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Millikan came to the California Institute of Technology to be the director of the Norman Bridges physics laboratory and the school’s de facto (but not officially titled) president. With access to the lion’s share of the schools financial resources and minimal administrative duties, Millikan’s goal was to transform a middling engineering college into an institution that emphasized pure science. Millikan believed that the modern world was basically a scientific invention, and that America’s future rested on promoting basic science and its applications. Caltech, in his view, existed to provide America’s scientific leadership, and to “put physics on the map of Southern California,” as he once explained. Millikan’s ambition over the next 25 years transformed not only Caltech, but also Southern California’s place in the world.

Between 1920 and 1930, more than one million people flocked to this region. The population explosion created boom times for bankers and businessmen. Building speculation flourished; interest rates soared; and new real estate subdivisions dotted the landscape. Economically, the region prospered as never before.

Southern California was also awash in students. By the mid-1920s, the region boasted more than 12,000 students in private colleges and universities. Another 6,500 college students were attending the new southern branch of the University of California (what we now call UCLA). However, no other southland school, private or public, could match Caltech’s strength in the fields of physics, chemistry, or engineering.

Until 1925, the institute conferred doctorates in only those three subjects. Millikan expanded its scientific reach, and in the process elevated the region’s horizons. Geology joined the list of graduate studies in 1926, aeronautics in 1926, biology and mathematics in 1928. By then, Caltech had 500 undergraduates, 60 graduate students in physics, 20 in chemistry, and four in electrical engineering.

By the 1930s, it had luminaries such as Linus Pauling in chemistry, Thomas Hunt Morgan in biology, and Millikan himself in physics. Einstein’s visits to the campus in the early years of that decade capped Millikan’s campaign to make Caltech one of the physics capitals of the world.

Among Millikan’s stars of science was one that literally boosted Caltech—and with it, America—into the stars. Building on the work of aircraft design pioneers such as Arthur E. Raymond, Theodore von Kármán rallied students and coworkers to attack a host of theoretical problems that revolutionized our understanding of aerodynamics and rockets. One of his most important works was a 10-foot wind tunnel designed to his specifications at the Guggenheim Laboratory. It was a bridge between the scientific world and one of Southern California’s biggest industries. Half of its time was budgeted for research problems and the other half was for testing new airplane designs for manufacturers. In fact, it tested practically all the aircraft built by the companies on the West Coast during the 1930s, including the Douglas Company’s DC-3 series, the most successful commercial aircraft of the time. Many of Caltech’s outstanding students ended up in leadership roles at these companies.

Van Kármán, his graduate students, and some local amateurs were responsible for the creation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech to this day. When their work rattled too many windows on campus, they were sent out into the arroyo, where they could experiment with high-altitude sounding rockets to their heart’s content. The project grew, and with Millikan’s blessings, the Army Air Corps assumed direct control of the rocket project in 1940. The lab’s solid-propellant rocket engines were developed, tested, and delivered into the hands of the Navy for use in the Pacific three years later. In late 1958, it became one of the core centers of the newly created civilian space agency NASA, and began a new career as the heart of America’s unmanned space program.

JPL provided America’s answer to the Russians’ launch of Sputnik, the first man-made object sent into orbit around Earth, in 1958 in the form of a satellite called Explorer 1. Data from Explorer 1—and later Explorer 3—led to the discovery of the belt of radiation around Earth known as the Van Allen radiation belts. A host of lunar and planetary spacecraft firsts from JPL followed in rapid succession, including the first close-up views of the moon from the Ranger spacecraft, the first close-up views of Venus, Mars, and Mercury from the Mariner spacecraft, the first lander on Mars with the Viking mission, and the first close-up views of the mysterious outer solar system planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune by Voyager 1 and 2. These days, NASA’s Mars rover, Curiosity, which JPL designed and built, is slowly scaling the slopes of the planet’s Mount Sharp, and sending back myriad breathtakingly beautiful images of the barren landscape.

Photo was taken in Washington D.C. Photo by Harris and Ewing.

Meanwhile, Millikan also sought to use Caltech’s prowess in rockets to help the country during World War II. Three months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America entered the war, the first contract for defense work on rockets in Southern California began at Caltech’s Kellogg Radiation Laboratory. From a modest government contract of $200,000 in 1941, Caltech’s rocket project grew into an $80 million dollar war industry. In 1944, at the height of the project, Caltech was spending more on rockets than its entire annual budget before the war. In fact, until the last year of the war, every rocket fired by the navy was manufactured in Pasadena. When the war ended, the whole rocket project was quietly put to rest.

Millikan’s Caltech also became the epicenter of earthquake science. It started with an interest in addressing the “California problem,” as the American seismological community of that era thought earthquakes were confined to this region.

