Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  During his first year at Portland's large and well-staffed Washington High School, Linus took his first real science course, a general introduction called "physiography," from a Smith College chemistry graduate, Pauline Geballe. Because of his eagerness to learn, Linus had a keen appreciation of teachers who were able to make their subjects coherent, logical, and interesting. He was impressed by Miss Geballe's teaching abilities, especially her use of visual aids: to demonstrate atmospheric pressure, for example, she boiled water in an old Log Cabin syrup tin, then tightened the cap and let her class watch as the steam condensed inside and air pressure crushed the can.

  The class also examined the properties of minerals, which diverted Linus's attention from insects to rocks. He did a great deal of reading on the subject, carefully copying tables of properties out of books he got from the library and testing his findings in order to fit them into the logical schemes of mineralogy. "I was beginning to be a scientist, in a way, without any training," he said. His early rock collection never became substantial—the area where he lived didn't offer a great range of specimens—but it was the start of a lifelong interest in crystals and minerals.

  Linus had an unusual interest in order. The hours he spent alone, studying, testing, learning about and carefully classifying minerals, were hours in which the unknown became known. There were rational relationships between things, there were logical connections, and there was a kind of ordered perfection. It was a welcome change from his home life. Rational order became his passion, and soon he was taking a scientific interest in everything. "Linus was always thinking," remembered his sister Lucile. "His mind was just active all the time wondering about this and that and the reasons for them." One cold morning, waiting for the train in Portland, she recalled, her twelve-year-old brother impressed his mother and sisters by commenting, "Mama, I know why you don't get so cold if you are moving around. Your feet aren't on the ground but half the time."

  His attitude even extended to family matters. His sister Lucile remembered borrowing a neighbor's bike and running, crying, to her big brother when the boy knocked her off and took it back. Instead of avenging his sister, Linus thought awhile, then told her to stop crying. "After all," he said, "it wasn't your bike."

  And it worked well in high school, where Pauling's favorite classes soon became math and science. "I got along well. I studied, did my work, and was happy. The only times that I was unhappy came when I didn't know what I was supposed to know perfectly," remembered Pauling. "It's like the story of the little boy who, when his teacher asked him, 'Willie, what is two and two?' answered, 'Four.' And she said, 'That's very good, Willie.' And he said, 'Very good? It's perfect!' I liked mathematics because you could be perfect, whereas with Latin, or in studying any language, it's essentially impossible to be perfect."

  Things Happen

  At around age twelve Pauling gave physical form to his emotional estrangement from the family. In the basement of his mother's boardinghouse he hammered some cheap lumber into a ten-by-ten-foot room, a rude laboratory where he could organize and protect his collections and, more importantly, create a haven from Belle where he could be free.

  But he wouldn't be totally alone. Walking home from high school one day, Linus met, for the first time since Herman's death, a kindred spirit, a boy a year older than Linus but in other ways similar—bright, inward-turning, and fascinated by natural phenomena—named Lloyd Jeffress. He and Jeffress would become best friends. They overcame their shyness enough to talk about the things that interested them. They taught themselves to play chess by reading about it in an encyclopedia and making a crude game out of paper. One afternoon after school Jeffress invited Linus to his home to see his simple, homemade chemistry set. Linus watched enraptured as Jeffress performed what looked like magic tricks, mixing colored powders, making solutions bubble and change hue. Then came the grand finale. Jeffress carefully mixed common table sugar and potassium chlorate together, added a drop of sulfuric acid—and the sugar burst into flame.

  At the same moment, so did Linus Pauling's mind. "As I think back, what struck me was the realization that substances are not immutable," he remembered about that afternoon. "Here he had sugar and a few chemicals and ended up with a little pile of black carbon. That phenomenon—changing substances into other substances—is what impressed me. In chemistry, things happen. Very striking things happen." He would always pinpoint that moment as the start of his chemistry career.

  He had found his passion. Linus ran the mile back to his home, eager to do anything that faintly resembled chemistry. The only equipment he could find was his mother's small spirit lamp. He built a stand with his Erector set, lit the lamp, and performed his first work in chemistry: He boiled water. Unfortunately, he boiled it in the glass cap of the alcohol burner; the glass cracked, and his first foray into experimental work ended with an uncomfortable explanation to his mother.

  - - -

  The mounted butterflies and labeled minerals were pushed aside; Linus transformed his basement sanctuary into a chemistry laboratory. "He would take Lloyd Jeffress down there and the awfulest odors would creep up occasionally from their mixtures," his sister Pauline recalled. But odors were about all his sisters or mother knew of his basement experiments. It was a strict—and strictly observed—rule that no one but Linus and a few select friends could enter his lab.

  That small group included Jeffress and two other science-minded boys from the neighborhood: Lynn Anderson, the son of a local barber, and Lloyd Simon, a peppy, entrepreneurial teenager who would devote much of his time with Linus to dreaming up moneymaking schemes.

