Lee Alvin DuBridge Oral History Interview

Interviewed by Judith R. Goodstein

Abstract

Original interview conducted in two sessions with Lee A. DuBridge by Judith R. Goodstein, Feb. 19 and 20, 1981.

Physicist Lee A. DuBridge became president of the California Institute of Technology in 1946. In this interview he recalls the immediate problems he faced, including his dealings with Robert A. Millikan, whom he replaced as chief administrator of the institute; institute financing and inadequate salaries. DuBridge also talks about the advent of federal support for peacetime science and Millikan’s distaste for it; his close working relationship with Robert F. Bacher, who came to the institute in 1949 as chairman of the Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy; his recollections of the meteorologist Irving P. Krick, the physicist Alexander Goetz, and the chemist Linus Pauling; and his attempts to build up the Humanities Division. He recalls his dealings at Caltech with Linus Pauling; his memories of George W. Beadle, Theodore von Kármán, and J. Robert Oppenheimer; the military Vista Project at Caltech; and the difficulties surrounding the deportation of Hsue-shen Tsien, Caltech’s Goddard Professor of Jet Propulsion.

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Lee Alvin DuBridge, interview by Judith R. Goodstein, Caltech Archives Oral History Project, February 19, 1981, February 20, 1981, http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_DuBridge.