Millikan brought in Harry Oscar Wood, a mineralogist trained at Berkeley, who had lived through the 1906 San Francisco quake and dreamed of building a network of special instruments throughout the Southland that would scientifically measure and record the shaking ground. Working at Caltech with astronomer John Anderson, Wood designed a reliable, short-period, portable instrument that, when placed vertically, consistently recorded the east-west and north-south components of the Earth’s motions during an earthquake. The Wood-Anderson torsion seismometer was sensitive enough to record shocks having a period varying from 0.5 to 2.0 seconds. He set out his network of instruments, and waited for the shaking to begin.

Then, in 1923, a funny thing happened. The Wood-Anderson seismograph unexpectedly recorded the rumbling of a distant earthquake, one from far across the planet. Wood had unwittingly altered the course of his own program. Seismology was a worldwide science, and Caltech, with Harry Wood’s network of instruments in place, started accumulating records of earthquakes around the Earth. Soon the Caltech Seismo Lab had a welter of confusing earthquake records. Enter Charles Francis Richter, probably the most famous name in the history of seismology.

Richter came to Caltech as a grad student in theoretical physics because he had heard Millikan give a lecture. To support himself, he got a job sorting out the growing mountain of earthquake data in Wood’s lab. Richter found he could classify little quakes and big ones, near ones and far ones, on a scale that ranked earthquakes in factors of 10. “If there was anything you call an actual discovery that came out of that scale,” he later said, “it was that the biggest earthquakes are ever so much bigger than the little ones.” The world-famous Richter scale grew out of Woods’ vision of a Southern California earthquake network.

Of course, for all of his progressive thinking on the topic of science, Millikan’s social views seem to us today narrow, like those held by many men of his time. He didn’t understand the role that women could play in science—Caltech was open only to men on his watch. And he believed that Southern California and Caltech’s ability to solve scientific and technological problems stemmed from “the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race” (as he once called it) and its dominance in the region. Boy, would he be surprised today by women such as Fiona Harrison, an astronomy and physics professor who is the principal investigator of NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission, and the number of professors from around the world that flock to Caltech who have made great discoveries here, from Dutch astronomer Maarten Schmidt, who discovered quasars in 1963, to Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail, who received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1999.

But nevertheless, Millikan had expanded Caltech’s horizons by the time he turned over the reins to the next president of Caltech in 1946: Then, as now, the school is “small in numbers, gigantic in quality and in influence,” as Caltech President Harold Brown said in 1991. Caltech created larger entities out of itself—like JPL—that applied technology on a grand, California-sized scale. Aspirations can be powerful; Millikan’s still define our region.

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A hundred women and men, representatives of almost every Jewish organization in the city, gathered hastily to plan an event to honor of the couple. They rented the most lavish room in town: the Fiesta Room of the Ambassador Hotel where, three months earlier, Hollywood’s finest had gathered for the third annual Academy Awards. There, the Jews of L.A. would stage the “the most important event” in their community’s history, a “monster banquet” (as their press release boasted) honoring a personage the L.A. Times called “the man Jews generally regard as the greatest member of their race.”

Jews of all sorts came out for the February 16 gala: Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform; Ashkenazim and Sefaradim; native-born and greenhorn; Zionist and non-; intellectuals and businessfolk. Rabbi Shlomo Neches, the immigrant traditionalist from the Breed Street Shul, offered “grace,” while Rabbi Edgar Magnin, the tony doyen of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, introduced the great physicist. In between, Los Angeles Mayor John Clinton Porter welcomed the crowd.

Albert Einstein spent three winter terms at Caltech, in 1931, 1932, and 1933, and his visits with his wife were a unifying event for a Jewish community divided by background, language, class, and sorts of observance. Everyone, it seemed, admired the physicist. The leaders of La Communidad Sephardi invited him to speak at the dedication of their grand Tifferet Israel synagogue in the West Adams neighborhood of South L.A. Samuel Untermyer, the best-paid lawyer in New York and one of America’s most renowned Jews (“A millionaire many times over [and] a defender of the poor and oppressed,” as H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine described him), hosted the Einsteins at his new hotel in Palm Springs. Jack Warner and Carl Laemmle, the Jews who headed Warner Bros. and Universal, limousined the Einsteins to their lots for private showings of favorite films. Ben Meyer, president of the Union Bank and a Jewish community leader, insisted the couple join him at his Montecito ranch.

Every edition of the local Jewish paper, The Bnai Brith Messenger, carried Einstein news. In his honor, L.A. Jews made out checks to cover “a huge reforestation project in Palestine which [would] be known as the Einstein Forest.” Something about Einstein had moved the Jews of the city in a way that no one before ever had (and no one after ever would). It was only after the scientist left that they sobered, leaving Dr. George J. Saylin, the head of the Los Angeles Jewish Kehillah, the official representative of the local Jewish community, to observe:

[W]e have overdone it, [and] we have permitted our emotions to get the better of us. Hero worship is as old as worship itself. Though we have accepted but one God, most of us cannot resist the temptation of manufacturing demigods a sideline.

Saylin had a point.