  Too poor to buy his own equipment or chemicals, Linus scavenged, stole, or cajoled others to give him what he needed. Belle's married friend Billy Ziegler, eager to help, provided some chemicals from his drug-supply business. Around the corner from Linus's house lived a Mr. Yokum, a former mountain-climbing guide and semiprofessional photographer, who managed the stockroom at a local dental college. Yokum took a friendly interest in the fatherless boy; in addition to pieces of chipped laboratory glassware from the stockroom, he gave Linus his first bicycle and some early lessons in Greek, which Linus would study on his own while riding the steam train to his grandparents' house.

  Most importantly, there was the abandoned laboratory at the smelter, a treasure trove of chemicals and equipment.

  Chemistry had an effect on Linus that nothing had had before.

  Part of it was intellectual stimulation. Linus loved puzzles and brainteasers, and chemistry was a great puzzle. There was a rough sense to the way chemicals combined and transformed into other chemicals, but a great deal was still a mystery. You could play all day at new combinations, trying to predict what would happen if instead of chemical A you used chemical B in an experiment.

  Part of it was a sense of romance and adventure. He had been deeply impressed by the central roles and heroic images of scientists in the works of fiction he had read by Verne and Wells. He had been impressed by the image of scientists in these books. From Verne he learned that scientists were fearless, innovative men able to handle any danger with a combination of pluck and wit; their work was a great adventure that took them to the center of the earth, the bottom of the sea, the moon. From Wells he learned that scientists could be the key to a happier future, when rationality would supersede the petty passions of humanity, ushering in an age of reason and plenty. By playing at being a chemist, he was vicariously joining the ranks of these literary supermen.

  Part of it was sheer, daring fun. "I was simply entranced by chemical phenomena," he remembered. He mixed potassium chlorate and sulfur together, wadded it in paper, set it on the trolley tracks, and ran whooping through the streets when cars set it off with a bang. (The streetcar company sent a representative to his house to put a stop it.) He prepared an unstable iodide of nitrogen that popped loudly when disturbed—a sort of junior-grade nitroglycerine—and used it to surprise his sisters at home; it worked so well that he took some to s
chool. He accidentally sloshed concentrated sulfuric acid on himself one day, eating away his clothes and the broom he used to sweep it into a drain (although he avoided serious burns). He once set fire to wooden walls with molten phosphorous.

  For Linus, chemistry was filling a need. Chemistry, he was learning, was organized in a rational way. The periodic table of the elements illustrated an underlying order to nature; the work of chemists had shown that this order extended to their science in certain ways. If you mixed the right amounts of reactants and exposed them to the right amount of energy, the same reaction would take place each time, predictably, reliably. Chemistry provided Linus with explanations and a sense of order in a life that was otherwise, in important ways, disordered and inexplicable.

  Once focused on chemistry, Linus's attention never wavered. In addition to the normal load of classes and close to four years of Latin, he began to take every science and math class he could at Washington High School, including courses in advanced mathematics through the college-freshman level. In his junior year he took his first formal chemistry course under William V. Green, a small, dapper man who was impressed by Linus's eagerness for all things chemical. Green let Linus stay after school to help him determine the heat value of the school system's oil and coal. There was no second-year chemistry offered at Washington High, but in his senior year Green arranged for Linus to work independently in the lab on problems in organic chemistry.

  In his last semester at Washington High School, Linus took his first physics course. The teacher, Virgil Earle, a remarkable, energetic lecturer, introduced Linus to a new level of understanding the physical world, opening his eyes to the basic laws of energy and matter that underlay chemistry. Linus was particularly impressed by Earle's precise use of language. The teacher once brought to his class's attention the wording of a story-question asked in their textbook, Millikan and Gale's First Course in Physics. The book read: If you were in the mountains and came across a cube of gold, one foot on each side, would you try to carry it home? Earle looked at his students. "Well?" he said. "Of course you would. Anybody would try to carry it home. The question ought to be, could you carry it home?"

  This scholarly concern for accuracy was complemented by a general thoroughness in his high school classes that impressed Linus. "I think the Oregon schools had a significant effect in developing in me this feeling that if there were some pieces of information that I was missing, then I should have them," he later remembered. "That if there was something I should know, then I'd better know it."

  One thing he would carry with him from high school was the importance of the careful use of English, and not just in science courses. Linus always had a keen ear for good language, an appreciation grounded in years of avid reading and expressed in the form of good writing. A creative-writing assignment in a high school English class even led to an attempt at fiction. A short story Linus wrote about oil exploration—complete with youthful hero, world travel, and explosive fires—was read aloud in class and proved so popular that his teacher asked for further weekly installments. "I was the only one whom she encouraged to write a novel," Linus said.

  If he had lived sixty years later, Linus's shy bookishness and fixation on science might have earned him the title of "nerd." But a different set of values operated before World War I. His classmates remember him as a quiet boy but one who was well liked and respected for his exceptional abilities in class—someone who would go far. They didn't think of him as a nerd at Washington High School. They thought of him as a genius.

  And Linus may have felt the same way. He coasted through Washington High without ever having to study hard, mastered every course, and impressed all his teachers. In a high school volume of Virgil's Aeneid that he kept his whole life, there is an illustration of a statue of Minerva. Above it, in what appears to be Linus's hand, is the note "Linus Pauling, some day." An arrow points from the note to a statuette of the Winged Victory in Minerva's hand. Above the statuette someone has drawn a halo.

