E. Bright Wilson, Jr.: When I was a student at Caltech, Linus Pauling was regarded as the star of the chemistry
department at that time -- he was, was a very young man and he already had begun to
build up a considerable reputation. I remember one thing was he was busy at that time
working on his ideas, developing his ideas on the nature of the chemical bond, which
became the basis for his very famous book of that name later on. But he went off to
a meeting of the American Chemical Society and I think it was the time that he received
what was then called the Langmuir Award. It was a young men, it was an award for young
men in chemistry. I think they set the age limit at thirty-six because he was thirty-six
or something like that and could just get under. They wanted him to be the first recipient.
But this just happens to occur to me that he brought back a picture, sort of a daily
newspaper, that was gotten out at the convention. And on the front page there was
just a circle, a figure, just a circle had on it "Professor Pauling captures the elusive
s orbital" or something like that, which has that kind of shape.
But he was, he was known. He was becoming, beginning to become famous at that time
so he was held in considerable awe by his graduate students and also admiration I
might say. I remember one of my colleagues began to wear orange ties because Linus
was addicted to orange ties and not flamboyant ones. We all took his course in quantum
mechanics and he was a really extremely, extremely good lecturer and teacher and displayed
a complete mastery of the subject in his lectures. I think he meant us to believe
that it was very spontaneous that he could just dash this stuff off. While I can't
really believe that he didn't study hard to prepare for those lectures, however it
was done, they were brilliant lectures and extremely clear and we would take the course
over and over again because it was so worthwhile.
Clip
Creator: E. Bright Wilson, Jr. Associated: Linus Pauling Clip ID: 1977v.66-wilson
Full Work
Creator: Robert Richter, WGBH-Boston Associated: Linus Pauling, Ava Helen Pauling, David Shoemaker, E. Bright Wilson, Jr., Frank Catchpool
