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.