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Millikan’s School: A History of the California Institute of Technology
by Judith Goodstein, W. W. Norton, pp 278, $24

It began in 1891 as a nondescript trade school situated on the second
floor of a warehouse in Pasadena, California. But astronomer George Ellery
Hale had ‘big plans’ for Throop College. He was determined to transform
it into a world centre of science and education.

Hale, a man ‘bursting with educational, architectural and civic ideas’,
had established the prestigious Mount Wilson Obser-servatory in the mountains
above Pasadena in 1903. He realised immediately that if the observatory
were to be great it would need a college or university of the first magnitude
in its backyard.

In a whirlwind of activity, Hale set about persuading southern California’s
wealthy industrialists to finance his impossible dream, and started the
long search for an ‘outstanding leader’ whose magnetic attraction would
lure to Throop other brilliant men in the field of science and education.
Hale zeroed in on the most brilliant star in the academic firmament: the
physicist Robert Andrews Millikan.

In July 1916, Hale went to New York, where Millikan was teaching summer
school at Columbia University. Over lunch, he asked Millikan to spend three
months a year in Pasadena starting up a physics laboratory. Though Millikan
refused the offer, he was deeply impressed by the astronomer’s vision for
Throop and his single-minded determination to see it realised. ‘He is the
most restless flea on the American continent,’ Millikan later wrote to his
wife Greta in Chicago. ‘More things are eating him than I could tell you
about in an hour.’

It took five further years of tireless effort by Hale, but the restless
flea finally got his way. In 1921, Millikan cut his ties with the University
of Chicago and moved west to join the faculty of Throop, by now renamed
the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech.

Millikan was 53 years old. His record as a researcher and teacher was
second to none. He had measured the charge on the electron, verified Einstein’s
photoelectric equations and determined the value of Planck’s constant. In
1923, he would carry off the Nobel Prize for his ground-breaking contributions
to experimental physics. It would place Caltech well and truly on the scientific
map, and Hale’s impossible dream would start to come true.

In Millikan’s School, Judith Goodstein tells the remarkable story of
the rise of Caltech, a small school ‘dedicated to excellence and focused
on certain areas’. She details how Millikan, aided by Hale and Arthur Amos
Noyes, America’s leading physical chemist and another of Hale’s inspired
acquisitions, took a former trade school and forged from it a ‘grandiose
university among the orange groves’.

By the 1930s, Caltech was the leading producer of physics papers in
the US, overtaking Stanford, Harvard and others. With its newfound prestige,
Caltech attracted the world’s greatest scientists, including Niels Bohr,
Werner Heisenberg and J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘the father of the atomic bomb’.
But perhaps the most famous of them all was Albert Einstein.

Einstein proved to be Millikan’s biggest mistake. Though the great man
had worked at Caltech on three occasions between 1931 and 1933, and had
shown a clear interest in joining Caltech’s faculty, the institute never
came up with money to hire him. Goodstein puts it down to Millikan’s ‘legendary
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When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and Einstein was forced to
flee Europe, he went to Princeton not Caltech. ‘The penny-pinching Millikan
had saved Caltech a tidy sum’, writes Goodstein, ‘and coincidentally lost
a faculty member.’

Despite losing the most celebrated scientist of the 20th century, Caltech
survived and flourished. It even spawned larger activities than itself,
such as the Jet Pro-pulsion Laboratory, which applies technology on the
grand scale, principally to the US space programme.

It would be impossible, while reading Goodstein’s lively account, not
to be impressed by the energy, drive and boundless enthusiasm of men like
Millikan, Hale and Noyes, ‘Caltech’s ruling triumvirate’. Fired with the
American spirit of ‘can do’, they had the bare-faced audacity to set about
building an institute to rival the cream of the universities of Europe and
America.

Such monumental self-belief is enviable, but the flip side of this is
monumental arrogance, something I myself experienced as a graduate student
at Caltech in the early 1980s. Goodstein never mentions the word, but then,
in addition to being Caltech’s historian, she is married to the institute’s
vice provost. Despite her efforts to write the ‘official’ history, however,
Caltech’s terminal addiction to blowing its own trumpet is hard to hide.

‘To be accepted as a student, you need near-perfect SAT (high school
aptitude tests) scores, so you are immediately among the elite,’ writes
ex-president Marvin Goldberger in the book’s foreword. ‘Invitations to join
the faculty come only after the most excruciating examination. There are
no good appointments at Caltech – only superb ones.’

Millikan’s school has grown enormously in stature, but so too, unfortunately,
has its opinion of itself.