Major Events

  • Pauling is appointed Director of the Gates Laboratory and Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. Before accepting the position, he insists on the title of director as well as chairman, and, commensurate with his great services to CIT, his salary must be raised to $9,000 in 1938. In his earlier refusal, Pauling was clear-headed enough to see that he was not being given sufficient power to run the division in the way he would like, and he was not willing to accept the heavy responsibilities of the post unless he was given real administrative authority.
  • Pauling and S.H. Bauer publish an important paper on the structure of pentaborane.
  • During the summer, Pauling attacks the problem of the folding of the polypeptide chain in the protein alpha keratin by using molecular models, but he has no success and concludes that one or more of his assumptions (for example, a planar peptide group and bond lengths as in simple substances) must be wrong (it later turns out that his assumptions are valid and this preliminary conclusion is incorrect).
  • At the end of the summer (and at the urging of Pauling), Robert B. Corey comes to CIT from the Rockefeller Institute on a postdoctoral fellowship. Pauling gives Corey the task of determining the structures of amino acids and simple peptides (with the view of ultimately solving the problem of the general three-dimensional structure of proteins).
  • On June 4, Edward Crellin, his third son and last child, is born.
  • Pauling is George Fisher Baker Lecturer in Chemistry at Cornell University from September 1937 to February 1938. His course on the nature of the chemical bond is based, in large part, on the classic series of papers he published in the early 1930’s.
Chronology by Robert Paradowski.

Travel

 Corvallis, OR 
 Ithaca, NY (20)
 Rochester, NY (4)
 Ithaca, NY (50)
 transit to Pasadena, CA (3)
See the Paulings' activities in January 1937
See the Paulings' activities in January 1937

Snapshot

The Pauling family with Ava Helen's mother, Nora Gard Miller. Front row, left to right: Linda Pauling, Nora Gard Miller, and Peter Pauling. Back row: Linus, Jr., Ava Helen, and Linus Pauling Picture. 1937
The Pauling family with Ava Helen's mother, Nora Gard Miller. Front row, left to right: Linda Pauling, Nora Gard Miller, and Peter Pauling. Back row: Linus, Jr., Ava Helen, and Linus Pauling 1937. Larger Image / More Information

Statistics

  • 1279 activity listings
  • 52 scanned documents
  • 135 full-text transcripts

Activity Listings - 1937 (No Date)