Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

  And Pauling was impressed by more than G. N. Lewis's ideas. He was attracted by his style. Lewis's approach to science—bold, theoretical, structural—would provide a model for Pauling. This was chemistry on a level different from what he had known. This was theoretical chemistry, the invention of a few simple, broad ideas that explained and ordered an otherwise confusing welter of phenomena. Lewis's attempts to explain all of chemistry with his electron cubes excited Pauling to think in broader terms, on a higher level than he had before.

  And he wanted to share his excitement. Unlike more sophisticated universities, OAC did not offer regular chemistry-department seminars in which the faculty would spend an hour or two explaining current research to other faculty members and students. Only one, on the frozen-fish industry, had been given during the entire year Pauling taught there. But, enthusiastic about what he had read, Pauling, still a teenager, determined to raise the level of scientific discourse by giving another. He prepared carefully. Then Pauling, technically between his sophomore and junior years in college, introduced his professors to one of the most important recent advances in chemistry: the "electronic" theory of chemical bonding.

  Miss Miller

  His teaching year also gave Pauling time for intellectual snacking outside the sciences. Every few days he would go to the college library and check out one or two books, whatever interested him at the moment. He discovered George Bernard Shaw and read all his plays, including the prefaces and introductions. He devoured the short stories of Maupassant and read a smattering of philosophy. And he indulged his lifelong interest in popular literature as well. He bought the Saturday Evening Post every week, if he had an extra nickel, and read the short stories, especially enjoying anything involving mystery and adventure. He had already developed a taste for science fiction and continued to seek out anything he could find with a science-fiction flavor.

  He also thought about his future. He was becoming unsatisfied with the OAC emphasis on practical training. His interest in chemistry was growing increasingly academic; Lewis and Langmuir had helped turn him toward physical chemistry in general and theoretical approaches in particular. Pauling talked with John Fulton about his concerns, and the department head showed him a flyer from a new school in Pasadena, California, the Throop Polytechnic Institute, that he thought might interest him. Pauling had already heard of it from a pair of students who had flunked out and transferred to OAC: The chemistry program in Pasadena was headed by one of the biggest names in chemistry, A. A. Noyes, founder of the phenomenally successful program in physical chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Throop was quite small, but the program was rigorous, with a lot of tough math and physics. It sounded good, and Pauling wrote Noyes himself asking for advice on entering as an undergraduate. A Throop administrator wrote back with discouraging news about financial support, however, and Pauling decided to stick it out at OAC.

  After working another summer on the highway, he reentered the chemistry program in 1920 as a junior. His teaching success had built his self-confidence; he was now closer in age to his classmates, acclimated to fraternity life, and ready to enjoy college as an upperclassman. He easily earned top marks in virtually all his courses, including, finally, a much-desired A in track. He made some money as an assistant to the school's professor of mechanics, performing calculations on the strength of materials and doing some teaching. He was invited to apply for a Rhodes scholarship, was inducted into honorary societies in engineering and the military arts, and was elected president of the chemistry honorary society, Chi Epsilon.

  He also continued to build his reputation for being the smartest man on campus and something of a smart aleck. His metallography professor remembered Pauling peppering him in class with "embarrassing questions about the ultimate structure of matter." Bored with an assignment in which he was asked to describe methods of photographing metals, Pauling wrote his professor, "It is hardly necessary to describe them except briefly, as the technique of photographing metals is very similar to that required for other purposes. However, in order not to be accused of lying down on the job, I shall devote a few minutes of my valuable time to a short exposition. . . ." If he liked a professor, he would tease: "I have attempted to use words of one syllable to as great an extent as is practicable in order to prevent any mental strain," he wrote on a paper for another teacher.

  "He was a bit on the cocky side," remembered Paul Emmett, a fellow chemistry major, a good friend, and an eventual brother-in-law. (Emmett would marry Pauling's sister Pauline.) "I remember one time in class our new physical chemistry teacher, in correcting problems, said, 'Well, now, since Linus Pauling and I get the same answer, when two great authorities agree, it must be right.' Linus calmly looked him in the eye and said, 'Who's the other one?'"

