When this very proper product of Puritan New England moved west, he brought essential chemistry to Caltech.

By Laura Marcus

Laura Marcus’s last story for Caltech News was "A Caltech Couple: Frank and Ora Lee Marble," in 1996. The present article–about the chemist of the triumvirate that created an institute of technology in Pasadena–comes hot on the heels of an Institute professor’s winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Ahmed Zewail, the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Physics and professor of physics, accepted the prize this December. The last Caltech chemist to win the prize was Rudy Marcus, the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry, who happens to be Laura’s husband.

Caltech students called him "the King"; some of his closest friends called him Arturo; but most people knew him only as "Dr. Noyes," the scholarly, quiet-spoken, and very reserved head of Caltech’s chemistry department (and later division) from 1919 until his death in 1936. In the famous portrait of Caltech’s Big Three, he’s the one seated on the left, beside Trustee George Ellery Hale, with Robert Millikan standing between them.

Noyes was a chemistry professor at MIT and its former acting president when Hale persuaded him in 1913 to come on a part-time basis to Caltech, or Throop College of Technology, as it was then known. (It changed its name to the California Institute of Technology in 1920, about the same time that Noyes–who had strongly advocated the name-change–joined the Institute permanently.) When Hale was a student at MIT, he had taken a course with Noyes, who was then a young instructor. Their respect for each other’s abilities resulted in a teamwork that, combined with Robert Millikan’s truly dynamic leadership, created the distinctive Caltech that we know today.

Professor Noyes had very definite ideas about the best way to educate young men to be scientists and engineers. He believed that classes should be small, although he recognized the need for some large lecture courses. There should be ample opportunity for faculty and students to interact, and therefore a small, intellectually based institute was most desirable. The faculty should be first-rate, of course.

It was Noyes who initiated a Caltech core curriculum centered on strong fundamental training in math and physics that remained essentially unchanged until innovations were introduced in the last half of this decade. It was also Noyes who insisted that the core requirements include a sizable number of humanities courses–and that notable humanities scholars be recruited to teach them–so that undergraduates would spend roughly 20 percent of their time studying literature, history, languages, government, and economics. "The whole man" (one of his favorite concepts) needed a well-rounded education.

Noyes’s family background undoubtedly contributed to his views on education. His father was a respected lawyer in the small town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, where his ancestors had lived since 1635. The family was not particularly prosperous, however, and because he could not afford to enter MIT for his freshman year, Noyes studied at home the required subjects for freshmen (except drawing). He enrolled as a sophomore the next year on a scholarship.

In high school Noyes had found his chemistry teacher to be highly stimulating, so much so that he and a friend set up a lab on the Noyes family’s dining room table. Unfortunately the experimental flask broke, spilling potash and phosphorus over the table, the rug, and some of Mr. Noyes’s law books. Thereafter, all the experiments in the textbook were attempted–but only in the Noyes family attic or in the friend’s barn.

When Noyes finally did arrive at MIT, his college career was predictable. He received his bachelor’s degree at the age of 19 in 1886 and an MS the next year. He was then appointed assistant in analytical chemistry, teaching qualitative analysis to a class of about 40 students. George Ellery Hale was one of those students.

But Noyes was eager for further training himself, and following the custom of the time, he went to Europe to get it, receiving his PhD from the University of Leipzig in 1890. Returning immediately to MIT as a faculty member, he taught courses over the next decade in analytical, organic, and physical chemistry, while actively conducting research with his students on the ionic theory of electrolytes.

It was in 1903 at MIT that Noyes created and began directing the school’s first research laboratory for studies in pure science–the Research Laboratory of Physical Chemistry, which trained many prominent chemists over the years. Feeling so strongly about the importance of basic, creative research, he paid one-half the laboratory’s operating expenses from his personal funds on a regular basis for 17 years, until his permanent departure for Pasadena. During his last four years at MIT he directed the research at that lab as well as the chemical research being done at Caltech.

He was able to provide the MIT laboratory’s financial support as a result of a successful process he and W.R. Whitney, another MIT scientist, had developed in the late 1890s. The process was designed to recover alcohol and ether vapors which till then had been lost during the manufacture of photographic films.

