Pauling’s OAC: A Maturing Relationship with Chemistry

Linus Pauling, 1920.

[A look back at Linus Pauling’s undergraduate experience from 100 years ago; part 2 of 3.]

By the fall of 1920, Linus Pauling was connected to an academic trajectory that he would continue to pursue for the rest of his life. That said, during his years at Oregon Agricultural College, he was compelled to advance his studies in chemistry through rather unorthodox means. Because OAC was a land grant institution, the practical and applied sciences were the main point of emphasis within the college’s curriculum. Further, because the state of Oregon discouraged (and later mandated against) redundancy in the majors offered by its two largest institutions of higher learning, and because the University of Oregon already offered a degree in chemistry, Pauling’s only real option as a Beaver was to major in chemical engineering.

Partly as a result of these circumstances, much of the chemistry that Pauling had learned so far was fairly out of date. Not surprisingly, Pauling had found many of his classes to be dull and, at times, rote in their emphasis on solving problems of interest to engineers rather than academic chemists. But by the fall of 1920, having spent the previous year teaching, Pauling re-enrolled at OAC with a boost in confidence and a willingness to seek out opportunities in non-traditional ways. Fortunately, the school year reciprocated, offering key new acquaintances who broadened horizons for the precocious young student.

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Throughout his studies in chemistry, the young Pauling often found himself questioning aspects of what he was learning and seeking to uncover more. For example, Pauling was intrigued by magnetism and puzzled over questions of why certain materials with similar physical structures varied in their degree of attraction to one another.

The courses that Pauling had taken to date were not providing answers to these questions. As a chemical engineer in training, he was learning that different substances expressed different levels of magnetism, but he had no insight into why. Prior to his junior year, Pauling may well have been resigned to the notion that these were unanswerable questions. However, more satisfactory solutions soon emerged with the help of a few influential professors.

OAC alumni inducted into Phi Kappa Phi, 1924. John Fulton stands in the back row, second from right.

Though he had saved up enough money to return to school, Pauling still needed to earn a wage to pay for on-going expenses, so he took up a job as an assistant to OAC Chemistry Professor Samuel Graf. Even though the job consisted mostly of working through computations, it also allocated time for Pauling to engage with the scientific literature. OAC’s Chemistry head, John Fulton, helped facilitate this by giving Pauling a few of his own chemical journals, and during his stint as Graf’s assistant, Pauling began to consume these journals with relish.

It was in this setting that Pauling first encountered the work of G.N. Lewis and Irving Langmuir, both of whom were exploring some of the most exciting questions in subatomic chemistry. While their publications did not answer all of Pauling’s questions, (many of which were in their earliest stages of formation) reading Lewis and Langmuir made Pauling realize that this new field of subatomic chemistry could solve problems, many of which he had not even realized existed.

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While the history of the field of subatomic chemistry is quite complex, many of the ideas that Lewis and Langmuir were developing emerged because of headways that the Danish chemist, Niels Bohr, made with the formalization of his quantum theory in 1918. At OAC all of the chemical engineering courses were physical and practical in their orientation. The kind of theoretical work that Bohr, Lewis, and Langmuir were doing was novel – and not being taught at OAC – but making its acquaintance equipped Pauling with new tools to explore some of the questions that he was pondering as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate. This breakthrough renewed Pauling’s fervor for chemistry and his determination to pursue it for a career.

Pauling’s moment of insight was especially well-timed in that it corresponded with another interaction that he had with an OAC professor, one where he learned about the availability of graduate fellowships at the California Institute of Technology. The fellowship announcement bore the imprimatur of Caltech chemistry chief A.A. Noyes, among the country’s leading physical chemists and a mentor to several promising young scholars. It is no surprise then, that the flyer caught the eye of Pauling almost immediately and helped to steer him toward graduate studies in Pasadena.

Becoming Division Chair: Staffing a New Laboratory, Noyes’ Death, and a Conversation with Harvard

Architectural schematic for the third floor of the Crellin Laboratory.

[Pauling as Administrator]

In November 1935, Edward Crellin, a retired Pasadena steel magnate, and his spouse Amy, informed Caltech chemistry chief A.A. Noyes of their wish to provide majority funding for a new building to be used by the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. Planning for this new facility promptly commenced and, by the next month, had advanced to the point where Noyes could tell the Division Council that construction would begin in spring 1937. In the meantime, fundraising and design work continued, a process that was aided by Crellin’s forgiveness of a $60,000 annuity owed to him by Caltech.

By spring 1936, the final plans appeared to be coming together for the new space. It would be called the Crellin Laboratory, and the division’s existing facility would become the Gates Laboratory. One issue of particular concern was the square footage to be made available for biochemistry research supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Another key need was finding a person suitable to organizing this work.

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Carl Niemann, 1950

Linus Pauling was tasked with leading the search for the head researcher position but, as had happened the previous year, his inquiries yielded few leads. In his correspondence with Thorfin Hogness, a close colleague at the University of Chicago, Pauling learned that they too were looking for someone similar. This shared difficulty encountered by both institutions reflected a growing interest in biochemical research nation-wide that had been catalyzed, in no small measure, by the Rockefeller Foundation.

More promising suggestions came from Moses Gomberg at Johns Hopkins University and from the Rockefeller Foundation itself, in the form of Warren Weaver. Gomberg suggested Edwin Buchman and Weaver suggested Carl Niemann, but both struck Pauling as being too early in their careers to fill this position. Making a trip back East, Pauling began to search in person, interviewing “young bio-organic chemists” and getting “advice from several older ones.”

The most important conversation that Pauling had during this trip was with Warren Weaver. In it, Pauling learned that the Rockefeller Foundation would not commit to even a “small grant” for “preliminary investigations,” if the division was not able to meet an April 1937 deadline for submitting a “well worked out plan” for initial implementation in September. Weaver also shared his sense that the foundation’s trustees would likely not consent to supporting a program headed by “only young and relatively untried men at the beginning of their careers.”

Having received this guidance, Pauling suggested that Caltech hire a mid-career candidate who had already made significant contributions, and then add young men who could be groomed by this individual. The only person whom Pauling had met so far who approached this description was Hans T. Clark, a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry at Columbia University. Pauling worried though, that Clark’s research was not “outstanding.” Another possibility was Samuel Gurin, a National Research Fellow at the University of Illinois and Pauling’s favorite among the “young men” that he had interviewed.

In the end, neither Clark nor Gurin was hired. Instead, Edwin Buchman and Carl Niemann – the two candidates suggested by Moses Gomberg and Warren Weaver – were brought on as temporary junior appointments. Though young, both were brimming with promise: Niemann had already published ten papers by the age of twenty-five, and Buchman quickly secured funding for his research on vitamin B1. As it turned out, both also stayed at Caltech for the remainder of their careers.

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A.A. Noyes

On June 6, 1936, with the Crellin facility still in its planning phase and a succession plan for division leadership still not in hand, A.A. Noyes passed away. For many in the division, sadness at Noyes’ passing was amplified by feelings of resentment toward Pauling, the likely new chair, who was widely seen as having pressed the issue of succession too aggressively during Noyes’ final days. For this and other reasons, many colleagues favored the appointment of physicist Richard Tolman instead, forcing him, just four days after Noyes’ death, to clarify that he would not accept the position if offered.

Tolman’s preemptive refusal fell on deaf ears with the Executive Council, who recommended him anyway. Tolman, who was already Dean of the Graduate School and whose research did not comfortably align with the division’s broader work, responded to the council once more at the end of June, explaining

I am very appreciative – and indeed quite touched – by this expression of confidence on the part of the members of the Executive Council. Nevertheless, both from the point of view of my own work and from that of the welfare of the Institute, I do not think that it would be wisest for me to accept.

