campus the city of Pasadena passed a number of ordinances to slow infection. “The Crown City,” commented the *L.A. Times*, permitted outdoor gatherings “provided those present are seated at least two feet apart.”[^11] In 1978, Alice Stone of the Caltech Women’s Club interviewed several women who had been part of Throop in these early years. Among them was Elizabeth Swift, who had served as assistant to the secretary in 1918. Three students, all freshmen, passed away within a period of a few weeks: chemistry major John B. Drive on October 26, general engineering major John Perham Webster on November 1, and chemistry major Russel David Forney on November 13.[^12] Meanwhile, World War I’s armistice came on November 11. According to Sorenson, “most of Pasadena headed for Marengo and Colorado Streets to join the unorganized but orderly parade which continued for hours. Some had their masks as required by law, but they were off the face hanging by a loop over one ear.”[^13] As far as I can tell, Pasadena hadn’t actually legislated mask-wearing—that came a couple months later—but one of the challenges in history is that memory is fallible. As the disease subsided, campus returned to action by November 21, when Throop held its first assembly of the term.[^14] With the war over, SATC dissolved and the college became a civilian institution again. As in many places, though, the flu had a second wave at Throop. In the new year of 1919, the institution suspended classes from January 18 to February 3. Pasadena began requiring masks in public on January 18 as well. On January 20 a fourth student died: Warren C. Mansur, a sophomore mechanical engineering major.[^15] In some ways, it was immediately after this traumatic period that the history of Caltech as we know it today began. In 1919, chemist Arthur Amos Noyes resigned his position at MIT and came to Throop full-time. In 1920, after spending much of a year on leave due to depression and nervous breakdowns, President Scherer oversaw the institution’s renaming as the California Institute of Technology, then resigned. He went on to work as a screenwriter, as president of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, and as a guide offering tours of Asia, while publishing books on the histories of both Japan and California. In 1921, physicist Robert A. Millikan also came to Caltech full-time, replacing the presidency with the role of Chairman of the Executive Council, which he would hold for 24 years. [^1]: James A. B. Scherer, *The Nation at War* (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 14–18. [^2]: Scherer, *Nation at War*, 28. [^3]: Imra W. Buwalda, “The Roots of the California Institute of Technology III,” *Engineering and Science*, December 1966, 19. [^4]: Buwalda, “Roots,” 19. [^5]: Buwalda, “Roots,” 22; Advisory Board, *Committee on Education and Special Training: A Review of Its Work During 1918* (Washington: War Department, 1919), 31. [^6]: *The Throop Tech* (Pasadena: 1919), 40; James A. B. Scherer, “The President's Ninth-Tenth Annual Report,” *Throop College Bulletin* 28, no. 83 (May 1919): 14–15. [^7]: “Influenza Breaks Out in Pasadena,” *Los Angeles Times*, October 9, 1918; “[Los Angeles, California](https://www.influenzaarchive.org/cities/city-losangeles.html),” in *American Influenza Epidemic of 1918–1919: A Digital Encyclopedia*, ed. J. Alex Navarro and Howard Markel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine and Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2016). [^8]: *Throop Tech*, 48. [^9]: “Furloughs Recalled and Cadets Return to Camp at Throop,” *Los Angeles Evening Herald*, October 17, 1918. [^10]: *Throop Tech*, 40, 46, 48; Royal Sorensen, quoted in Buwalda, “Roots,” 22. [^11]: “The Two-Foot Rule,” *Los Angeles Times*, November 7, 1918. [^12]: Scherer, “President’s Ninth-Tenth Annual Report,” 14–15; Throop Tech, frontmatter. [^13]: Sorensen, quoted in Buwalda, “Roots,” 22. [^14]: James A. B. Scherer to Arthur Fleming, November 21, 1918, 1918 file, Outgoing Correspondence subseries, Correspondence series, James A. B. Scherer Papers, California Institute of Technology Archives and Special Collections; Scherer, “President’s Ninth-Tenth Annual Report,” 14–15. [^15]: Buwalda, “Roots,” 22; Scherer, “President’s Ninth-Tenth Annual Report,” 14–15; Throop Tech, frontmatter.

Becoming Caltech, 1910–1930: Presentations from the Archives

2020-06-11T00:00:00-07:00

A century ago, a small institution called Throop Polytechnic Institute dramatically reinvented itself, transforming from a manual arts academy to an engineering school, then expanding into a research institute. In 1920, it became the California Institute of Technology. In summer 2020, Caltech archivists gave a series of livestreamed presentations on the science, engineering, architecture, and community life of early Caltech.