  Pauling was disappointed in his physical chemistry class; the professor teaching it was new and unsure of himself, the textbook was poor, and there was little theory in the approach. Pauling was bored with plugging numbers into someone else's equations, especially when there wasn't a good explanation of the ideas behind the equations. He had had the same problem with organic chemistry his sophomore year, and he left OAC with a distaste for both subjects.

  Public speaking was, however, becoming more of an interest. In his junior year, Pauling competed in a schoolwide oratorical contest as his class's representative. Although he was fairly comfortable speaking in front of others, Pauling also wanted to win, and he sought out additional coaching in diction and delivery from a former minister who had gone on to become an OAC professor of English. The piece Pauling wrote for the competition was a paean to scientific rationalism entitled "Children of the Dawn":

  My body slept. My mind soared. From infinite distance, attainable only by the flight of thought, I saw in the midst of the limitless universe the solar system—its sun, a pigmy amidst other pigmy suns, dimly visible as a minute radiating point—our earth, revolving about the sun, hardly to be differentiated from the myriads of other planets. That hour a thought was born in me: "The earth is not the center of the universe, but merely a tiny part of the great design."

  As I gazed, entranced, the vapors about the earth condensed, and oceans were born. Aeons passed. Plant and animal life appeared, simple at first, then more complex. . . . The genius of Darwin enlightened the world, so that now it is generally believed that man is an evolutionary product, with lineage extending back to the lowest forms of life. But though we know that man is immeasurably superior now to what he once was, we do not realize the marvelous changes to come, the splendid improvements to be made.

  Physical changes in man are the result of changes in his physical environment. Efficiency is Nature's goal. As conditions changed on this earth, so did the forms of life change, until man, the highest of the animals, has approached physical perfection.

  Similarly, psychical changes in man are the result of changes in his mental environment. ... A young man may now know more of geometry than Euclid, and more of calculus than Newton. ... Is it not evident that the great mental development which has characterized the last few thousand years is still taking place? . . .

  We are not the flower of civilization. We are but the immature bud of a civilization yet to come. We are the children of the dawn, witnessing the approach of day. We bask in the dim prophecies of the rising sun, knowing, even in our inexperience, that something glorious is to come; for it is from us that greater beings will grow, to develop in the light of the sun that shall know no setting.

  The optimism of the piece is typical of Pauling. But his Darwinian progressivism may have been too cheery for the judges. Pauling tied for second place in the contest with the sophomore speaker, who spoke of the dangers of "Closing Our National Door" to immigrants. They both lost to the senior orator's "House Divided Against Itself." (The fellow went on to take second place in the state competition with "Our Tottering Civilization.")

  The summer between his junior and senior years, while again testing paving materi
als, Pauling decided to apply for the Rhodes scholarship. He went all out, as always, noting in his application that since he had learned about the Rhodes the year before, "my actions and activities have to a large extent been influenced by the desire to prepare myself for Oxford." Interestingly, Pauling inquired about the possibilities of using the scholarship to study with a metallography professor at the British school. And he solicited seven letters of recommendation from his teachers at OAC, which together indicate something of the impression he had made on his mentors. Floyd Rowland, the head of the chemical engineering program, took special note of Pauling's oratorical prowess and added that the twenty-year-old "possesses one of the best minds I have ever observed in a person of his age, and in many ways is superior to his instructors." Pauling's public-speaking professor was impressed by the fact that "he seems always unwilling to accept conclusions merely because they are lying close at hand, ready-made. He has the scientific attitude. He does not expect results without hard work, but seems to delight in digging hard."