For his part, Tolman still favored the plan that he had devised the previous year with Noyes, George Ellery Hale and Robert Millikan, wherein it was recommended that Pauling take over as leader working in tandem with the Division Council. Tolman noted that as “an outstanding chemist, who is actively engaged in chemical research, who has a good knowledge of the chemical work being done in this and in other countries, and who is himself recognized as a man who is now making important contributions to chemistry,” Pauling was the perfect candidate. Tolman also hoped that the Division Council structure could be maintained and put forth that, as originally planned, he would continue to serve on the council since it was a position from which he could most effectively benefit the division.

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Pauling’s strong objections to the Tolman group’s proposal in general, and the Division Council structure in particular continued to hold. Feeling that the window for advancing on acceptable terms at Caltech was nearing its close, Pauling also began to seriously entertain the idea of working elsewhere.

In 1929, Harvard University had recruited Pauling for a position as Professor of Physical Chemistry, an offer that Pauling ultimately refused. Seven years later, the division chairmanship seemingly out of reach, Pauling wrote to the new President of Harvard, James B. Conant, asking if the 1929 offer was still a consideration. Conant replied that the position had since been filled by one of Pauling’s former students, E. Bright Wilson, and that Harvard was not presently in a position to create a new job for Pauling. This news came as a disappointment, but other opportunities were soon to arrive.

Becoming Division Chair: The Division Council, Pauling’s Demur, and Weaver’s Promise

Linus Pauling, 1935

[Pauling as Administrator]

In 1935, after being diagnosed with colon cancer, A.A. Noyes knew that he would soon have to step down from his position as Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. As such, Noyes began planning how best to transition his administrative portfolio to whomever might be elevated as the next chairman. Noyes favored the idea of promoting a strong researcher – rather than an experienced administrator – into the position, and was likewise keen to continuing strengthening the divisions’s ties to the Rockefeller Foundation. With these criteria set, Noyes quickly settled on Linus Pauling as his favored successor.

Pauling was aware of Noyes’ preferences and, as time moved forward, began to press the issue himself. When July arrived and little movement had been made toward appointing a new chair, Pauling approached Robert Millikan, professor of physics and Chairman of the Executive Council at Caltech, to make his case more aggressively. As a close friend of Noyes, whose health was on the decline, (he would die less than a year later) Millikan was infuriated with Pauling’s insensitivity to the circumstances. But this did not stop Pauling: within two weeks, after thinking the situation over, Pauling addressed Noyes directly by letter, claiming that he was considering leaving Caltech since the promised chairmanship had apparently been taken away.

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For his part, Noyes still wanted Pauling to succeed him as chair. Upon receiving Pauling’s letter, Noyes passed it on to astronomer George Ellery Hale, who had been central to shaping Caltech into a prestigious institution over the previous two decades. Noyes also met in person with Hale, Millikan, and physicist Richard Tolman to discuss the question of his successor.

Millikan favored Tolman for the position, in part because he was concerned that Pauling’s modest upbringing would impact his ability to engage with and woo wealthy donors. Noyes also admitted to harboring concerns about Pauling’s leadership style, the result of having observed him in the laboratory, where he was inclined to delegate specific tasks to his students and staff rather than allowing those under him to think through problems for themselves.

Ultimately the four decided that the best course of action was to split the leadership of the division in half. Pauling would be anointed as chairman but would be asked to work with a new Chemistry Division Council, to be comprised of a selection of five of Pauling’s fellow faculty. The group also decided that Tolman would represent the division to the Caltech Executive Council and retain primary responsibility for interacting with donors.

The creation of the Division Council, which was modeled on the Institute’s existing Executive Council, reflected the inclusive approach to running the division that Noyes had developed during his tenure and insured its institutionalization. In a letter requesting the Executive Committee to establish the Division Council, Noyes and Tolman described the duties of the chairman as being in a “spirit of cooperation” with the council, such that the chairman would bring matters before the council and make recommendations.

A separate memo further clarified the roles to be played by the chairman and council, noting that the chairman would represent the division to the broader Caltech community, but with certain restrictions. Among them, the memo envisioned the council as having “final authority and responsibility” for making recommendations to the Executive Council concerning budgets and major expenditures, staffing and promotions, and decisions on the usage of laboratory space. The council was tasked with meeting every month during the academic year or when called by the division chair.

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The annotations that Pauling made to his own copy of the memo are indicative of his point of view. In it, Pauling highlighted that the chairman would

personally decide all administrative questions, except that he will refer matters upon which a consensus of Division opinion is desirable to the Council or to the Committee of the Division, or to the Division as a whole, as indicated in the statement given below of their respective functions.

The various restrictions outlined in the memo were unacceptable to Pauling, and he refused to sign off on its contents. Instead, he replied to the memo with a written rejoinder addressed to the Executive Council. In it, Pauling expressed his feeling that the Division Council approach would prove inefficient and stagnate the progress of the unit as a whole. “The more reactionary and less ambitious members of the group,” he worried, “will determine its policy, inasmuch as to move ahead is harder than to stand still.” More specifically, Pauling was concerned that the council would be ruled by those who were most out of touch with current trends in research and the instruction, and that the quality of the division would suffer accordingly.

Hesitations about trying to work within this structure, compounded by the difficult financial times being endured nation-wide, were such that Pauling chose to the decline the chairmanship under the terms offered.

I would not accept appointment as Chairman of the Division with authority vested in a Council, inasmuch as it would be impossible or difficult to build up the Division under these circumstances. With someone else as Chairman, I would not feel called on or justified in making any effort to build up the Division, this being then the responsibility of the Chairman. Professor Morgan says that there is no chance of building the West Wing of Gates for five years, no chance of increasing the Chemistry budget, no chance of getting new staff members, no chance that the Institute would promise an increase in budget at some definite time in the future. With no prospect of developing the Division, I would not accept its Chairmanship.

Ignoring Pauling’s objections, the Executive Council approved the Division Council on November 2, 1935, the day after Pauling authored his letter. From that point, it would take more than two years to resolve the disagreement between Pauling and upper administration. Central to the healing process was Warren Weaver at the Rockefeller Foundation.

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In March 1936, Weaver informed Pauling of the Rockefeller Foundation’s interest in supporting “an attack on cancer from below (structure of carcinogenic substances, etc.) but not from above.” The following month, further details about the Foundation’s proposed level of support were shared at a Division Council meeting, where it was conveyed that the grant could fund research in organic chemistry at rate of $250,000 over five to seven years, with an additional $50,000 going to the Division of Biology. The Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering was asked to submit its grant application by August. Needless to say, a potential windfall of this magnitude served as a powerful motivator for the division to shift its attention toward biochemistry and also provided Pauling with significant leverage in his pursuit of the division’s chair.

This leverage first began to manifest when Noyes put Pauling in charge of identifying three research fellows to attach to the grant. The previous year, Pauling had conducted a similar search and was unsuccessful. During this first attempt, Pauling had sent out letters to chemistry and medical departments at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, Washington University, and Harvard describing the ideal candidate as “original and energetic” but not requiring plum facilities to carry out effective research. This second time around, Caltech’s relative lack of facilities would be less of a problem. The potential Rockefeller grant was partly responsible for this, as was a plan to begin construction on the Crellin Laboratory the following year.

Pauling as Administrator: Becoming Division Chair

[Ed Note: Over the past eleven years, one of the Pauling Blog’s areas of interest has been the exploration of different institutions with which Linus Pauling was affiliated. Posting series authored in support of this interest include examinations of Pauling’s time at The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the University of California, San Diego, Stanford University, and the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine.

Pauling is, of course, most famously associated with the California Institute of Technology, his institutional home from 1922-1963. But attempting to develop a series of blog posts that delve into his institutional relationship with Caltech is a daunting task — in addition to being there for a long time, a great deal happened during those forty-one years.