Becoming Caltech: A Q&A with Caltech Archivist Peter Collopy

2020-04-06T00:00:00-07:00

**What is the scope of *Becoming Caltech*?** In the exhibit, we focus on the transformation of the institution in two periods. The first started in the late aughts, around 1908, when there was a really deep rebuilding of the Institute from one that had tried to be many things to many people in Pasadena to one that was very specifically and narrowly an engineering school. The second period begins when that engineering school, which lasted in that form for about a decade, was successful enough that its leadership decided it could expand to be a scientific institute as well.

Becoming Caltech: Building a Research Community, 1910–1930

2020-02-10T00:00:00-08:00

In the 1910s and 1920s, Caltech dramatically reinvented itself, transforming from a manual arts academy to an engineering school, then expanding into a research institute. The school began building its current campus, recruited renowned faculty, constructed sophisticated laboratories, trained students to become leading researchers, and established new relationships with industry and government. On February 10, 1920, the Institute’s trustees acknowledged this transformation by changing the institution’s name from Throop College of Technology to California Institute of Technology. A century later, the Caltech Archives presents the exhibition “Becoming Caltech: Building a Research Community, 1910–1930.” It tells the story of Caltech’s early growth through historical documents, objects, photographs, and film, organized into three sections. “Becoming” traces Caltech’s evolution through the reformation instigated by George Ellery Hale and catalyzed by World War I. “Building Research” chronicles both the history of science, engineering, and the humanities at Caltech—ranging from the core activities of the 1910s (electrical engineering, chemistry, and physics) to the new fields of the 1920s (genetics, seismology, and aeronautics)—and the architecture and construction of the buildings which housed this research. “Community” explores the lives and culture of the students, faculty, and staff who made up the Institute, including athletics, clubs, the Athenaeum, and the big T that students carved out of the forest on the side of Mt. Wilson.

Richard Feynman

2019-08-27T00:00:00-07:00

In work and play, Richard Feynman was a distinctively visual thinker. He achieved fame as a theoretical physicist by making sense of the interactions of elementary particles, and in the process inventing the Feynman diagrams that illustrated these interactions. For Feynman to do physics was to write and draw.

Copernicus to Feynman: Paper and Print in the Caltech Archives from 1500 to Present

2019-04-11T00:00:00-07:00

{% include youtube.html id=page.youtube %} Caltech’s Archives and Special Collections include rare books from the Scientific Revolution, the correspondence and research notes of Caltech scientists and engineers, and other records of the history of science and technology at Caltech. Our formats include film, magnetic tape, and a variety of digital media—but for this webinar we’ll be focusing on paper and print, to accompany Mark Kurlansky’s history Paper. We’ll look at some books from as early as 1502, only fifty years after the invention of movable type in Europe, including original editions of works by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. And we’ll look at modern books, from a first edition of The Origin of Species published in 1859 to works by Caltech faculty like Robert Millikan, to see how paper and printing changed as they became industrial, steam-powered operations in the 1800s. Finally, we’ll look at some of our twentieth century scientists’ papers, with an eye towards the technology of paper, typewriting, and computer printing.

The Caltech Archives as Modern Wunderkammer

2018-11-05T00:00:00-08:00

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The Mind’s Eye: Richard Feynman in Word and Image

2018-05-11T00:00:00-07:00

History of Physics in the Caltech Archives, and Now on the Web: Hale, Glaser, and More

2018-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

The Caltech Archives is digitizing two major collections in the history of physics and astronomy, consisting of the papers of solar astronomer George Ellery Hale (1868–1938) and particle physicist Donald A. Glaser (1926–2013). We are also contributing to the history of physics through new acquisitions of Caltech scientists’ papers and a new exhibition on visual thinking in the work and life of Richard Feynman.