  But it was his German professor Louis Bach who provided the most careful overview of Pauling's character. "To me, he is an interested and an interesting student, wide-awake, keen, critical, considerate. ... He would make a good teacher, and nobody would be tempted to sleep under his guidance. He is endowed with a remarkable memory in combination with good judgment, sound analytical and synthetical discrimination: a brilliant mind. He likes to discuss and while discussing, shows rare originality," Bach wrote. Then he offered a mild but telling criticism: "His present tendency is to rush too quickly to conclusions. That, however, is due to lack of experience, an unavoidable condition of youth." Rushing to conclusions was one youthful tendency that some would say stayed with Pauling his whole life.

  All the praise was for naught. Although Pauling became one of OAC's candidates for the Rhodes (Paul Emmett was the other), he went no further in the selection process. It was a disappointment when he received the bad tidings during the second semester of his senior year. But by then the blow to his ego didn't seem to matter so much. He was in love.

  - - -

  In the Corvallis railroad station on his way to spend Christmas in Portland, Pauling ran into Fred Allen, an overworked OAC professor who was teaching Pauling physical chemistry that year. Allen desperately needed someone to take over a course he was slated to teach the coming term, a section of freshman chemistry for home economics majors. He had been impressed by Pauling's work in his physical chemistry course—a chemist through and through, Allen later recalled that "the gap from Pauling to the others in the class was akin to the hardness gap from diamond to corundum"—and he knew of Pauling's teaching experience. He asked Pauling to teach the home-economics chemistry course. It was a class Pauling had taught before, and he could use the extra money, so he agreed to do the favor.

  On the first day of winter term, January 6, 1922, he walked into an OAC lecture hall and faced a roomful of twenty-five young women.

  They, in turn, studied their surprisingly young professor, gauging his looks (now grown to a full six feet, thin, nicely dressed) and manner (very professional and a bit stiff, perhaps trying a bit hard to come off as older than he was). Pauling, always shy around women, was extremely self-conscious. But he had taught chemistry to home-economics classes before; he knew the best way to avoid any "boy professor" sniggering was to get right to the subject. This was the second term of a three-term course, and he decided to start by measuring the class's basic knowledge. "Will you tell me all you know about ammonium hydroxide, Miss . . ." He ran his finger down the registration sheet, looking for a name he couldn't possibly mispronounce. "Miss Miller?" He looked up and into the eyes of Ava Helen Miller. She was a small, delicate, strikingly pretty girl with long, dark hair. She was barely eighteen years old. She was a flirt. And, as it turned out, she knew quite a bit about ammonium hydroxide.

  Ava Helen, the tenth of twelve children, was raised on a 160-acre farm near the tiny town of Beavercreek, Oregon. Her father was a German immigrant, a rail-thin, autocratic schoolteacher who first met her mother when she was his student. Politics was a part of life in the household. Ava Helen's mother had been a suffragist, and her father was a liberal Democrat with leanings toward socialism. Her parents divorced when Ava Helen was eleven, and she and her younger brothers and sisters were raised by their mother; the combination of socialist discussions around the dinner table and the example of her self-sufficient mother engendered in Ava Helen a lifelong concern for social justice and a strong feeling that women were capable of anything they set their minds to. At age thirteen she went to live with an older sister who worked for the Oregon Supreme Court in the capital of Salem, where she breezed through high school in three years. Her mother, a believer in higher education, invested almost everything she had in putting as many of her children as possible through college.

  Ava Helen entered OAC as a fun-loving, energetic, independent spirit. She also liked men. Since her family had "a great deal of respect for the teaching profession," she said later, she was especially interested in people who "looked, talked, and acted as though they knew a good bit." She and the other girls in the class were impressed by their young professor. "We thought it was very interesting that he had his curly black hair parted in the middle," she remembered. "He was very good-looking. We thought that our class would be much more interesting with this new teacher. ... We didn't know whether he was married. We were interested in that."

  She quickly found out all about Pauling from a fraternity brother, and her interest grew. She began putting in long hours in the chemistry lab, taking careful note of the products of reactions and the reactions of her professor. Pauling, on his part, thought Ava Helen was extremely bright—"smarter than any girl I'd ever met," he would later say. She enjoyed teasing him. The home-economics laboratory was on the ground floor, with windows that offered easy access. At the end of one lab session in which Pauling watched her receiving a fair number of jump-through male visitors, he asked Ava Helen, "Did you get anything done today?" She answered, "Yes, didn't you see all the help I had?"

