18 August 1954

Mr. Peter Pauling

Peter House

Cambridge

England

Dear Peter:

Thanks for your letter of 10 August. Mama and I were glad to hear from you. We had a letter from Linda, with the Robertsons in Paris. I had wondered what you were doing.

I enclose a check for $125.50 with is to cover the expenditures of £44 6s. 7d. for books for me. Please keep on sending them.

Also, I enclose a check for $418.00. This is the $168.00 to take the place of the check that you returned to me, plus $250.00, representing 1 September and 1 October checks. I am planning to write checks only once every two months for each of you, but to make them for double the amount.

Now as to the P. Chem. books. I think that there is no need for you to do anything about the matter. I have just about decided not to try to write a textbook on physical chemistry, because I think that it would be too much work. I think that I could more profitably devote the same amount of effort to improving my freshman texts. I am working hard on the second edition of College Chemistry, and have rewritten several chapters. Today I am working on Chapter 12, which does not need very much change. Next year I am planning to get out a second edition -- third edition, rather -- of The Nature of the Chemical Bond. If you have any suggestions about how to revise it, please let me know. Perhaps you have picked up some ideas from someone about it, too, in addition to your own ideas.

Mama and I spent three days at Idylwild, about ten days ago. We were there to attend a conference on the magnetic properties of the earth. There was a man from geophysics in Oxford -- a bustling sort of fellow named [left blank]. Also, there was a man named Clegg, from London, who has been working with Blackett on the magnetic properties of rocks.

I am glad to learn that you are working on the 1.5 Å reflection in myoglobin. It would be fine if you could get some heather nettle atoms onto the heme groups, and make progress in determining signs. I am afraid that it is a very hard job, however.

I shall speak to Holmes about the rotating anode tubes.

I don't think that I am Jim Watson's supervisor for this Ph.D. He has never said anything to me about it. I remember that some months ago I received a form about supervisors, but no mention of Jim Watson. I didn't fill out the form. I think that I shall ask him, when he comes back.

I am rather doubtful about the wisdom of your binding your copies of Nature. I subscribed to Nature for a year, perhaps even longer, about the time that we were in Germany, 1927. I don't know what happened to those early Natures -- I think that I threw them away. I find it very convenient to have a lot of old journals around the house. Every once in a while I need to look something up, and I save a good bit of time by having them there. I expect that my journals are worth several thousand dollars.

You ask about the Indian collagen. A copy of the manuscript was sent to me, and I wrote saying that I was pretty doubtful about the structure. One of the hydrogen bonds is so badly bent as to be, I think, really unstable. I didn't go to the trouble of making a model.

I have sent the note about Linda, saying that I would support her, to her in Paris.

I remembered to add For. Mem. R.S.

I hope that you can keep Linda under control. She seems to me to be wanting to be doing something exciting all of the time. She gets bored by ordinary activities. For example, while we were driving across the country, even through the Rockies, for example, she had a tendency to curl up in the back seat and go to sleep, instead of looking at the scenery.

We have a fence around part of the yard now. It is a grape-stake fence, five feet high. It extends all along the north boundary, from the eastern corner to the driveway, where it makes a little bend south, about eight feet. Then there is a little curve on the opposite side of the driveway, and it heads down along the western boundary, as far as the first of the great big eucalyptus trees -- about a hundred thirty feet.

Jürg Waser and his wife, also his brother Peter, are coming to dinner with us tonight. I must be popping on home now.

I am not able to get into the Crellin Laboratory by the usual route, nor to park my car in the usual place. I park it now in the parking lot at the end of Holliston. There is a hole, about thirty feet deep, extending from the edge of the driveway at Crellin -- in fact, from the edge of the Laboratory, the driveway being gone -- nearly to Wilson. Some of the concrete has just been poured, a couple of days ago. Perhaps we shall have our new laboratory by September 1955.

I hadn't finished telling you about the fence, when I was interrupted by Holmes, to whom I gave your message about the rotating anode tube. He said that our rotating anode tube is well on its way toward completion. He is also working on a microfocus tube.

The fence was put in by Jack and a couple of other boys. They had never put in a fence before, and it wiggles about a good bit, with an amplitude of perhaps six inches. Perhaps we would have been wiser to have got a commercial friend to do the job. There are two new houses to the north of us, almost finished, and one to the south. The one to the south is about directly south of the old house, the rabbit house. It doesn't stick up very far, and so it isn't too bad.

Love from

[Linus Pauling]