Today, however, we begin to approach this weighty subject with the release of the first post in a lengthy series that will examine Pauling’s work as an administrator while also a member of the Caltech faculty. Among the more ambitious projects that the Pauling Blog has undertaken, this topic will be our primary point of emphasis from now until June 2019.]

Linus Pauling, 1937

Linus Pauling became Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and Director of the Gates and Crellin Laboratories of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in 1937, succeeding long-time head A.A. Noyes. But before this time, he had taken on administrative responsibilities that would prepare him for the position and demonstrate to his superiors that he was a suitable candidate. By 1937, Pauling had also long since proven himself to be a world-class researcher and his rank had advanced accordingly: appointed Assistant Professor of Theoretical Chemistry in 1927, he was promoted to full professor just four years later. Importantly, Pauling’s research interests also led to the fostering of a strong working relationship with the Rockefeller Foundation during a key moment in institutional history.

Pauling’s demonstration of administrative skill and his research achievements, in tandem with his valuable ties to the Rockefeller Foundation, all contributed to the viability of his candidacy for division chair in the post-Noyes era.

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Space

From the very beginning of Pauling’s tenure as chair, the need for and allocation of space ranked high as an ever-present concern. Prior to his appointment as division head, Pauling had gained useful experience with the administration of space. A member of a 1929 sub-committee charged with exploring ways to improve graduate instruction and research in physical chemistry, Pauling found that space devoted to graduate research was a pressing need and advocated that the division act accordingly. Later, Pauling himself dealt with shortages in space when compelled to move his laboratory to the astrophysics building beginning in 1932. Once Pauling became chair, these problems continued to linger, if softened somewhat by the construction of two new facilities, the Crellin and Church Laboratories.

In addition to raw square footage, the organization of available space was a regular topic of discussion. During his years as chair, A.A. Noyes sought to address the issue by  organizing spaces according to research program, with areas for inorganic, organic, physical, and applied chemistry designated within the newly occupied Gates Laboratory. Pauling took issue with this approach, writing to Noyes in 1931 that the compartmentalization served “no useful purpose and would seriously weaken the Division by the introduction of artificial barriers.”

The Gates Laboratory, circa 1930s. Credit: Caltech Archives.

It was Pauling’s opinion that the division ought to continue promoting its well-recognized physical chemistry program instead, rather than incurring the risk that organic chemistry, a more emergent program, begin to overshadow an existing area of strength. “I am not opposed to the development of work in organic chemistry,” Pauling hastened to add, “But I feel that the work in physical and inorganic chemistry is one of the Institute’s strongest assets, and that development of organic chemistry should not be made at the expense of physical chemistry.”

Pauling even went so far as to put forth a suggested floor plan: the sub-basement, basement, and first floor should be devoted to physical chemistry, he felt, and the second and third floors to organic. Pauling further suggested that, as the division continued to grow to the point of overcrowding, a new building devoted to organic chemistry could be built, leaving physical and inorganic chemistry to occupy all of Gates. And as it turned out, Pauling’s vision proved accurate: a new building did come very soon, with construction of the Crellin Laboratory of Chemistry first proposed in 1935 and completed in 1938, not long after Pauling took up the chairmanship.

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Salaries

In the years prior to his taking charge, Pauling also developed a reputation as an advocate for his fellow faculty; a stance that sometimes put him at odds with the Institute’s upper administration. In 1932, Robert Millikan, a Nobel laureate who was then the Chairman of the Caltech Executive Council, asked that the faculty vote to take a 10% pay cut in response to the economic depression then gripping the United States. Pauling vocally opposed this request, noting that only the Institute’s Board of Trustees could take such an action.

Three years later, Pauling voiced his support for raises that were pending for newly tenured colleagues Richard Badger and Don Yost, despite continuing budget woes. Pauling argued that the raises would help the division maintain its position as a leader within the profession by rewarding the successes of deserving researchers. As Pauling told Noyes, “I feel that in university administration, just is to be esteemed above expediency, and a satisfied staff above a balanced budget.” Pauling’s attention to faculty pay remained a hallmark of his tenure as chairman. Indeed, one of his final gestures as division leader, put forth in 1957, was a $1500 gift earmarked for Caltech faculty salaries.

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Equipment

Another issue with which Pauling would grapple as chair was the imperative that the division be properly equipped, a problem that Pauling had encountered in his own research. In 1930, Pauling spent part of his summer at Arnold Sommerfeld’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Munich, and upon his return to Pasadena, he requested institutional support for an electron-diffraction apparatus that was similar to Sommerfeld’s. As with his advocacy of faculty raises, Pauling’s request was in keeping with his ambition that the division maintain a position of prominence, this time in crystal structure research.

In making his case, Pauling argued that the research infrastructure at other campuses like the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were beginning to leave Caltech in their wake. He expressed this concern to Noyes, writing

I should not like to have this laboratory, which has played a significant part in the development of crystal structure since the early days, fall far behind the other and newer crystal structure laboratories in this country.

Pauling likewise believed that researchers themselves, rather than administrators, were in the best position to determine what sort of laboratory equipment was needed to carry out cutting-edge work. And though an admittedly risky proposition, he felt that each researcher should be given their own funding to do with as they pleased. Again to Noyes,

The most interesting experiments are the least safe – those which might give a surprising result, but which might fail. It is difficult to use these as an argument for buying new apparatus, inasmuch as success cannot be guaranteed. I feel nevertheless that these experiments are fully important as the routine ones.

Over time, Pauling continued to exert influence on decision-making related to the divisions’s general equipment needs, and became a formal member of its Equipment Laboratory Committee in 1935.

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The Rockefeller Foundation

Without doubt, a major factor behind Pauling’s elevation to chairman was the strength of his relationship with the Rockefeller Foundation and, more specifically, its Director of the Natural Sciences, Warren Weaver. Pauling had been cultivating ties with the Foundation and Weaver for at least five years prior to his appointment as chair. In July 1932, he secured Rockefeller funding under what he later described as a “small grant” for $10,000 per year (nearly $170,000 in contemporary valuation) for crystal structure research. This grant was renewed twice and proved a crucial means of support during difficult economic times. After those three years had passed, Weaver told Pauling that the Foundation would no longer fund his current line of research, but that they would be interested in its biological applications.

Rockefeller Foundation administrator Warren Weaver.

As a result of these discussions, Pauling began redirecting his interests towards biological topics. In doing so, he requested $5,000 per year from Caltech’s Executive Council to supplement a potential $10,000 annual award from the Rockefeller Foundation, an amount that he ultimately received for three years beginning in 1935. Following the Foundation’s approval of his grant, Pauling wrote a thank you letter to Weaver in which he confided that he had already begun preliminary investigations on the structure of hemoglobin. Pauling added, “As I have read about the problems of biochemistry, I have become more and more enthusiastic about the possibilities of the application of our methods.” In short, he was smitten.

For Weaver, Pauling was part of the Foundation’s larger project of promoting biochemical research across the United States and also a valuable resource in deciding how to carry it out. In particular, Weaver solicited the perspective of researchers like Pauling on how best to coordinate training across institutions. One particular case involved an Antioch College researcher named O.L. Inman. Inman had requested Rockefeller support for studies of chlorophyll that were similar to what Pauling had done with hemoglobin, with the proviso that he would only do so if he could bring in someone who had worked on hemoglobin in Pauling’s lab. When asked for his input, Pauling told Weaver that Inman’s idea was doomed to failure, since chlorophyll lacked paramagnetic atoms. Weaver promptly heeded this advice, thus halting one potential instance of cross-institutional training.