Noyes also made his mark early as an author of scientific textbooks. First published in 1892, his book on qualitative analysis was widely used in its many revised editions, and became known as A Course of Instruction and System of Procedure in the Qualitative Chemical Analysis of Inorganic Substances. He also published (with coauthors) Laboratory Experiments on the Class Reactions and Identification of Organic Substances (1898) and Qualitative Analysis of the Rare Elements (1927), which he considered his most important contribution to chemistry.

In 1914, with his former student and fellow MIT faculty member Miles Sherrill, Noyes published A Course of Instruction in the General Principles of Chemistry. There followed a regular series of new editions and expansions, which Sherrill continued after Noyes’s death. A landmark text in the teaching of chemistry, it emphasized hands-on laboratory assignments, ensuring that the student would avoid mere memorization. According to Sherrill, Noyes’s work day usually ran from 4 a.m. till 8 p.m. Sometimes, however, he took time off for a bike trip, or–even more to his liking–a sailing outing with some of his MIT colleagues. They used his 48-foot yawl, Virginia, for summertime excursions along the New England coast–Noyes’s father had introduced him to boats and the fun of exploring nearby waterways early on. Fortunately, a portion of the Virginia log has survived. Some of the entries were made by a crew member named Richard Tolman, who would later become a renowned Caltech professor of chemistry and physics.

The log does not mention it, but another crew member has written that Noyes’s students and friends were greatly impressed with his love of poetry and his ability to recite "from memory by the hour with intonation and diction never to be forgotten." Relaxing on a boat gave him that
opportunity.

The boating life also made it possible to go over the side at 4:30 in the morning for a wake-up swim, which was another of Captain Noyes’s special pleasures. When he came to Caltech, however, he left his boat behind, and although he bought a house at Corona del Mar on a cliff overlooking the
Newport harbor, he never again bought anything larger than a canoe and a rowboat, which were intended for visiting staff and students to use.

The boat remained in Massachusetts, but Noyes did bring to Pasadena his firm conviction, reinforced by years of teaching experience at MIT, that qualified undergraduates should be introduced to research as soon as possible. Ideally, they should be given a problem to work on directly with an instructor or in collaboration with a more experienced student.

The late Kenneth Pitzer, who at various times was research director of the Atomic Energy Commission, a faculty member at UC Berkeley, and president of Rice and Stanford Universities, remembered with appreciation the research assignment he undertook at Caltech at the end of his freshman year in 1932 with graduate student J. L. Hoard, under Noyes’s direction. The resulting paper, entitled "Argentic Salts in Acid Solutions. I," was published with Noyes as a coauthor. That paper helped to prepare the way for Pitzer’s illustrious career. Other students benefited from similar experiences.

Always on the alert for the brightest, most promising students, Noyes spotted William Pickering soon after the enterprising sophomore from New Zealand arrived at Caltech in 1929 intending to study engineering. Encouraged by both Noyes and Millikan to switch to science, Pickering did so, and stayed on to receive his PhD in physics in 1936. He became a Caltech professor and for 22 years was director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Today, Pickering, now 89, recalls how, to fulfill a sophomore chemistry requirement, he and four other students were invited to spend the summer in Corona del Mar, where they were given a course by professor Ernest Swift, who also had a summer home there. The students lived at Caltech’s marine lab, a former boathouse that had just been bought by Caltech at Noyes’s behest when the neighboring yacht club hit hard times. Noyes had made an arrangement with renowned Caltech biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan that allowed him to use an upstairs space for chemical research, bringing down a graduate student and two or more honors undergraduates to work there during the summers on problems in analytical chemistry. A wooden stairway, built by young professor Arnold Beckman and handyman Hal Weis, connected the marine lab to Noyes’s property on the cliff. Although Pickering did not see Noyes there, he later learned that the special opportunity had been made possible by him.

For Pickering another special treat came in 1931 during his junior year at Caltech, when he and Charles Jones received the travel grants awarded
annually by an anonymous donor to two outstanding juniors. (Two other students were invited to join them at their own expense.) A new Ford, picked up at the Detroit plant, was made available for their six months of travel in Europe. To make sure they were properly prepared for their cultural adventure, they had been enrolled the previous term in a class taught by
Professor John Macarthur, a Caltech humanities professor. Upon their return to Pasadena, they were only asked to give an account of their experiences at one of the weekly student assemblies.

