by Thomas Hager
But Belle would not let go entirely. When Linus left for OAC on October 6, 1917, he was accompanied on the train by his mother.
CHAPTER 3
The Boy Professor
Rook
"I try not to think of college, because of the way it affects me," Pauling wrote in his diary the month before he left for OAC. "Why should I rush through my education in the way I am? Paul Harvey is going to OAC to study chemistry—big, manly Paul Harvey, beside whom I pale into insignificance. Why should I enjoy the same benefits he has, when I am so unprepared, so unused to the ways of man? I will not be able, on account of my youth and inexperience, to do justice to the courses and the teaching placed before me."
He was sixteen years old and understandably worried about how he would measure up to the "big, manly" types in college. "But," he added resignedly, "it is too late to change now, even if I wanted to." However, longing to get away from Belle's control, eager for the chance to learn more chemistry, and hungry for new experiences, he didn't want to.
Mervyn Stephenson, Pauling's older cousin and Condon playmate, now a junior studying engineering at OAC, met Belle and Linus at the Corvallis train station. Having Stephenson there to look after her son was a factor in Belle's decision to let him go to college; Pauling was to room with his cousin at a boardinghouse a few blocks from campus.
Belle stayed overnight to make sure her son's accommodations were satisfactory before she returned to Portland. As soon as she was gone, Stephenson gave the incoming freshman a few words of advice and left him to fend for himself. Within a few weeks Pauling had moved out of the boardinghouse to save money and after that saw little of his cousin in college.
Although Pauling had come to OAC out of necessity—it was the only college he could afford—it turned out to be a good choice. In 1917 it was the nation's second-largest land-grant institution, spread over a sprawling 349-acre campus, with more than four thousand students, two hundred instructors, and solid programs in agriculture, commerce, engineering, mining, home economics, forestry, music, pharmacy, and vocational education. Chemistry, along with most of the other arts and sciences, was a "service department," originally designed to provide future farmers, pharmacists, and housewives with the rudiments of chemical knowledge. But by the time Pauling arrived, the OAC chemistry department was rapidly growing both in size and importance as the changing American economy created a new demand for trained researchers and engineers.
During the sixteen years between Pauling's birth and his arrival at OAC, American industry had gone through an era of unprecedented expansion. Domestic petroleum production grew sixfold; steel, fivefold. The automobile and aviation industries had been born; electrification and assembly-line production had become everyday realities. Larger, more technical, more competitive industries relied increasingly on scientific research to create new products, improve old ones, and develop innovative processes for production. The early part of the twentieth century saw many of America's most forward looking industrialists become science boosters, in large part because they recognized the value of basic research in maintaining an edge in the marketplace. Led by firms such as General Electric and Bell Telephone, companies began establishing their own research facilities. In 1890, by one estimate, there were only four industrial research labs in the United States; one generation later there were more than five hundred, and new ones were being started at the rate of about fifty per year.
Universities soon made the important discovery that private industry was willing to fund professorships, programs, and campus construction as a means of ensuring a supply of skilled technical workers. Once considered havens for an aristocratic elite, universities began opening their curricula to more utilitarian subjects and their doors to the children of the growing middle class. In the three decades prior to Pauling's arrival at OAC, enrollment in American universities and colleges nearly tripled, and land-grant colleges, with their mission to "promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes," led the way.
Chemistry was a major beneficiary of the new order. In America, industrial chemistry had started slowly, primarily in the mining and metals industries, which relied on chemists to test and refine ores. (OAC's chemical engineering program, for instance, was part of the School of Mines.) It took the success of industrial chemistry in Germany and a world war to awaken America to the need for more—and more modern—science. The German chemical industry started in the mid-nineteenth century when organic chemists unlocked the secret of creating dyes synthetically, destroying the natural dye market and making fortunes for manufacturers quick enough to take advantage of the new techniques. By the turn of the century Germany had become the undisputed world center for chemistry, both academic and industrial. The great German universities at Berlin, Goettingen, Munich, Heidelberg, Bonn, and Leipzig were magnets for the best young minds from around the globe who came to study at the feet of the masters: Fischer, von Baeyer, Buchner, and Willstatter in organic chemistry; or, increasingly, Ostwald, Nernst, the Dutchman van't Hoff, and the Swede Arrhenius, leaders of a revolution called physical chemistry that was attempting to bridge the gap between chemistry and physics. By 1910, five of the first ten Nobel Prizes awarded in chemistry had been won by Germans—seven if you count van't Hoff and Arrhenius, who did much of their most important work in Germany.
By 1914, Germany was producing more than 80 percent of the world's dyes, and the preeminence of its chemical industry extended to such important areas as pharmaceuticals, explosives, and agricultural chemicals. America was dependent on many of these German products when the Allied blockade during World War I shut off the supply, opening the eyes of American industrialists to the need for domestic chemical research and chemical-based industries—especially with the threat of a modern war that would be fought with chemically based high explosives and poison gases. By the time Pauling was an undergraduate just after the war, chemists held about one of every three industrial research jobs in the United States, and one undergraduate student in twelve at American colleges was a chemistry major. Suddenly, research chemistry changed from a gentleman's game to a broad-shouldered, progressive, ail-American career, practical, patriotic—and profitable. As one historian put it, "Becoming a scientist. . . was a means of going from the lower middle to the upper middle class." It was a climb Pauling was eager to make.