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In an undated note likely written in the mid-1940s, Pauling reflected on his relationship with the Rockefeller Foundation and the role that it played in influencing his research trajectory. “Perhaps,” Pauling wrote, “the remark from Weaver that my grant for molecular structure was all right, but that the main support was going in another direction, and the hint that application of m. s. [molecular structure] to biological problems might interest the Foundation greatly” had indeed made an impact on his decision-making.

However, Pauling did not agree with the notion that Weaver’s encouragement had diverted him away from more focused attention on chemical subjects. Rather, Weaver’s suggestion had opened up vital new territory of which Pauling had been unaware and that he subsequently became eager to explore. Pauling further described his relationship with the Rockefeller Foundation by likening it to a joke he had read in the Saturday Evening Post.

A young man and young woman were saying goodnight at her door. She said ‘I’ll give you a kiss – I owe it to you for bringing me all the way out to 155^th Street, and next week I’m going to move out to 242nd.

Regardless of its impact on his research agenda, Pauling’s willingness to follow Weaver’s suggestions and the research funding strategies put forth by the Rockefeller Foundation would prove to be the tipping point in Pauling’s ascension to the chairmanship of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology.

The History of the Pauling Blog: An Archivist Reflects

Red carnations left anonymously in the Valley Library Special Collections and Archives Research Center foyer on February 28, 2018 — Pauling’s 117th birthday.

[Extracts from an interview by Tiah Edmunson-Morton with Chris Petersen, conducted on the occasion of the Pauling Blog’s tenth anniversary. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Part 4 of 4.]

Tiah Edmunson-Morton: Do you see yourself as his biographer?

Chris Petersen: Oh no, definitely not. But here is what I do see myself as. I see myself as a person who, through pure accident, wound up in a very unique position. I was hired as a student assistant in 1996, I was hired as a full-time [faculty member] in 1999, and that was the period of time during which the collection was being processed. And somehow I took charge of that when I was a student. The person who had my job before me left in the spring of my senior year of college, and at that point I began to lead the processing effort of this enormous collection. And that continued.

We published the catalog in 2006, so that’s ten years of work based on my start date as a student. And that’s never going to happen again. Nobody’s ever going to re-process the Pauling Papers. I hope not, at least. [laughs] So I had this opportunity that nobody else will ever have. And when you work with a collection, you don’t necessarily become their biographer, but you do have a level of intimacy with the material that nobody else will ever have, because nobody else is going to process that collection.

Linus Pauling in the original Special Collections reading room, 1988.

And now when I think about the blog I think about it in multiple ways, but one of the ways that I think about it is it being a resource for future archivists who work at OSU to be able to work with this collection in a more effective way, just because they’re not going to have that same experience of working with it that I had. And part of what continues to motivate me to publish the [Pauling Blog] is that — to leave a little bit of my experience behind after I’m gone. Because the blog will hopefully continue to exist. I doubt it will continue to be published after I stop doing it, whenever that is, but what we’ve done will continue to exist. We’re archiving it with our Archive-It instance, so it’s in the Internet Archive. It gets archived once a quarter.

And I’m happy about that. It’s a very big collection, it’s difficult to provide reference for it because of its size, and it’s unfair for all of the people who work here to be expected to know it on anything more than a surface level. So this is a tool for them to have in the future.

TEM: Is there a post that you thought about writing, because of the depth of knowledge that you have about the collection, that you decided not to write?

CP: Yeah, I thought about writing something [for the tenth anniversary of the Pauling Blog] but we’re doing this instead. [laughs]

There’s a part of me that wants to write a reflection about my engagement with Pauling, a person I never met. He died when I was a senior in high school; actually the summer after my senior year of high school. I was working for the Department of Transportation picking up garbage by the side of the road in Eastern Oregon on the day that he died. So that was my status at the end of his life. But I have come to know him well through strange ways, and I have come to know his oldest son quite well – Linus Jr. – through oral history. And I was in the middle of this department [Special Collections] that doesn’t exist anymore, that was devoted to him. And that’s, again, a unique experience.

Part of my oral history work, in addition to Linus Jr., was to interview Cliff Mead – basically the only head of Special Collections that ever existed – to try to get some of his memories from the chapter before I came along in ’96, because there were nine years of time that elapsed. So I could have a history of Special Collections recorded somewhere.

And anyway, part of me has thought about writing these recollections down, but it seems like a lot of work [laughs] and I have other things to do right now. But maybe someday.

Ava Helen Miller with Linus Pauling, 1922.

TEM: What about topics that you’ve thought about writing about? I mean, there’s some really personal relationship stuff between he and Ava Helen.

CP: Yep. That’s actually a good example of something that I’ve thought about and haven’t done. So they were separated for a year when he went to Caltech and she was here [at Oregon Agricultural College]. They wanted to get married and their parents wouldn’t let them, so she stayed here in Corvallis for a year and he went for his first year of grad school. And then he came back that next summer, they got married, and they went off together. But they were apart for one year and they wrote to each other basically every single day, and we have all of his letters but none of hers, because he burned them. And I think that there’s probably good stuff in those letters but I just can’t deal with it because there’s also a lot of lovey-dovey stuff, and there’s just a lot of stuff period.

But I think that the correspondence between he and Ava Helen is ripe for mining, and Mina Carson did some of that for her Ava Helen biography. Pauling was super formal in his correspondence and pretty much to the point, because he was doing a lot of corresponding and just was a very busy person. The one time where he reveals himself on any deeper level, or reveals any kind of vulnerability, is in his correspondence with his wife. So I think that there’s probably a lot there that could be thought about and teased out, but it would take a lot of time and thinking to try and figure out what exactly is going on here with some of that stuff. But that’s something that I would like somebody to do some day; that’s definitely at least a paper, if not a book.

Something that I would like somebody else to do that definitely is a book is to talk about his relationship with Caltech. He was there for a long time and it would be really interesting to trace his evolution while there and also to trace the Institute’s evolution while he was there, and think about how the two of them were symbiotic on some level. I mean, Caltech was not Caltech when he joined, and it is Caltech today in part because he was there. He helped to build that place. He certainly wasn’t the only person, but he was a significant piece of it.

And on the same token, when he went to Caltech — he came from an extremely humble background and he’s lucky to have made it out of that background. When he went to Caltech he was very smart and ambitious but super green. I mean, his education that he got here was, I think, pretty modest. OAC was a land grant institution, it was focused on practical stuff, and he had far greater aspirations than that.

Hand-tinted photo of Pauling at the Sutherlin work site, 1922.

And he got into Caltech — one of my favorite stories about Pauling is that, so he’s been accepted to Caltech and the summer before he goes down there he’s working for the Department of Transportation and he’s a pavement inspector. And so he’s out in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, inspecting pavement and living in a tent. But before he embarked upon this job he wrote to A.A. Noyes, who is the head of the Chemistry section of Caltech — there are basically three people who started Caltech and Noyes was one of them — and Pauling says, “I’m coming to grad school, how do I become a grad student?” And Noyes is writing a textbook and he sends him a manuscript version of the textbook and tells him, “Do all the problems in this book.” And so that summer in his tent, with a lantern, Pauling is doing this work and learning how to become a grad student and how to become a scientist.

And so he goes to Caltech and he’s there for a few years and at the end of that he gets this Guggenheim fellowship to go to Europe to learn quantum mechanics as it’s basically being invented. And then he comes back to the United States, applies quantum mechanics to structural chemistry, publishes a series of papers that become The Nature of the Chemical Bond in 1939, and that’s Nobel-quality work at that point. And it’s a very short period of time during which this process is moving forward, but for me it begins in that tent.

In any case, Caltech was hugely important for Pauling and vice-versa, and I think that would be a book that somebody should write; I’d love to see that. That’s not a series of blog posts.