When Caltech Was Throop University

2017-11-01T00:00:00-07:00

On November 2, 1891, classes began at Throop University—the school that would become Caltech—in a rented building in downtown Pasadena. Founder Amos Throop was a Universalist preacher and abolitionist politician who made his fortune in lumber and real estate in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles, where he bought orchards and farms, in 1880. His school offered courses in literature, music, art, elocution, stenography, typewriting, and law—with only six faculty. Throop University had trouble recruiting students, so its trustees renamed it Throop Polytechnic Institute in 1893 and reorganized it to train Pasadena’s youth, from elementary school through college, for factory work in an industrial society. Although namesake Amos Throop passed away in 1894, over the decades that followed Throop Polytechnic Institute formed alliances with influential scientists—astronomer George Hale, physicist Robert Millikan, and chemist Arthur Noyes—and reinvented itself again as a pioneering science and engineering university, renamed the California Institute of Technology in 1920.

“Throops’s Superlative Opportunity”: The Story of the Gates Laboratory of Chemistry

2017-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

The Gates Laboratory of Chemistry, constructed in 1917 in part to persuade chemist Arthur A. Noyes to join the faculty, is Caltech’s oldest building and the first to cross the hundred-year threshold. Today, the building is the home of the Institute’s administrative offices and is called the Parsons-Gates Hall of Administration.

Building a Chemistry Division

2017-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

Over the century since the Gates Laboratory of Chemistry was built, Caltech’s Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering has grown exponentially. Here are some of the stories from that history.

4 Questions for Peter Collopy

2017-08-04T00:00:00-07:00

**What attracted you to archival science as a field and to Caltech specifically?** I'm primarily a historian of 20th-century science and technology. Caltech is one of the major places where that history has happened. In graduate school, I became interested in the history of computing and the ways the counterculture was experimenting with technology in the 1960s and '70s, which also pulled me into the field of media studies. I wrote a dissertation about how psychiatrists, social scientists, and artists used the new technology of videotape to experiment with consciousness, and I’ve also written about debates about race in the fields of genetics and anthropology.

Peter Sachs Collopy

A Prank, a Story, and an Origin of Oral History at Caltech

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Explores Where Film & Science Collide in LA

Electrifying Los Angeles

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

January 8: Caltech and Its Archives

January 15: Thinking Critically About Infrastructure

January 22: Electrifying America

January 29: Big Creek and the High Voltage Research Laboratory

February 5: Gordon Kaufmann at Caltech

February 12: Hoover Dam and the Technological Sublime

February 19: Electric Los Angeles

February 26

March 4: Chinatown screening

March 5: River Futures

The Beckmans at Caltech, 1923–1939

Art and Science at Caltech: Four Histories

Passing in the Hallway: Art and Technology at Caltech, 1968–1972

Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020

Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020

Art and Science Collide at Southern California’s Third Annual PST ART Series

Curating Art and Science

Student Learning Outcomes

Assignments

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

August 29: Introduction

Art and Science

September 12: Scientific Images

September 19: Science in Art

September 26: The Architecture of Science

October 3: Art and Technology

Curating

October 10: Showing Is Telling: Contemporary Curatorial Practice

October 17: Archives and Collections

October 24: Exhibiting Art, Exhibiting Science

October 31: From White Cube to Black Box: Contemporary Curatorial Thought

Disciplinary Histories and Student Presentations

November 7: Astronomy and Planetary Science

November 14: Biology

November 21: Chemistry

November 28: Art and Architecture

December 5: Physics

December 12: Conclusion

Behind the Book: Escape from Earth

Robert Millikan, Eugenics, and Justice in the Laboratory and the Archives

Iterating Infrastructure from High Volts to X-Rays to Nuclear Physics: Early Caltech Science in the Archives

Archiving Communities of Resilience and Resistance in Caltech’s Present & Past

Caltech’s House of Lightning

Sitting Down with Uncomfortable Things in the Caltech Archives

Ready, Set, Spark

Biology Returns to Caltech

From High Volts to High Energy Physics

Chemistry Comes to Caltech

Influenza Comes to Throop

Becoming Caltech, 1910–1930: Presentations from the Archives

Becoming Caltech: A Q&A with Caltech Archivist Peter Collopy

Becoming Caltech: Building a Research Community, 1910–1930

Richard Feynman

Copernicus to Feynman: Paper and Print in the Caltech Archives from 1500 to Present

The Caltech Archives as Modern Wunderkammer

The Mind’s Eye: Richard Feynman in Word and Image

History of Physics in the Caltech Archives, and Now on the Web: Hale, Glaser, and More

When Caltech Was Throop University

“Throops’s Superlative Opportunity”: The Story of the Gates Laboratory of Chemistry

Building a Chemistry Division

4 Questions for Peter Collopy