Oppenheimer Minerals Update

We’ve received several comments on the unidentified minerals referenced in the previous post.  Here are those comments, along with revised images of the mystery specimens as color-corrected in Photoshop, (the original photos all having been admittedly a bit too yellow).
“possibly native silver or copper… the colors are a bit distorted in the [original] photo”
“appears to [...]

The Oppenheimer Minerals

For a short period of time in the late 1920s, Linus Pauling and J. Robert Oppenheimer were colleagues at the California Institute of Technology.  While the tenor of their relationship was, in the end, rather tumultuous, the two did share many common interests.
One such interest was a passion for minerals.  Both Pauling and Oppenheimer developed [...]

Ewan Cameron

“Today I propose to tell you of my personal involvement in this still highly controversial subject, the vitamin C in cancer story. The matter is capable of arousing almost any emotion from bitter prejudice and blazing anger on the one hand, to unbridled (and undeserved) enthusiasm on the other, with all grades of scorn, laughter, [...]

David and Clara Shoemaker

Husband and wife crystallographers David and Clara Shoemaker were, in many respects, an unlikely couple.
David Shoemaker was born on May 12, 1920 in the tiny town of Kooskia, Idaho. Clara Brink was born on June 20, 1921 in Rolde, Holland. Both moved through their primary studies in orderly fashion and progressed to undergraduate [...]

Remembering Abram Hoffer

“As a physician, I am ambivalent about my association with the medical fraternity.  I am happy to be in a profession which has discovered so much information in the field of disease and health, but I am unhappy and distressed with such an association which almost invariably rejects at first hand the discoveries and views [...]

“There is no substitute for doing things with your own hands.”

In the archival world, scrapbooks are typically regarded to be “high-value” items, deserving of close descriptive and preservation attentions.  As we work our way through the arrangement and description of the Roger Hayward Papers, we are reminded again as to why scrapbooks are held in such high regard.
Though the Hayward Papers consist primarily of correspondence [...]

Pauling’s Best Friend: Lloyd Jeffress

As a child, Linus Pauling had relatively few friends. After moving from Condon, Oregon to Portland, the death of his father and subsequent poverty forced him to work when not in school. The remainder of his time was consumed with studying and household chores, leaving little room for companionship. Pauling, even as [...]

Dr. Paul Emmett, 1900-1985

The catalysis chemist Dr. Paul Emmett is one of many distinguished scientists to have attended Oregon State University. He was born in Portland, Oregon on September 22, 1900 to a railroad worker and his wife, and had two sisters. Historian Dr. Burt Davis, who is writing a biography of Emmett’s life, notes that [...]

Resident Scholar, Dr. Burt Davis

For several weeks in April, there was a new yet familiar face roaming the stacks of the OSU Libraries Special Collections. It was Dr. Burtron “Burt” Davis of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Applied Energy Research, who had traveled across the country to research his former mentor, Dr. Paul Emmett. Dr. Davis [...]

William P. Murphy: Condon’s Other Nobel Prize Winner

Condon – as you are undoubtedly already aware if you are a regular reader of this blog – is a very small town in Gilliam County in North-Central Oregon. According to the 2000 census, the town’s population consisted of only 759 people, and in the early 1900s, when the Pauling family lived in Condon, the [...]