One of the things that we’ve done a lot is to talk about his associations with places. We’ve done a series on his tenure at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which was rocky at best and short-lived. Same thing with UCSD. We’ve got a series coming out soon about his time at Stanford. We’ve done a lot on his relationship with Oregon Agricultural College too. But it’s harder to wrap yourself around the relationship with Caltech because he was there for so long and so much happened.

But I think I figured out a way that we can start to engage with that a little bit, and that’s something that’s being worked on right now, and that’s to talk about his work as an administrator. So he was the head of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering for a long time and he was in charge of a lot of grant money and he had an army of grad students who worked for him. And part of his success story is that he was a very able administrator, and obviously a brilliant thinker.

So he’d come up with an idea and give it a grad student, and that might become that grad student’s entire career basically. They would pursue that as a grad student and continue to pursue it for the rest of their career. It was something that would emerge from this yellow piece of paper that he would give to people, saying “you can work on this if you want, you don’t have to.” It was implied that you should. [laughs]

But he published 1,100 papers and you don’t do that without help. And there are plenty of co-authors there and people who went on to win Nobel Prizes — the Pauling tree is vast and significant. So I’m interested in that; I’m interested in his ability to be a leader of men. And it was men, because Caltech didn’t allow women. But I’m interested in his ability to attract grant money and how this all flows into creating this career that is so remarkable. And a lot of it happened at Caltech; a lot of the best stuff happened at Caltech.

Pauling’s Last Year as a Grad Student

Ava Helen and Linus Pauling, 1924.

[Part 3 of 3]

Pauling’s final year of graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, 1924-1925, was quite busy.  During this last phase of his student experience, Pauling’s primary research interests centered on hematite, corundum, and beta-alumina, though a great deal more professional and personal growth can be traced to this time in the budding young scholar’s life.

In his work on corundum and hematite, Pauling was assisted by Sterling B. Hendricks, a Texan who had received his master’s degree from Kansas State in 1924 was now in Pasadena, working on his PhD.  Hendricks became a close associate and personal friend of Pauling’s and, with their mentor Roscoe Dickinson away on a research trip, Pauling became Hendricks’ unofficial adviser. Such was Pauling’s influence that, later in life, Hendricks would come to consider himself to be “Linus’s first student.”

Together, Pauling and Hendricks worked on a theoretical paper that pieced together much of the work that they had completed over the previous year and a half. The paper was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) in March 1926 (nearly a year after Pauling had completed his PhD) and titled “The Prediction of the Relative Stabilities of Isosteric Isomeric Ions and Molecules.”  The paper was a milestone in that it was Pauling’s first paper devoted solely to the subject of the chemical bond.

It was not, however, the first paper that Hendricks and Pauling had co-authored. In 1925 the duo worked together to publish two sets of crystal structures: “The crystal structures of hematite and corundum” (March 1925) and “The crystal structures of sodium and potassium trinitrides and potassium cyanate, and the nature of the trinitride group” (December 1925).  During his last year of grad school, Pauling also collaborated with his friend and former roommate, Paul Emmett, on an X-ray determination of the crystal structure of barite.  Their article, which was published in JACS in April 1925, is another example of Pauling’s work that corrected previous published structures.

Peter Debye, 1926.

On top of the research that he was doing on crystal structures, Pauling also toyed with an idea in which he applied the Debye-Hückel theory, which was used to determine the energy coefficient of ions in dilute solutions. When he learned of this work, A.A. Noyes invited Peter Debye, who was based in Switzerland, to visit Caltech, in part to have him discuss his theory with Pauling. And although Pauling never published his original idea, in July 1925 Debye and Pauling did co-author a different paper, “The Inter-Ionic Attraction Theory of Ionized Solutes.  IV.  The Influence of Variation of Dielectric Constant on the Limiting Law for Small Concentrations.”  Appearing in JACS, the article was a contribution to a larger series published by the journal on the inter-ionic attraction theory of ionized solutes.

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Later on in his life, Pauling developed a reputation for staying on top of the latest findings and issuing an informed opinion on a wide range of scientific topics.  This character trait was likely spurred by an experience that he had as a graduate student.

Early on in his graduate career, one of Pauling’s more influential professors, Richard C. Tolman, posed to him a question about diamagnetism. Pauling responded that diamagnetism was just a general property of matter, a lackluster reply that made clear that Pauling had not stayed current with the literature. Tolman kept questioning Pauling for more specific details until Pauling finally answered, “I don’t know.”  For this he was reprimanded by a Caltech post-doc who told him, “You are a graduate student now, and you’re supposed to know everything.” This was advice that Pauling took to heart and that made a big difference throughout his career in science.

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The Paulings, 1925.

Nearing the end of his graduate school tenure, Pauling read G.L. Clark’s paper on uranyl nitrate hexahydrate and, as he went, he corrected it.  This was a continuation of the critical reading habits that he had first developed at Oregon Agricultural College and had continued to hone by lantern light while working for the Oregon Highway Department the summer prior to his enrollment at Caltech. It was likewise a practice that he would continue throughout his career: closely reading papers and correcting errors, often by letting the author or publisher know what he had found.

By this time, with Roscoe Dickinson away, Pauling had taken up some of his mentor’s responsibilities in the lab and, as with Sterling Hendricks, was serving as an ad hoc advisor to several students.

Likewise, with Dickinson gone, Pauling began to develop his own techniques to aid in crystal structure determinations. A methodology that was quite different from the formal instruction that he had received, Pauling’s approach used atomic sizes and chemical behaviors to approximate reasonable structures for molecules.  After determining these possible structures, Pauling then used X-ray data to eliminate unlikely possibilities and to isolate the best possible structure for a particular substance.  As it turned out, this approach to scientific inquiry already had a name, the stochastic method, and Pauling ultimately put it to effective use across many different disciplines.

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Linus Jr. and Ava Helen, 1925.

Pauling’s last year as a grad student also included big changes in his personal life.  After marrying in the summer of 1923, Ava Helen Pauling moved to Pasadena with her husband and kept house while he finished his degree. In the early years of their marriage, these duties also routinely included helping “keep house” in the laboratory, particularly by recording data and taking notes. Pauling’s research notebooks from these years are full of her handwriting, even including one note reminding Linus that she loved him.

In the midst of all his coursework and research, and as Pauling was wrapping up his last Winter term at Caltech, another big change came about when the Paulings’ first child, Linus Jr., was born on March 10, 1925.  By this time, Ava Helen was mostly excused from laboratory duty and focused her energies primarily on raising her children (ultimately there would be four) thus creating an atmosphere at home in which Linus could be as productive as possible.

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Graduation day, 1925.

Linus Pauling completed his PhD in chemistry in June 1925, tacking on minors in physics and mathematics as well. His dissertation, titled “The Determination with X-rays of the Structure of Crystals,” consisted of a compilation of articles that he had previously published with little more than new pagination connecting them together as a whole.

The summer after graduation, A.A. Noyes helped Pauling to secure a research fellowship that would enable him to stay at CIT and complete a research study on complex fluorides.  Pauling continued in this vein for the next eight months, during which time he began to make plans to leave Caltech to study as a post-doc at Berkeley, where he thought he might pursue a new set of experiments in G.N. Lewis’ lab, using funding from a National Research Fellowship that he had received.

Not wanting to lose Pauling to Berkeley and Lewis, Noyes managed to arrange for Pauling to remain in Pasadena in order to complete additional unfinished work on crystal structures.  Fortunately for Noyes, at the end of 1925, when the Guggenheim Fellowships were announced, Pauling was finally chosen for funding, having at last reached the program’s required minimum age.  At Noyes’s urging, Pauling resigned from his National Research Fellowship once he had received the good news from the Guggenheim Foundation. From there, Linus and Ava Helen took an important trip to Europe and ultimately returned to Caltech, their institutional home for the next thirty-six years.

Pauling Becomes a Researcher

Roscoe Dickinson, 1923.