  When he was sixteen, a high school senior, Linus started a diary:

  August 29, 1917. Today I am beginning to write the history of my life. The idea which has resulted in this originated a year or more ago, when I thought of the enjoyment that I would have could I read of the events of my former and younger life. My children and grandchildren will without doubt hear of the events in my life with the same relish with which I read the scattered fragments written by my granddad, Linus Wilson Darling. . . . Often, I hope, I shall glance over what I have written before, and ponder and meditate on the mistakes that I have made—on the good luck that I have had—on the carefree gaiety of my younger days; and, pondering, I shall resolve to remedy these mistakes, to bring back my good luck, and to regain my happiness.

  His last year of high school was a busy one. Bored by regular jobs, Linus, along with his entrepreneurial friend Lloyd Simon and another boy skilled in photography, tried to start a photo-developing service. It was not their first business venture. In addition to the distilled-water scheme, Linus and Lloyd had also tried their hand at independent chemical research, printing business cards for the "Palmon Laboratory, Research Chemists" when they were fifteen years old. Nothing panned out, but the photography idea looked like a sure thing, the right mix of commercial need (home photography was all the rage, and they would develop film for local drugstores) and an opportunity for chemical research on the side. They set up a lab in Simon's basement, supplied it with help from Belle's friend Billy Ziegler, identified the stores they would contract with for work, and planned to buy a motorcycle for deliveries. "If I get $5 to $10 a week throughout the year my college course will present few pecuniary difficulties. I might even take a year of graduate work and get the degree of Ch.E. [chemical engineer]. I will specialize in the chemistry of photography as far as possible," Linus wrote in the fall of 1917. "I enjoy day-dreaming, and building castles in Spain. But I hope these are not dreams or castles."

  The following January, he annotated that entry: "They are." The high school boys found they weren't skilled enough to make salable photographic prints.

  - - -

  Despite some concerns about how he would finance it, Linus never doubted he would go to college. His reasons were both intellectual and practical. In the simplest sense, he needed to satisfy an almost visceral appetite for chemistry; he wanted to know much more about the field, and college was the logical place to learn it. There was also money to be made. Early in the twentieth century American business firms began to realize that basic scientific research yielded profits in the form of improved efficiency, new products, and new techniques. Chemistry was important in everything from metallurgy to pharmaceuticals, textiles to agriculture. From his wide reading Linus knew that industrial chemistry, practiced after attaining a degree in chemical engineering, could provide a good living. When he was only fifteen years old, he had already decided on his career. During a visit to his grandparents in Oswego with his friend Lloyd Jeffress, his grandmother asked him what his job plans were. Linus answered that he was going to be a chemical engineer. Jeffress then piped up prophetically, "No, he's going to be a professor."

  Linus's choice of schools for advanced training was limited because he had little money, but luckily the state offered an adequate and relatively inexpensive program in chemical engineering at the Oregon Agricultural College (OAC; now Oregon State University), a land-grant institution in Corvallis, about ninety miles from his home. He applied, and OAC accepted him early in his senior year of high school. Linus had by that time already exhausted all of the science and most of the math offerings at Washington High and wanted to leave a term early to get a head start at college. State law, however, decreed that each high school student must take a full year of American history at the senior level. Linus figured that he would circumvent this by taking two terms of the class simultaneously, but the principal of Washington High School saw things differently. He refused Linus's request. Years later, Linus would remember his astonishment at
this summary exercise of institutional power. "He didn't ask me, 'What are you going to do? Are you a good student?' He just said no," Linus said.

  Instead of doing as he was told, Linus did what he thought was right. He dropped both history classes, indulged himself instead in some extra math and, as he wanted, left for college early—without a high school diploma. Using the terminology of a later time, Linus dropped out.

  There would be one more defiance of authority before Linus left home. The summer before college, he took a job running a drill press and doing odd jobs at a machinery-manufacturing company, where his careful work habits soon earned him several raises. The owner offered him the then-princely wage of $125 a month if he'd come to work full-time after graduating high school. Belle was frantic for him to take the job. She had never understood her son's interest in science, she desperately needed the money, and she had no appreciation of college. At age fifteen, Belle had been sent, with her older sister Goldie, to boarding school at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, hundreds of miles from her home in Condon. She quit within a year, homesick and disenchanted with the lessons higher education offered. She could never sympathize with or understand Linus's desire to go to college.

  Luckily, there were parental figures who could. Lloyd Jeffress lived with his aunt and uncle, and Linus was often invited to dinner or overnight stays at their house. They were more educated and appreciative of education than Belle; they had encouraged Jeffress to go to college and did the same for Linus. Linus told them about Belle's insistence that he work instead. "They said it was my duty to say no," Linus remembered. "They said that I must go to college." Linus told Belle he was turning down the machine-shop job and continuing his education. "I suppose it disappointed her," he remembered later. "She perhaps had started giving up on me, on understanding me."