The story
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 Manual Training School) 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 (equivalent to $900,000 in 2025) 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. A 22-acre campus plan was proposed in 1917.
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Under the leadership of Hale, Noyes, and Millikan (aided by the booming economy of Southern California), 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.
Millikan served as "Chairman of the Executive Council" (effectively Caltech's president) 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 (NOTS) 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.
Project Vista
From April to December 1951, Caltech was the host of a federal classified study, Project Vista. The selection of Caltech as host for the project was based on the university's expertise in rocketry and nuclear physics. In response to the war in Korea and the pressure from the Soviet Union, the project was Caltech's way of assisting the federal government in its effort to increase national security. The project was created to study new ways of improving the relationship between tactical air support and ground troops. The Army, Air Force, and Navy sponsored the project; however, it was under contract with the Army. The study was named after the hotel, Vista del Arroyo Hotel, which housed the study. The study operated under a committee with the supervision of President Lee A. DuBridge. William A. Fowler, a professor at Caltech, was selected as research director. More than a fourth of Caltech's faculty and a group of outside scientists staffed the project. Moreover, the number increases if one takes into account visiting scientists, military liaisons, secretarial, and security staff. In compensation for its participation, the university received about $750,000.
Post-war growth
From the 1950s to 1980s, Caltech was the home of Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, whose work was central to the establishment of the Standard Model of particle physics. Feynman was also known outside the physics community as a teacher and unconventional character.
During Lee A. DuBridge's tenure as Caltech's president (1946–1969), Caltech's faculty doubled and the campus tripled in size. DuBridge, unlike his predecessors, welcomed federal funding of science. New research fields flourished, including chemical biology, planetary science, nuclear astrophysics, and geochemistry. A 200-inch telescope was dedicated on nearby Palomar Mountain in 1948 and remained the world's most powerful optical telescope for over forty years.
Caltech opened its doors to female undergraduates during the presidency of Harold Brown in 1970, and they made up 14% of the entering class. The portion of female undergraduates has been increasing since then.
Protests by Caltech students are rare. The earliest was a 1968 protest outside the NBC Burbank studios, in response to rumors that NBC was to cancel Star Trek. In 1973, the students from Dabney House protested a presidential visit with a sign on the library bearing the simple phrase "Impeach Nixon". The following week, Ross McCollum, president of the National Oil Company, wrote an open letter to Dabney House stating that in light of their actions he had decided not to donate one million dollars to Caltech. The Dabney family, being Republicans, disowned Dabney House after hearing of the protest.
21st century
Since 2000, the Einstein Papers Project has been located at Caltech. The project was established in 1986 to assemble, preserve, translate, and publish papers selected from the literary estate of Albert Einstein and from other collections.
In fall 2008, the freshman class was 42% female, a record for Caltech's undergraduate enrollment. In the same year, the Institute concluded a six-year-long fund-raising campaign. The campaign raised more than $1.4 billion from about 16,000 donors. Nearly half of the funds went into the support of Caltech programs and projects.
In 2010, Caltech, in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and headed by Professor Nathan Lewis, established a DOE Energy Innovation Hub aimed at developing revolutionary methods to generate fuels directly from sunlight. This hub, the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, will receive up to $122 million in federal funding over five years.
Since 2012, Caltech began to offer classes through massive open online courses (MOOCs) under Coursera, from 2013, edX. Since 2020, Caltech’s Center for Technology and Management Education (CTME) has provided professional certificate programs and bootcamps targeted at working professionals. Beginning in 2022, CTME faced a class-action lawsuit alleging that its cybersecurity bootcamp was misleadingly marketed as a Caltech program, despite being fully designed and taught by the third-party company Simplilearn without Caltech faculty involvement. The lawsuit asserted that students were misled by the use of Caltech branding. In response, Caltech announced it would end its partnership with Simplilearn and restructure CTME programs under internal oversight.
Jean-Lou Chameau, the eighth president, announced on February 19, 2013, that he would be stepping down to accept the presidency at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Thomas F. Rosenbaum was announced to be the ninth president of Caltech on October 24, 2013, and his term began on July 1, 2014.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational‑Wave Observatory (LIGO) was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, MIT, and industrial partners, funded by the National Science Foundation. It was intended to launch gravitational‑wave astronomy by detecting the ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein’s general relativity. Gravitational waves were directly detected for the first time on September 14, 2015, by the LIGO detectors. For their pivotal roles in building the LIGO observatory and making the discovery, Caltech physicists Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, together with MIT physicist Rainer Weiss, were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Thorne, who is a Caltech graduate, provided the theoretical foundation that guided LIGO's design.
In 2019, Caltech received a gift of $750 million for sustainability research from the Resnick family of The Wonderful Company. The gift is the largest ever for environmental sustainability research and the second-largest private donation to a US academic institution (after Bloomberg's gift of $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University in 2018).
In January 2021, the Caltech Board of Trustees authorized the removal of the names to six historical figures—including inaugural president Robert Millikan, Harry Chandler, Albert Ruddock—from campus buildings due to their affiliations with the Human Betterment Foundation, an American eugenics organization. As a result, Millikan Library was renamed Caltech Hall, Chandler Dining Hall became Lee F. Browne Dining Hall, Ruddock House was renamed Grant D. Venerable House (after Caltech’s first Black graduate).
From Wikipedia’s article on California Institute of Technology, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5