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The first two years at OAC, Pauling took the same classes as students of mining engineering, including an overview of the mining industry and classes in explosives, forging, and metallurgy. He enjoyed the mining courses; the emphasis on metals and industrial processes built on his early interest in rock collecting and his childhood forays to the abandoned smelter and foundry in Oswego. He learned how to use a forge, hammering horseshoes and hammers and a knife out of red-hot iron; he learned the mining chemist’s craft, blowpipe analysis and fire assay. There were field trips to nearby industries and talks by mining engineers and the chemists who worked with them. Like all students in the School of Mines, Pauling was a member of the Miners Club, and he went to the organization's get-togethers every two weeks to drink coffee, eat doughnuts, and hear talks by professional men.
And there were the standard introductory chemistry courses, taught in OAC's most impressive building, a three-story, towered granite-and-sandstone edifice built originally to house agricultural departments. By the time Pauling arrived, the fast-growing chemistry program had taken over most of the building. The dairy-and-stock judging area on the first floor had been converted into a huge chemistry teaching laboratory outfitted with the finest equipment and capable of accommodating 550 students in four sections. New labs were also set up for quantitative and organic chemistry. Officially the building was called Science Hall; by the time Pauling was studying there it was known as the "Chem Shack."
Presiding over the Chem Shack was Prof. John Fulton, a tubby man with an impressive shock of silver hair. Like the rest of the OAC chemistry faculty members at the time, he was
not a researcher—he had never received a doctorate, and even the Harvard master's degree he claimed, Pauling found out later, was fictional—but Johnny Fulton did have sympathy for students. Although Pauling would never remember anything he learned from Fulton, he would always recall the three hundred dollars the department head later loaned him to ease his way to graduate school.
There were some good instructors. Unhappy with the chemistry class he was originally assigned to as a freshman, Pauling shopped around until he found Renton Kirkwood Brodie, "a remarkable, enthusiastic lecturer," according to Pauling. He attended Brodie's classes through his first year, solidifying his hold on the basics of chemical knowledge. And he continued to have good luck with his mathematics teachers. On his first train trip to Corvallis, Pauling met Charles Johnson, head of the OAC math department, and decided on the spot to try to take every class Johnson taught. His instincts were right: Johnson's lectures made calculus a delight.
While Fulton oversaw the chemistry department, Floyd Rowland headed the more specialized chemical engineering program after Pauling's freshman year. Pauling said that he was "not very smart, but he recognized that he wasn't." Rowland was, however, one of the few professors at OAC who had managed to get a Ph.D. (and from a good chemistry program at the University of Illinois) and was a great promoter of graduate education. With Rowland's encouragement, an unheard-of nine of the twelve OAC students who went through the undergraduate chemical engineering program with Pauling went on to graduate school.
Despite his early apprehension, Pauling soon found he could master college courses almost as easily as he had his high school work, at least when he wanted to. He earned A's in all his chemistry and math courses. "It just seemed like all he had to do was sit down at a table, look at a book, and he'd absorb the knowledge without reading it, without looking at it," remembered classmate Edward Larson.
He also began forming a feeling for what he liked and didn't like about chemistry. Qualitative analysis, for instance, which he took as a freshman, was not to his taste. "Inorganic qualitative analysis repelled me, because of its completely or nearly completely empirical character," he remembered. "Most of the methods of separation and detection of the different metals depended on the solubility of certain compounds, and there was essentially no theoretical basis for the difference. ... I disliked qualitative analysis, whereas the precision of quantitative analysis appealed to me."
Pauling paid less attention to subjects outside the physical sciences, receiving a D in mechanical drawing (he wasn't patient enough to let the ink dry on his work, Pauling remembered, and kept smudging it) and an F in his second semester of freshman gymnasium. He failed the gym class when, in true Pauling fashion, he tried to get around the rules. He knew that members of the school athletic teams weren't required to take the standard gym classes, so he planned to join the track team instead of taking the required course. (He had thought about being a high-hurdles and high-jump competitor since high school.) Trying out for the team, however, was a disaster: He knocked over a hurdle and couldn't clear a high enough bar to interest the coach. Although he ran in one meet, he failed to make the team, got an F in the course he tried to bypass, and gave up on competitive athletics.
In most ways, he was a typical and enthusiastic underclassman. As a freshman, Pauling wore the green beanie required of all "rooks" at OAC. The school's athletic team was the Beavers, and as Pauling noted in his diary, he soon developed "lots of Beaver pep." He saluted upperclassmen, rooted at football games, sang fight songs, played billiards, and partied at freshman class "smokers." He joined the student military cadet corps, purchasing a uniform and taking classes in drill and camp cookery (eventually rising to the rank of major his senior year).
