California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university/institute of technology in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes of technology in the United States that are devoted to the instruction of pure and applied sciences.
The institution was founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891 and began attracting influential scientists such as George Ellery Hale, Arthur Amos Noyes, and Robert Andrews Millikan in the early 20th century. The vocational and preparatory schools were disbanded and spun off in 1910, and the college assumed its present name in 1920. In 1934, Caltech was elected to the Association of American Universities, and the antecedents of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech continues to manage and operate, were established between 1936 and 1943 under Theodore von Kármán.
Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphasis on science and engineering, managing $332 million in research grants as of 2010. Its primary campus is located approximately northeast of downtown Los Angeles, in Pasadena. First-year students are required to live on campus, and 95% of undergraduates remain in the on-campus housing system at Caltech. Students agree to abide by an honor code which allows faculty to assign take-home examinations. The [|Caltech Beavers] compete in 13 intercollegiate sports in the NCAA Division III's Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
Scientists and engineers at or from the university have played an essential role in many modern scientific breakthroughs and innovations, including advances in space research, sustainability science, quantum physics, and seismology., there are 80 Nobel laureates who have been affiliated with Caltech, making it the institution with the highest number of Nobelists per capita in America. This includes 48 alumni and faculty members. In addition, 68 National Medal of Science Recipients, 43 MacArthur Fellows, 15 National Medal of Technology and Innovation recipients, 11 astronauts, 5 Science Advisors to the President, 4 Fields Medalists, and 6 Turing Award winners have been affiliated with Caltech.
History
Throop College
Caltech started as a vocational school founded in present-day Old Pasadena on Fair Oaks Avenue and Chestnut Street on September 23, 1891, by local businessman and politician Amos G. Throop. The school was known successively as Throop University, Throop Polytechnic Institute and Throop College of Technology before acquiring its current name in 1920. The vocational school was disbanded and the preparatory program was split off to form the independent Polytechnic School in 1907.At a time when scientific research in the United States was still in its infancy, George Ellery Hale, a solar astronomer from the University of Chicago, founded the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1904. He joined Throop's board of trustees in 1907, and soon began developing the university, and the whole of Pasadena, into a major scientific and cultural destination. He engineered the appointment of James A. B. Scherer, a literary scholar untutored in science but very capable in administration and fund-raising, to Throop's presidency in 1908. Scherer persuaded retired businessman and trustee Charles W. Gates to donate $25,000 in seed money to build Gates Laboratory, the first science building on campus.
World Wars
In 1910, Throop moved to its current site. Arthur Fleming donated the land for the permanent campus site. Theodore Roosevelt delivered an address at Throop Institute on March 21, 1911, and he declared:I want to see institutions like Throop turn out perhaps ninety-nine of every hundred students as men who are to do given pieces of industrial work better than any one else can do them; I want to see those men do the kind of work that is now being done on the Panama Canal and on the great irrigation projects in the interior of this country—and the one-hundredth man I want to see with the kind of cultural scientific training that will make him and his fellows the matrix out of which you can occasionally develop a man like your great astronomer, George Ellery Hale.
Also in 1911, a bill was introduced in the California Legislature calling for the establishment of a publicly funded "California Institute of Technology," with an initial budget of a million dollars, ten times the budget of Throop at the time. The board of trustees offered to turn Throop over to the state, but the presidents of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley successfully lobbied to defeat the bill, which allowed Throop to develop as the only scientific research-oriented educational institute in southern California, public or private, until the onset of World War II necessitated the broader development of research-based science education. The promise of Throop attracted physical chemist Arthur Amos Noyes from MIT to develop the institution and assist in establishing it as a center for science and technology.
With the onset of World War I, Hale organized the National Research Council to coordinate and support scientific work on military problems. While he supported the idea of federal appropriations for science, he took exception to a federal bill that would have funded engineering research at land-grant colleges, and instead sought to raise a $1 million national research fund entirely from private sources. To that end, as Hale wrote in The New York Times:
Throop College of Technology, in Pasadena California has recently afforded a striking illustration of one way in which the Research Council can secure co-operation and advance scientific investigation. This institution, with its able investigators and excellent research laboratories, could be of great service in any broad scheme of cooperation. President Scherer, hearing of the formation of the council, immediately offered to take part in its work, and with this object, he secured within three days an additional research endowment of one hundred thousand dollars.
