Linus Pauling: I was given a Guggenheim Fellowship in, for 1926 and we left Pasadena in February
1926, end of January, and gradually traveled on by the slow methods of travel that
were available then; visiting Niagara Falls and going by an Italian ship, the Duilio,
which was sunk during the second World War, to Madeira, Algiers, ah, Gibraltar, Madeira,
Gibraltar, Algiers, and Naples. And then we took a month to work our way up Italy,
living very inexpensively because we didn't have much money and learning a great deal
as we moved along.
We went to Munich and were in Munich for about a year in the Institute for Theoretical
Physics. And then we spent, we also traveled about and visited Paris and Zurich and
the Netherlands and Berlin, other German countries. We went to Denmark and I worked
for a while in Bohr's institute. Then we went to Switzerland, I worked in Schrodinger's
Institute and had contact also with Debye, so that I was able to have contact with
many of the leading physicists of that period.
We stopped in England on the way back and saw the Braggs who did elec...x-ray diffraction
work and saw, visited other physicists too. My work was mainly in the field of physics
then. This laid the groundwork, well my research was basic chemistry, molecular structure,
but I was learning physics.
I wrote a book with Goudsmit, the Structure of Line Spectra, which is on the branch of physics called spectroscopy, line spectroscopy. And later
on, I wrote with one of my students, Bright Wilson, the book Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, which has been quite a popular textbook in the field of quantum mechanics. So we
were away for nineteen months on that trip and learned a great deal about the world.