And, like most college boys, he looked for romance. Pauling was still shy around girls, a situation worsened at college by the poor opinion he had of his appearance. "The more I look at myself in the mirror, the more peculiar my physiognomy appears to me," he wrote as a freshman. "I do not look at all attractive. ... I already have faint horizontal wrinkles in my forehead, and my upper lip projects to an unnecessarily great extent. I must remember to restrain it." He was overly critical: photos of the time show a skinny kid with a full head of wavy auburn hair, broad, expressive features, an open and engaging grin; his eyes were a bright and penetrating blue. In any case, he was young, on his own, and fully capable of overcoming fears. Pauling had his first, confused, impetuous kiss, with a girl named Gwendolyn, just before he left for college. Soon after arriving in Corvallis, while chopping wood to earn extra money, Pauling met Irene Sparks, a curly haired seventeen-year-old who was taking business classes at OAC. Pauling was smitten and immediately asked her out to a movie. "She is the girl for me," he wrote breathlessly after the show. That diary entry was the last he ever made about her. Five years would pass before he had another significant romance.
As a sophomore Pauling was given a job working in the chemistry department's "solution room," where, bright and able, he soon made an impression on many of the professors. He was also invited to join a fraternity, Gamma Tau Beta (mainly, he thought, in order to raise the house grade-point average). Pauling was generally well accepted by his fraternity brothers, who gave him the awful nickname "Peanie" and included him in all house activities. At one party, a house member remembered, some of the boys dressed in drag, Peanie especially making "a pretty good-looking little gal."
The younger members of Gamma Tau Beta were required to have a date every week, which Pauling remembered as "quite a problem for me. I had a lot of trouble asking a young woman to go to a movie with me because I was shy and didn't have a lot of money to entertain lavishly." But there was an inducement to find female companionship: Brothers who failed their romantic duties were carried upstairs, forced into a bathtub filled with freezing water, and held under until nearly drowned, a quaint Greek custom called "dunking." The weekend soon came when Pauling didn't have a date, but he had already figured out what he called "a little subterfuge" to get around the punishment. As the older fraternity brothers were carrying him up the stairs, he started breathing deeply, saturating his blood with oxygen. "Then I didn't struggle at all," he remembered. "They put me in the tub, holding me under the water, and I just lay there ... lay there ... lay there . . . and the seconds went by ... a minute went by . . . and they pulled me out, very frightened, saying, 'He's had a heart attack or something!' Of course, I 'recovered,' and from then on didn't have to worry about it."
The Arrangement of Electrons
Poverty had an effect on more than Pauling's social life. He had to work his way through college; during his freshman year he chopped wood, mopped kitchens, and cut up quarters of beef for a girls' dormitory, putting in one hundred hours a month at twenty-five cents per hour. "In order to do this . . . and to keep up with my studies, it was necessary that I not waste any hours during the day," he remembered. "So I think I developed the habit of working." Long hours of hard work would become the norm for the rest of his life.
Following his freshman year, in the early summer of 1918, Pauling and Mervyn Stephenson, along with a number of other OAC cadets, were sent to the Presidio in San Francisco for six weeks of intensive officers' training. Pauling and Stephenson spent the rest of the summer helping build wooden-hulled freighters in a shipyard on the coast of Oregon. Whatever Pauling's opinions about war later, during World War I he was in full support of the government's actions. Stephenson would later remember that Pauling was a strong supporter of the war effort, "100 percent for it."
Pauling's sophomore-year job in the chemistry department stockroom, preparing standard solutions and handing them out to students, helped him make a living — and almost killed him. One day, while transferring ammonia into smaller bottles, Pauling thought he would make the job easier by creating a siphon. "I blew into the rubber tube to get up enough pressure to start the siphon and then opened my mouth, forgetting that the pressure would blow the ammonia into my mouth," he remembered. "After I h
ad removed the mucous membrane that fell off inside my mouth, I went over to the student health service and was left to think that sometimes one mustn't be satisfied with having solved one problem but must go on and continue to think about the matter and solve the next problem that might arise." The next summer, after his sophomore year, Pauling started a job delivering milk from eight in the evening until four in the morning, physically punishing work that he could bear for only a month. He then secured a job with a contractor who had been hired by the state to test paving materials on the new network of hardtopped highways being laid across Oregon. The job of paving inspector paid well, and he enjoyed the work, traveling to out-of-the-way places with names like Wolf Creek and Grave Creek and camping out for weeks at a time in tents with the road crews. He liked the company of the workmen, who seemed to take a brotherly interest in the young whiz kid. He tested the blacktop, helped lay chain for surveying, even ran a steamroller off the road and flipped it. (Pauling didn't learn how to drive a car until he was in graduate school.) The job gave him time to think about chemistry as well. In his off hours that summer he lay on his cot in the tent and perused a chemical handbook, getting pleasure out of noting the properties of compounds, just as he had enjoyed listing the properties of minerals when he was rock collecting. He even tried some early theorizing, exercising his mind for a few weeks vainly trying to relate the magnetic properties of substances in some logical way to the periodic table. All the money he earned he sent back to Belle to bank for his coming year's tuition, and there was some left over to help his family as well.