Through the National Research Council, Hale simultaneously lobbied for science to play a larger role in national affairs, and for Throop to play a national role in science. The new funds were designated for physics research, and ultimately led to the establishment of the Norman Bridge Laboratory, which attracted experimental physicist Robert Andrews Millikan from the University of Chicago in 1917. During the course of the war, Hale, Noyes and Millikan worked together in Washington on the NRC. Subsequently, they continued their partnership in developing Caltech.
Under the leadership of Hale, Noyes, and Millikan, Caltech grew to national prominence in the 1920s and concentrated on the development of Roosevelt's "Hundredth Man". On November 29, 1921, the trustees declared it to be the express policy of the institute to pursue scientific research of the greatest importance and at the same time "to continue to conduct thorough courses in engineering and pure science, basing the work of these courses on exceptionally strong instruction in the fundamental sciences of mathematics, physics, and chemistry; broadening and enriching the curriculum by a liberal amount of instruction in such subjects as English, history, and economics; and vitalizing all the work of the Institute by the infusion in generous measure of the spirit of research". In 1923, Millikan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1925, the school established a department of geology and hired William Bennett Munro, then chairman of the division of History, Government, and Economics at Harvard University, to create a division of humanities and social sciences at Caltech. In 1928, a division of biology was established under the leadership of Thomas Hunt Morgan, the most distinguished biologist in the United States at the time, and discoverer of the role of genes and the chromosome in heredity. In 1930, Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory was established in Corona del Mar under the care of Professor George MacGinitie. In 1926, a graduate school of aeronautics was created, which eventually attracted Theodore von Kármán. Kármán later helped create the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and played an integral part in establishing Caltech as one of the world's centers for rocket science. In 1928, construction of the Palomar Observatory began.
File:Richard C. Tolman and Albert Einstein at California Institute of Technology.jpg|thumb|left|220px|Richard C. Tolman and Albert Einstein at Caltech, 1932
Millikan served as "Chairman of the Executive Council" from 1921 to 1945, and his influence was such that the institute was occasionally referred to as "Millikan's School". Millikan initiated a visiting-scholars program soon after joining Caltech. Notable scientists who accepted his invitation include Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Hendrik Lorentz and Niels Bohr. Albert Einstein arrived on the Caltech campus for the first time in 1931 to polish up his Theory of General Relativity, and he returned to Caltech subsequently as a visiting professor in 1932 and 1933.
During World War II, Caltech was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission. The United States Navy also maintained a naval training school for aeronautical engineering, resident inspectors of ordinance and naval material, and a liaison officer to the National Defense Research Committee on campus. During the war, some scientists from Caltech, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Tolman, and Robert Bacher, were instrumental in the Manhattan Project and contributed to critical aspects of the atomic bomb's development.
Caltech was also directly involved in other bomb-related research with a group led by Charles Lauritsen which assisted in the development of the high-explosive lenses used in the Fat Man implosion bomb, crucial to the Trinity Test and the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki. Lauritsen's team at Caltech developed detonators that would later be used in atomic bombs. In November 1943, Caltech and the U.S. Navy established the Naval Ordnance Test Station in Inyokern, California, near the Mojave Desert to work on aircraft ordnance and rocket development. One of the most successful innovations was the development of the 5-inch High-Velocity Aircraft Rocket, commonly known as the "Holy Moses," which was used in combat against enemy fortifications and ships.
The partnership between the Navy and Caltech continued to deepen throughout the war, leading to the creation of several military technologies, and by 1945, the focus of Caltech's war contributions expanded further with Project Camel, a collaboration between the Naval Ordnance Test Station and the Manhattan Project. Caltech scientists worked on a variety of assignments, including B-29 airdrop tests of model atomic bombs and the manufacturing of explosives for use in the atomic bomb's implosion mechanism. Additionally, the Salt Wells Pilot Plant at Inyokern was developed with Caltech scientists in response to concerns about the safety of explosive production at Los Alamos and began producing high explosives just days before the Trinity Test in July 1945. Early in the war, Caltech scientists, including Lauritsen's son, Thomas Lauritsen, worked on various rocket designs at the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory. These rockets, including the "Tiny Tim" and the "Mighty Mouse," were used in critical military operations, from naval engagements to land assaults. By the end of the war, Caltech had essentially become an extension of the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Ordnance, with its rocket research providing important technology to U.S. combat capabilities.