  Despite—and perhaps because of—her flirtatiousness, Pauling worked hard to appear uninterested. She thought he was avoiding looking at her; she thought he was purposefully staying clear of her desk when he walked around the classroom. Then, when Ava Helen looked inside a homework notebook Pauling had corrected, she found a short note. It was from her young professor, telling her that an OAC teacher had been severely criticized for the attentions he paid one of his students a few years before. That, Pauling wrote, was not going to happen to him. Ava Helen stormed up to him after class. "I said that he was my chemistry instructor, and so of course I expected him to teach me some chemistry, but didn't expect him to teach me anything else." And she stormed away.

  Undermined, Pauling's defenses crumbled. A few weeks later, Ava Helen found another note, this time asking her out for a stroll across campus.

  During their first, tremulous walk together, as he was helping Ava Helen cross a stream, Pauling managed to crack her across the nose with his elbow. He was distraught; she thought it was funny; the ice was broken. Soon she was bringing him treats (she later said, "My husband says I seduced him with sea foam candy") and listening intently on their long walks as he talked about chemistry—and himself. "He was the first man that I had been with who could talk about himself in my presence," she remembered. "Boys had always told me about what beautiful eyes I had or how good a dancer I was, but Linus was not overly concerned with that. He was full of ideas and dreams. He knew what he wanted to do and it all sounded so exciting."

  After thinking it over for some weeks, Pauling decided that the proper way to think of the two of them was as senior and freshman rather than professor and student. In the late spring, just before giving her a final grade, he asked her to marry him. She said yes. He then lowered her grade one point below what he thought it should be in order to avoid any impression of favoritism.

  - - -

&nbs
p; Most of the exciting things Pauling told Ava Helen he wanted to do depended on getting more education than was available at OAC. Spurred partly by his own instincts and ambitions and partly by Rowland's proselytizing in favor of graduate work, Pauling decided he had to go to graduate school. He applied to a number of the nation's top schools offering advanced chemistry programs, including Harvard, Illinois, and Berkeley, and wrote again to Throop Polytechnic, recently renamed the California Institute of Technology.

  Berkeley was particularly attractive. The chemistry program there was headed by G. N. Lewis, the discoverer of the shared electron bond, and Berkeley was generally considered the best place in the nation to study physical chemistry. The program at Harvard, directed by America's first (and at that time only) chemistry Nobelist, Theodore Richards, was solid and well respected; Rowland's alma mater, Illinois, focused on organic chemistry but had a good program in physical chemistry as well. Pauling still had a strong interest in the California Institute of Technology, but it was more of a gamble: the youngest and smallest of the schools, it was just beginning to build the national reputation that would make it in a short time the best-known research center in the United States.

  Timing helped Pauling decide. Harvard quickly made him an offer, but Caltech made him a better one, including a fellowship that would pay his tuition and a $350 monthly stipend for working as a teaching assistant. Caltech also accepted Pauling's friend Paul Emmett. Berkeley was too slow in making an offer. Impatient, Pauling said yes to Caltech, no to Harvard, and withdrew his other applications.

  There was a great deal to do to ready himself. He borrowed one thousand dollars from an uncle, Jim Campbell, to give to his mother so he wouldn't have to worry about sending her money while engaged in his graduate studies. And he came to a decision about Ava Helen. His first impulse was to get married quickly and take his bride with him to California, but both Belle and Ava Helen's mother worked hard to discourage the idea. They wanted their children to finish their educations first, without the distractions of married life. Ava Helen's mother, determined that her daughter would have a college education, was especially persuasive. Eventually, Pauling and Ava Helen let their heads prevail over their hearts and agreed to separate, she to finish her studies at OAC, he to return for his fiancée after receiving his doctorate.