Still, it was not just Jews who venerated Einstein. Five hundred high school girls greeted his ship in San Diego carrying poinsettias; he was a guest of honor at the Tournament of Roses Parade and the L.A. Chamber of Commerce annual banquet; 10,000 Angelenos greeted him at a ceremony on the steps of L.A.’s City Hall; Charlie Chaplin twice hosted the Einsteins for dinner at his home; and California Governor James Rolph visited the Einsteins at their borrowed bungalow in Pasadena. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, when the L.A. Times reported that Einstein “was deluged with offers from firms and corporations, running into thousands of dollars, for signed testimonials to the value he had found in their toothpastes, cigarettes, toilet waters, disinfectants, and this, that and the other.”

Einstein refused to go Hollywood and cash in on his fame, but he could never escape it. From 1929 to 1933, the L.A. Times published 1,322 articles about him, or just under four a week. Even in a town used to regarding celebrities with studied dispassion, sophisticates became worshipful schoolgirls when confronted with Einstein.

There’s a complex relationship between the adulatory reverence that the Jews of L.A. felt for Einstein and the reverent adulation that other city residents felt. All of them, to be sure, recognized that the man in their midst was the greatest physicist since Newton. (Einstein was 51 years old when he made his first L.A. visit; 10 years had passed since he had won the Nobel Prize, and his image was recognized around the world as the very icon of genius.) And they all understood, as Einstein’s host at Caltech, Nobel laureate Robert Millikan put it, that Einstein somehow represented a “scientific … approach to all problems … that throws into the discard all prejudices and preconceptions.”

But just what this meant was different for Jews than for the Protestants and Catholics among whom they lived. For Jews, Einstein represented a new, scientific social compact, in which a person’s mettle was measured not by how he prayed or by the music of his accent but by his accomplishments. Einstein represented these things in his vocation; the universe cared not a whit if its laws were decoded by a Protestant, a Jain, or a non-believing Jew. He represented these things in his actions, denouncing tyrants, preaching internationalism, embracing Zionism, and, while in Southern California, petitioning Governor Rolph to release two labor leaders doing time for a bombing many suspected they had not committed. Einstein demonstrated that a Jew, no less than anyone else, could speak truth to power without apology.

Einstein proved, as one L.A. Jewish leader put it, that “the question of the cultural value of the Jewish race no longer need to be asked.” Through the blinding brilliance of his science, Einstein transcended his Jewishness—and everyone knew it (and this, while never denying or regretting his Judaism). And so it was that L.A.’s Jews both loved Einstein like all the other Angelenos did and loved Einstein because all the other Angelenos did (as well as almost everyone else).

The way Einstein was regarded helps to illuminate a perplexing commonplace. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Jews have succeeded extravagantly in science. The statistics about Nobel Prizes are well-known: Of America’s laureates, a third in chemistry have been Jews, and more still in physics and medicine. Tabulating handshakes with the king of Sweden is a crass measure of scientific excellence, but it reflects something—though we don’t know exactly what.

A century ago, sociologist Thorstein Veblen hypothesized that it was because Jews, as outsiders, were skeptical of received wisdom, a trait that paid dividends in science. Others since have argued that Jewish “love of learning” accounts for their successes, or Jewish genes for intelligence. Recently, “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld argued that it is a tense combination of feelings of superiority (“we’re chosen”) and inferiority (“we’re loud and pushy”), along with a talent for deferring gratification that explains the success of Jews (among other immigrant groups) in America.

Whether or not there’s any truth to these claims, Einstein’s months in Los Angeles and the adulation that endured long after he had left suggest another explanation. Jews embraced science because they thought that science promised a society that would accept them, a society in which a Jew—even one of poor lineage, inadequate coiffeur, and radical sympathies, like Einstein—can be regarded as a great man among great men.

When Einstein died in 1955, although 22 years had passed since he last visited the city, the L.A. Jewish Community Council (LAJCC) quickly organized a memorial service, co-sponsored by UCLA, Caltech, and USC. Judge David Coleman, the head of the LAJCC, eulogized Einstein in the great physicist’s own words:

The striving for knowledge for its own sake, … the love of justice and the quest for independence—these are the motivating traditions of the Jewish people which cause me to regard my adherence to them as a gift of destiny.

By then, the three great universities that took part in Einstein’s memorial—and the best universities across the nation—boasted dozens of brilliant Jewish scientists striving for knowledge, justice, and independence. These women and men were embraced with some of the same enthusiasm that Einstein had found a quarter of a century earlier, and for the same reasons.

A lot has changed in the 84 years since Einstein caught his first glimpses of California and 500 girls with bouquets of poinsettias. No one much wonders today about “the cultural value of the Jewish race,” and thank God for that. But the need has not passed for a worldview that, as Millikan said of Einstein’s, “throws into the discard all prejudices and all preconceptions.” It was the hope that such a worldview would spread that drew so many—the Jews of L.A. and all the rest, all over the globe—to Einstein and to science. It was a beautiful and forlorn hope then, and remains one today.

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