[Part 2 of 3 in a series investigating Linus Pauling’s life as a graduate student]

As a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology (CIT), Linus Pauling tailored a research program that was focused on the properties of matter, with a particular emphasis placed on molecular structure. This interest and the techniques that he learned would shape Pauling’s scientific thinking for the rest of his life.

Pauling’s focus on the theoretical, and his questioning of why processes move forward as they do or why structures are built as they are, was in keeping with contemporary trends in physical chemistry. Pauling enrolled at Caltech with a strong desire to learn more about the discipline of physical chemistry and his early mentor, Caltech chemistry chair A.A. Noyes, encouraged him to build up his background in x-ray crystallography to further enable this pursuit.

When Pauling began classes in September 1922, he also began his research in x-ray crystallography under the direction of his major professor, Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson.  Not much older than Pauling and a recently minted PhD himself, Dickinson would soon become Pauling’s friend. Within weeks, Pauling began receiving invitations for dinners at the Dickinson house and was soon spending the odd weekend on camping trips with Dickinson and his wife.  After Ava Helen and Linus were married, she too joined in these social gatherings.

Dickinson and Pauling worked closely together for most of Pauling’s first year of grad school, but once Pauling had mastered the techniques necessary to prepare his own research, he mostly moved without Dickinson’s direct supervision. In a 1977 interview, Pauling recalled that Dickinson “was remarkably clear-headed, logical, and thorough” while working in the lab.  And as for the research,

Fortunately the field of x-ray diffraction was in an excellent state in that the procedures were rather complicated but they were thoroughly logical, [and] consisted of a series of logical tests.

The rigor and the logic that were fundamental to the field both pleased Pauling immensely.  And before long, the prodigious young student had moved beyond the expertise of his mentor and had begun to conduct original research that was outside of Dickinson’s own capability. In fact, Pauling’s acumen in the lab and facility as an x-ray crystallographer advanced so rapidly that, by his own recollection

…after about three years…I was making structure determinations of crystals that the technique was not powerful enough to handle, by guessing what the structure was and then testing it.

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X-ray apparatus at Linus Pauling’s desk, Gates Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. 1925.

But in his earlier days, Pauling still needed some help. During November and December of his first year as a graduate student, Pauling prepared approximately twelve crystals and attempted to analyze them using x-rays, but none of the crystals yielded images sufficient enough to make a structure determination.

At this point, Dickinson stepped in and directed Pauling to the mineral molybdenite (MoS₂), in the process showing him how to take an adequate sample, mount it, and analyze it using x-ray crystallography. This assistance in hand, Pauling was able to determine the structure of the crystal and Dickinson returned to his own work, confident in his feeling that Pauling was capable of doing the crystallography himself.

Soon after completing the experiment, Pauling was confronted by a very different type of confusion. With a successful structure determination in hand, he assumed that the next step would be to publish the work. So too did he assume that Dickinson would provide him with more direction, but he found that none was offered.  As such, Pauling wrote up his findings and presented them for review to his major professor.

Not long after, A.A. Noyes summoned Pauling to his office and carefully explained to the young graduate student that he had written up a paper with only his name on it and in the process had failed to acknowledge the crucial help that Dickinson had provided. Chagrined, Pauling revised the paper and listed himself as a second author, behind Dickinson. The experience proved to be an important one for Pauling, who was reminded early on of how easy it can be to minimize or discount the role that colleagues can play in one’s own research.

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Molybdenite model, side view.

By the end of April 1923, Dickinson and Pauling had submitted their paper on the structure of molybdenite to the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS); it was published in June of that same year.  Together they had found the simplest crystal structure of molybdenite – which contains two molecules in a hexagonal unit – based on Laue and spectral photographs, and using the theory of space groups.  Although he published a piece on the manufacture of cement in Oregon while he was in undergrad at Oregon Agricultural College, the molybdenite paper was Pauling’s first true scientific publication.

Later that year, Pauling arrived at another milestone by publishing his first sole-author paper, one in which he described the structure of magnesium stannide (Mg₂Sn) as determined, once again, by using x-rays. The paper was a huge accomplishment for another reason as well: the x-ray processes used by Pauling had never been successfully deployed for the study of an intermetallic compound before.  And even though this was his first single author paper, Pauling still made sure to thank Roscoe Dickinson in his conclusion, taking pains to avoid another scholarly faux pas.  He would continue in this practice throughout his graduate career.

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Richard Tolman, 1931.

“The crystal structure of magnesium stannide,” was one of eight articles that Pauling published during his grad school years – he completed an impressive total of six structures before receiving his doctorate. Having authored these articles, Pauling found himself on the forefront of a shift in physical chemistry: as crystallography advanced, it was becoming increasingly clear that the properties of specific compounds were based on their structures, which could now be described with mounting confidence. Indeed, several of Pauling’s articles included reevaluations of existing structures, with revised explanations as to why the structures in question had not complied with the new data that Pauling collected.

One such article was “The Entropy of Supercooled Liquids at the Absolute Zero,” which Pauling wrote with CIT faculty member Richard C. Tolman.  In their paper, the two authors corrected an earlier claim made by Ermon D. Eastman, a professor of physical chemistry at Berkeley, who had stated that complicated crystals (those with large unit cells) have greater entropy at absolute zero than do simple crystals. Using statistical mechanical techniques, Pauling and Tolman were able to show that, at absolute zero, the entropy of all perfect crystals, even those with large unit cells, also has to be zero.

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Detail from ‘Atombau und Spektrallinien’ containing x-ray diffraction images.

Pauling had become familiar with Tolman through a different means. During his third term at Caltech, Spring of 1923, Pauling took Tolman’s course in advanced thermodynamics, an experience that boosted his subsequent interest in quantum theory. It was also during this period that he read Arnold Sommerfeld’s Atombau und Spektrallinien (Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines) and began to be exposed to cutting edge research in quantum theory through the numerous physics and chemistry research colloquia hosted by Caltech.

Sommerfeld would become a lasting influence on Pauling’s life and Pauling would eventually study with him in Germany while there on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1926-27. But well before then, in 1923, Sommerfeld visited CIT to talk about his work with the new quantum theory. As an aid to his lectures, Sommerfeld used crystal models that he brought from Germany, which he hoped would help him to better explain this complicated work. Afterward, Pauling felt emboldened enough to to show Sommerfeld some of the models that he himself had made in the course of his own research; models that turned out to be much better than those constructed by Sommerfeld.

Pauling in Graduate School

Pauling in Pasadena, 1922.

[Part 1 of 3]

“My ambition to become a factor in the advancement of human knowledge can be realized only if I prepare myself properly for my work.”

-Linus Pauling, letter to A.A. Noyes, January 26, 1922

By all measures a successful chemical engineering undergraduate at Oregon Agricultural College, and wanting very much to continue his education and earn his PhD in chemistry, Linus Pauling wrote to several graduate programs across the country, inquiring in particular about fellowships. Though he had proven himself to be prodigious talent as a student and, already, as a teacher, Pauling’s location in Corvallis didn’t carry a great deal of cache with the country’s elite institutions. And given his family’s shaky financial health, some measure of institutional funding was going to be required if he were to advance in the academy.

Pauling heard back from Harvard first, but was disappointed by their offer, which was for a half-time instructorship. Harvard also suggested that it would take him an estimated five years to complete his degree.  A more promising option was the University of California, Berkeley, an institution that would continue to tempt Pauling in the years to come. But as soon as he received a favorable reply from the California Institute of Technology (CIT), he rescinded all other pending applications, including Berkeley. Pauling had a good feeling about Caltech, and indeed his choice would pay significant dividends for the next four decades.

