Years of Discovery
Caltech and JPL make world-changing discoveries right in our own backyard
By Carl Kozlowski 06/09/2011
On a broad swath of shrub-covered landscape in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains between La Cañada Flintridge and Pasadena sits NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which since 1936 has had a direct hand in creating or testing everything from nuclear weapons to weather satellites and space shuttles.
Coupled with the low-key, bucolic campus of Caltech just east of Pasadena’s South Lake Avenue shopping district, the two powerhouse institutions have together made massive impacts on the advancement of science and technology throughout the past century.
Speaking with JPL historian Erik Conway and Caltech archivist Shelley Erwin in recent separate interviews, PW was able to peek behind the curtain at some of the scientific wonders at JPL and discuss the vital role the lab might play in the planet’s future.
“Where to start?!” laughs Conway, when asked about the benefits JPL has had on daily life. “One is weather satellites, which couldn’t be done before the Space Age. So you couldn’t see ocean storms coming, or storm fronts that build to tornados. And there are other things, like innovations in electronics from the Apollo era, which put a lot of money in digital computing during the crucial era of the ’60s.”
JPL had its informal start in 1936 with rocket experiments for the US Army but didn’t receive Army funding until 1939. It graduated to its current massive hilltop complex in 1944, when it was constituted as a lab operating under the Ordinance Department of the Army.
Because many of its scientists were reluctant to develop war technology, JPL’s mission changed in the 1950s, causing it to become a central location for the development of everything the space race needed — from the Explorer program of satellites to the space shuttles on up to current plans, which include landing humans on an asteroid by the late 2020s.
Currently, about 5,100 people are employed by JPL, making it Pasadena’s largest employer, and it operates on an annual budget of $1.4 billion. Looking back over JPL’s countless discoveries, Conway believes its biggest success has been the Voyager program — though he concedes that sometimes even the best intentions and most complex technology can go wrong.
“Our biggest success has been the Voyager satellites,” says Conway. “They surveyed four planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune —which is more than any other, and they have continued to operate since ‘77 while returning data. Our biggest disappointment, thankfully, isn’t a tragedy in the way you might think but was the Viking mission’s failure to find life on Mars. It’s beyond our control. We try to take losses somewhat in stride, but there’s new landing systems now that are successful on Mars, at least searching.”
Caltech, meanwhile, evolved from its predecessor school, Throop Polytechnic, founded in 1891 as a manual arts school — meaning that Throop focused on a practical learning approach more easily described as “learning by doing.” The school’s mission changed dramatically in 1904, when George Ellery Hale, the new head of the Mount Wilson Observatory, proposed transforming the school into a high-tech engineering and research college that would rival East Coast powerhouses like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), his alma mater.
Hale accomplished the switch by teaming with two other science giants, MIT chemist A.A. Noyes and University of Chicago physicist Robert Millikan, and restarting the school as the California Institute of Technology in 1920. The results of that partnership have been astonishing, to say the least, as the staff has collectively produced 31 Nobel Prize winners en route to the Institute’s current powerhouse status, with 2,175 graduate and undergraduate students as well as 656 postdoctoral scholars training for the future development of mankind.
While Caltech has long harbored a reputation as a major developer of new weapons technology, Caltech archivist Shelley Erwin says that impression is incorrect and that the institute’s work for the military consisted only of designing and building rockets and torpedoes for the US Navy during World War II. Instead, she focuses on what she believes are the three biggest discoveries made at Caltech.
“In 1935, Charles Richter created the earthquake magnitude scale, now named the Richter Scale, for measuring the size of earthquakes,” says Erwin. “Then in 1953, Clair C. Paterson determined the age of the Earth to be 4.6 billion years, and in the 1980s William A. Fowler won the Nobel Prize for establishing that the chemical elements of the universe — including those in the human body — were made in the stars.”
While those profound discoveries may be difficult for laypeople to wrap their minds around, Caltech’s work with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) plays a vital role in the lives of everyone who resides in earthquake-prone Southern California. Caltech’s seismological laboratory operates the Southern California Seismic Network in partnership with the USGS, offering earthquake readings while both fully analyzing their aftereffects and predicting their next occurrence.
But Erwin notes that the eyes and minds of Caltech are firmly planted on the future, with a new division called the Resnick Sustainability Institute currently conducting fundamental research in energy science. Other Caltech faculty projects include nano-engineering molecular medicines and drug-delivery devices to fight cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases here on earth.
Conway offers an important lesson to anyone who feels scientific research funding should be among the items cut amid our nation’s budget crisis. His response to the question of whether we can afford to scale back in this regard is at once practical and inspirational.
“All the money for space stuff is spent here on Earth, employs people and makes technologies that might be commercialized,” says Conway. “It’s also here on Earth doing productive things, showing that there are benefits to knowledge, we learn things about the universe, and economic benefits. Even the most far-flung seeming ideas can help our lives on the most basic levels."
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