The Paving Inspector Job

A unique chapter of Linus Pauling’s life played out over the summers of his undergraduate years at Oregon Agricultural College. A theme that had shadowed much of his young adult life – problems with finances – would continue to follow him into his graduate studies. The absence of a steady source of income, as well [...]

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 [...]

Pauling and Environmental Justice

(Ed. note: Toshihiro Higuchi of Georgetown University, a 2009 Pauling Resident Scholar award winner, spent a month in Oregon State University’s Valley Library this past summer working with the Pauling Papers. The following is excerpted from his final research report.)
Archival research is always full of unexpected discoveries about the past, and my project at [...]

Life in the Cold War 1980s

Three new additions to our archive of Pauling Peace Lectureship presentations have been added recently to the Events and Videos page of the OSU Libraries Special Collections website.  Dating to the mid-1980s, each is a reflection of the major, and mounting, concerns that peace activists and critics of U.S. foreign policy harbored during the eight [...]

The Pauling Centenary Conference

The date February 28, 2001 is meaningful to many residents of the Pacific Northwest.  At 10:54 AM that morning, the Nisqually earthquake, a magnitude 6.8 temblor located northwest of Olympia, Washington, shook the earth beneath the greater Seattle-Tacoma area and ultimately caused over $1 billion in damage.
Some 200 miles south in Corvallis, faint signs of [...]

Fred Allen’s Notebook

During his time at Oregon Agricultural College, Linus Pauling quickly built a reputation as being the smartest man on campus. This reputation would eventually evolve into international considerations of Pauling as one of the top scientists in all of history. Understandably, because of his abilities in the classroom and the laboratory, he made significant impressions [...]

Extracts from the Messenger Lectures

(Part 4 of 4 in our series marking the fiftieth anniversary of Pauling’s delivery of the Messenger Lectures.)
For our final post on Linus Pauling’s 1959 Messenger Lecture series, we have compiled a number of quotations from the talks themselves and from his own personal preparatory notes.  These excerpts highlight the most significant elements of Pauling’s [...]