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Once frustrated with chemistry at Oregon Agricultural College because he found it too easy, in graduate school Pauling was both presented with more challenging questions and received more considered guidance from some of the best scientists of the day.  One such man was Arthur Amos Noyes, the chair of Caltech’s chemistry department who also served as Pauling’s contact throughout his application process.

In their correspondence, Noyes encouraged Pauling to develop his coursework independently during his final quarters at OAC. Doing so would enable the bright but undertrained Pauling to enter CIT with the strongest background the he could muster in physical chemistry.  Noyes’ suggestions included building up a solid understanding of both French and German, and also working through a more rigorous physical chemistry text than the one that Pauling was currently using in his class.

This more appropriate text, An Advanced Course in Chemical Principles, was co-authored by Noyes himself, along with a Caltech colleague, Miles S. Sherrill.  Noyes implored Pauling to move through the book, methodically solving all of its example problems, the end goal being to provide Pauling with a better understanding of the field, and to prepare him to pursue both advanced coursework at CIT as well as his own unique research agenda.

The text itself was not merely descriptive, but also guided students through the problems that it presented by giving them the information necessary to solve them. This approach was unlike that taken by other popular texts at the time, which focused instead on leading students more directly to a solution. Noyes believed that his and Sherrill’s approach would help students to internalize what they were learning and assist them in understanding the processes required to arrive at the correct answer.

Noyes’ specific suggestion was that Pauling work through the text in conjunction with the OAC physical chemistry class in which he was currently enrolled, beginning at a point in the book that matched where he was at in class.  Instead, Pauling opted to commence with an independent study of the text during the summer after he graduated from OAC and before he enrolled at CIT.  Doing so, he believed, would allow him to work through the problems systematically and would also help to occupy his time while he was working in the field, assisting with road construction and pavement testing for the Oregon Highway Department. Before he reached the Caltech campus during the third week of September 1922, Pauling had worked through the entirety of book, solving many of its problems by lantern light in his tent.

And just as he would continue to do for the rest of his life, Pauling questioned the accuracy of certain answers posed by the authors of the book.  Upon finally arriving in Pasadena that fall, a first order of business for Pauling was to compare his notes with those of Paul Emmett, his childhood friend and OAC classmate who had likewise entered a course of graduate study in chemistry at CIT.

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While Pauling was still at OAC, Noyes passed along a few more ideas that might help in preparing for the rigors of Caltech. In addition to his own physical chemistry book, Noyes also suggested that Pauling read X-Rays and Crystal Structure, authored by Sir William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence Bragg, and likewise advised that Pauling take a mineralogy class at OAC that would cover the fundamentals of x-ray crystallography.

It is interesting to note that, while reading X-Rays and Crystal Structure (once again, put off until the summer of 1922), Pauling wrote to Emmett and told him that he was not learning much from it. The Braggs, of course, eventually became chief scientific competitors of Pauling’s, and the techniques that they described in their book proved fundamental to many of Pauling’s own early discoveries.

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A.A. Noyes, ca. 1920s.

As he tried to help Pauling secure funding for the coming school year, Noyes found himself questioning whether or not Pauling had the experience necessary to receive a teaching fellowship. Wanting to insure his study at CIT, Noyes encouraged Pauling to send further information that might help with finding a grant to cover tuition or even a graduate assistantship, which would promise a “somewhat larger payment.” Noyes assured Pauling that he assumed Pauling would eventually be qualified for a teaching fellowship the next year.

In applying to graduate programs, Pauling expressed full confidence in his capacity to succeed as a student in physical chemistry, due to his strong grasp of mathematics, his previous experience teaching quantitative analysis and his work as a teaching assistant in general chemistry.  But he also believed that the environment at Caltech was top-notch and would provide him with the training that he needed to carry out research, even though he had no prior experience in this area.

Noyes ultimately was able to offer Pauling a prized graduate assistantship, confident in his interest in pursuing pure science and a career in university teaching. Pauling would foster a close relationship with Noyes over the years, and it was Noyes who worked hardest to keep Pauling at Caltech after he had completed his PhD, warding off the advances of G.N. Lewis at Berkeley in particular.

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Paul Emmett with his mother, ca. 1920s.

Pauling moved in with Paul Emmett and Paul’s mother in September 1922, and stayed with them for his first school year in Pasadena. During this time, Emmett and Pauling shared the same bed, sleeping in shifts. Pauling’s habits were such that he would stay up late studying while Emmett slept, and around 3:00 AM Emmett would get up to go to the lab, at which time Pauling then went to sleep. During this first year in California, Pauling also took Richard Chace Tolman’s class, Introduction to Mathematical Physics, which helped cement Pauling’s desire to become a theoretical physical chemist.

During his sparse free time, Pauling wrote letter after letter to his girlfriend, Ava Helen Miller, who remained in Corvallis to continue work on her Home Economics degree at OAC. Having expressed a desire to marry at least twice before Linus left for California, only to be rebuffed by their families, the two decided in their letters that they would absolutely be wed once Pauling had finished his first year of classes and just prior to his resumption of more construction work during the summer. Their plan came to fruition in Salem, Oregon on June 17, 1923, and Ava Helen moved to Pasadena that fall to accompany her new husband during his second year as a graduate student.

The Origins of the Crellin Laboratory

Architectural schematic for the third floor of the Crellin Laboratory.

[Celebrating the 75th anniversary of the dedication of the Crellin Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.  Part 1 of 3]

By the early 1920s, the California Institute of Technology had become, in the minds of some, “the hub of America’s scientific establishments.” This point of prestige was especially notable because Caltech was so new and very geographically distant from other major scientific research enterprises, which were predominantly located on the east coast or around the Great Lakes region. Part of this success was due to the construction of the Gates Chemistry Laboratories, built in 1917 and expanded in 1927.

The prestige and skill exhibited by Caltech caught the attention of the very influential and wealthy Rockefeller Foundation, which began supporting certain of the Institute’s operations in the early 1930s.  This support was crucial for many reasons, one of them being that, by 1930, the Gates Laboratory had reached capacity. A.A. Noyes, chair of the Chemistry department at the time, commented that there was “literally no space for another research man,” and that greatly expanded facilities were exactly what the department needed to fulfill its vast potential. Linus Pauling, working in the Gates Lab, opined that the Institute was home to “the most forward looking Department of Chemistry with respect to physical chemistry in the world.” This was in no small part due to the superior leadership of Noyes, who had dramatically expanded the Chemistry and Chemical Engineering departments during his legendary tenure.

X-ray apparatus assembled on Linus Pauling’s desk in the basement of the Gates Laboratory, 1925. Pauling’s hat is seen in the rear of the photo.

The Rockefeller Foundation apparently agreed with Pauling’s assessment of Caltech’s capabilities, and in the early 1930s began to grant substantial funds to the Institute to further its leading positions in the fields of biology and chemistry. Specifically, the Institute held a key position in the development of a new field being pushed by the Foundation – a field described in 1938 as “molecular biology” by Rockefeller staffer Warren Weaver. Considering that the Great Depression was still in full swing, these additional funds were a godsend as research money was understandably difficult to come by.

In 1936, after some debate and controversy, Pauling was appointed the Chairman and Director of Caltech’s Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and also the Director of the Gates Laboratory of Chemistry, a position he held until 1958. Pauling was pleased with his increased responsibility and control, and decided that he wanted to revamp the department, and the labs in general, to better suit his vision for Caltech.

The Rockefeller Foundation agreed to provide Caltech with more money for purposes of expanding the Chemistry department and the Gates Lab. To this end, the Foundation also courted Edward W. Crellin, a retired steel magnate who lived in Pasadena. Fairly quickly, still in 1936, Crellin agreed to donate $350,000 – about $5.7 million in today’s dollars – in support of the construction of an expansion to the Gates lab, which was to be renamed the Gates and Crellin Chemical Laboratories. A year later, Crellin donated an additional $5,000 to provide floor coverings for the lab.

Edward W. Crellin.

Pauling was so pleased by Crellin’s contributions that he named his son, born June 4, 1937, Edward Crellin Pauling. Even though Edward Crellin and Crellin Pauling never got to know each other – Edward Crellin died when Crellin Pauling was only 11 – he was still flattered by Linus Pauling’s gesture, and left $5,000 in his will for Crellin Pauling.

The architects for the building initiative were Francis Mayers, Oscar Murray, and Hardie Phillip, and the project was expensive. In March 1937, Pauling received a memo from the Chemistry department that suggested cuts to the building, in order to reduce costs. The memo listed 29 suggested reductions that would lower the total cost by $47,039. The list also included three suggested additions, which would add $965 to the bill. His eyes firmly set on a world-class facility, Pauling agreed to consider only a few minor possibilities: “omit some ceiling inserts” ($240), “simplify water proofing on vertical walls” ($450), “omit birch strips on exterior walls” ($158), and “use skim coat plaster” ($200).

In addition to the building itself, outfitting costs for the new space were also high. The equipment required for the lab to function ran to $36,000 – $51,000, depending on the contractor. In addition, basic chemicals were an extra $1,200. The Chemistry department rejected Pauling’s request for more specialized analytical machines, as they would tack on an extra $4,500.

The process of bartering for and ultimately purchasing the materials that the new lab would need was slowed down in July 1937 by over three weeks, when Carl Niemann, a colleague that Pauling had entrusted to do much of the purchasing, was hospitalized. Niemann wrote in a letter to Pauling that he had gone to see a doctor because he had a chunk of rust embedded in the cornea of his left eye, “and the first attempt to remove it was not particularly successful.” He was then hospitalized and had to “have the disturbing element removed and the seat of the injury cauterized.” Despite the potential severity of the injury, Niemann made a full recovery, and the quest to secure the necessary chemicals resumed.

Once the needed equipment and chemicals had been secured, more attention was paid to the new laboratory’s décor, and Caltech had a bronze tablet cast. The tablet, which was eventually installed at the entrance of the lab, read simply: “Crellin Laboratory of Chemistry. The Gift of Edward W. and Amy H. Crellin. 1937.”

Pauling110

Linus Pauling. Lecturing at the Concepts of Chemical Bonding Seminar, Oslo University, Oslo, Norway. 1982.

Today marks the 110th anniversary of Linus Pauling’s birth, which occurred in Portland, Oregon on February 28, 1901. As has become tradition on the Pauling Blog, we are celebrating this occasion by looking back at Pauling’s life in increments of twenty-five years.

1911

At the tender age of ten, young Linus was already at a crossroads in his life. First and foremost, his father Herman had died of a perforated ulcer the previous summer, thus throwing the Pauling family into something akin to chaos. Herman was a pharmacist and businessman of middling success, and his death was a source of major financial concern for his widow Isabelle and their three children, Linus, Pauline (age 9) and Lucile (age 7). From this point on, Linus’s childhood was certainly informed, if not dominated, by the continual need to contribute to the household income. His mother’s only asset of consequence was the family home, which she boarded out on a regular basis in an attempt to make ends meet. But as time passed and Belle’s own health faded, her only son was frequently called upon to assist with the family finances, leading Linus to assume any number of odd jobs, from delivery boy to film projectionist to grocery clerk.

Young Linus, ca. 1910s.

It was at this same time that the boy’s interest in science was beginning to flower. The previous year Herman had written a letter to the Portland Oregonian newspaper indicating that his son was a “great reader” keenly interested in ancient history and the natural sciences. In 1911 Pauling’s scientific impulses continued to flourish in the form of an insect collection that he maintained and classified using books checked out from the Portland library. Not long after, as with many scientists of his generation, Linus would develop an interest in minerals and begin compiling a personal collection of classified stones that he found.

1936

By the age of thirty-five, Pauling had already established himself as among the world’s pre-eminent structural chemists and was well on his way to making a major impact in the biological sciences. In 1936 Pauling met Karl Landsteiner of the Rockefeller Institute, a Nobel laureate researcher best known at the time for having determined the existence of different blood types in human beings. In their initial meeting, Pauling and Landsteiner discussed Landsteiner’s program of research in immunology, a conversation that would lead to a fruitful collaboration between the two scientists. Importantly, his interactions with Landsteiner would lead Pauling to think about and publish important work on the specificity of serological reactions, in particular the relationship between antibodies and antigens in the human body.

Linus Pauling, 1936.

The year also bore witness to a major change at the California Institute of Technology: in June, Arthur Amos Noyes died. Noyes had served as chairman of the Caltech Chemistry Division for some twenty-seven years and was among the best known chemists of his era. His death ushered a power vacuum within the academic administration at Caltech, by then an emerging force in scientific research. Three of Pauling’s colleagues cautiously recommended to Caltech president Robert Millikan that Pauling be installed as interim chair of the department. Millikan agreed and offered the position to Pauling, but was met with refusal. At the time of the proposal,  Pauling was the object of some degree of criticism within the ranks at Caltech – certain of his peers felt him to be overly ambitious and even reckless in his pursuit of scientific advance – and the suggestion that Pauling assume division leadership was hardly unanimous. Millikan’s terms likewise did not meet with Pauling’s approval; in essence he felt that he would be burdened with more responsibility but would not gain in authority. The impasse would not last long however, as Pauling would eventually accept a new offer in April 1937 and begin a twenty-one year tenure as division chief.

1961

A busy year started off with a bang when the sixty-year-old Pauling was chosen alongside a cache of other U.S. scientists as “Men of the Year” by Time magazine. By this period in Pauling’s life his peace activism was a topic of international conversation and early in the year Linus and Ava Helen followed up their famous 1958 United Nations Bomb Test Petition with a second “Appeal to Stop the Spread of Nuclear Weapons,” issued in the wake of nuclear tests carried out by France. As a follow-up, the Paulings organized and attended a May conference held in Oslo Norway, at which the attendees (35 physical and biological scientists and 25 social scientists from around the world) issued the “Oslo Statement,” decrying nuclear proliferation and the continuation of nuclear tests.

Group photo of participants in the Oslo Conference, 1961.

While Pauling’s attentions during this period were increasingly drawn to his peace work, he did make time for innovative scientific research. Of particular note was his theory of anesthesia, published in July in the journal Science. Pauling’s idea was that anesthetic agents formed hydrate “cages” with properties similar to ice crystals. Owing to the nature of their molecular structure, these cages would impede electrical impulses in the brain, thus leading to unconsciousness. In a review article published one year later, the pharmacologist Chauncey Leake described the theory as “spectacular,” though for reasons that are still unclear it failed to gain traction with the larger scientific community.

1986

By age eighty-five, Pauling’s interests centered largely upon his continuing fascination with vitamin C. Having already published monographs focusing upon ascorbic acid’s capacity to ward of the common cold and the flu, Pauling was ready to put his thinking together into a general audience book that would discuss the path to happier and healthier lives. The result was How to Live Longer and Feel Better, a modest critical and commercial success that helped bolster the reputation and the finances of the struggling Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine.

Pauling at 85.

Many of the recommendations that Pauling made in How to Live Longer… were fairly typical of most health promotion books: a sensible diet, regular exercise and no smoking. The major exception to this moderate approach was the famed author’s stance on vitamin supplementation. In biographer Thomas Hager‘s words

Pauling was now advising between 6 and 18 grams of vitamin C per day, plus 400-16,000 IU of vitamin E (40-160 times the RDA), 25,000 IU of vitamin A (five times the RDA), and one or two ‘super B’ tablets for the B vitamins, along with a basic mineral supplement.

This staunch belief in the value of megavitamins would stay with Pauling until his death eight years later, in August 1994.