Professor Noyes, an enthusiastic traveler himself, was generally acknowledged to be the anonymous chief sponsor of the travel grant. His gesture reflected once again his belief that well-trained scientists and engineers needed a broad exposure to the humanities and liberal arts.

Noyes was himself a member of the close-knit American Philosophical Society, founded in 1734 in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin and other proponents of the Enlightenment. And he was predictably also very active in scientific organizations. In 1916, he, Hale, and Millikan helped to set up the National Research Council to assist the National Academy of Sciences in advising the government on scientific issues. During World War I he served as NRC chairman. Many young men–and Caltech itself–benefited from that organization through the prestigious annual fellowships it awarded. A number of Caltech faculty members came to campus initially as National Research Council Fellows, while others held those fellowships at Caltech before going on to other universities.

In fact, long before coming to Caltech, or to Throop College of Technology, as it was then known, Noyes was nationally recognized as a leading scientist. As early as 1895, he had established and edited the journal Review of American Chemical Research, and then watched it grow into the invaluable Chemical Abstracts, an ongoing record of chemical research. In 1904, at the age of 38, Noyes was elected president of the American Chemical Society, the youngest man to hold that office. A year later, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and went on to serve as editor of its Proceedings in 1915—16. Later he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Recognition of his own research contributions culminated in such honors as the Humphry Davy Medal of the Royal Society of London (1927), the Willard Gibbs Medal of the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society (1915), and the Theodore William Richards Medal of the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society (1932), which named him as its first recipient. He also received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, and several other institutions.

Although he held national offices and enjoyed an international reputation, Noyes was happiest as a teacher and scientist. The most capable students, his "carefully selected seeds," were singled out, but he also concentrated on building the best faculty and research organization possible. A number of young men contributed to his reaching that goal.

Arnold Beckman had completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Illinois before following Professor Richard Tolman to Caltech. A student of Noyes at MIT, Tolman was teaching at Illinois when Noyes lured him to Pasadena in 1921.

Beckman liked the idea of coming west, too, and arrived at Caltech in 1924. But after being in the Institute’s graduate program for one year, Beckman took a trip back east to visit his girlfriend, Mabel Meinzer, and decided to accept a research job at the Western Electric Engineering Company (later called Bell Labs), where a college friend was already working. After a year there, Arnold and Mabel were married, and were happily immersed in their new life when Professor Noyes came to New York.

"Don’t you want to come back and finish your degree?" Noyes asked Beckman. He did, and the rest is history–his contributions as a faculty member, highly successful inventor and entrepreneur, Caltech trustee chair, and long-term benefactor to the Institute.

Linus Pauling came down from Oregon in September 1922 with a fellowship to enter Caltech’s graduate program in chemistry. He had already received a letter from Noyes that suggested how he could strengthen his physical chemistry background before his arrival. Accordingly, Pauling had used his spare time that summer, while employed on a road-paving project, to work all the problems from the proof sheets of Chemical Principles, which Noyes and Sherrill were then in the process of issuing in a new edition. Upon receiving his PhD in 1925, Pauling went to Munich on a Guggenheim grant. While in Europe he had Noyes’s financial assistance when needed.

After returning to Caltech as assistant professor of theoretical chemistry, Pauling built a large research group, with emphasis on crystallographic techniques for studying a variety of problems. His vitality and wide-ranging intellect made him a major figure in 20th century science, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954 for his work on the nature of the chemical bond. After Noyes’s death, Pauling became chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech, a position he held from 1937 till 1958.

The field of X-ray diffraction had been a focus of research in the chemistry department ever since Noyes’s arrival, and the Institute was recognized as the outstanding center for that work. Noyes had early recognized the importance of the new field of X-ray crystallography and he encouraged his former MIT graduate student C. L. Burdick (who was doing postdoctoral research in Europe) to go and study with William Bragg (a future Nobel laureate) in London. Burdick took Noyes’s advice, and, later, when he joined Noyes at Caltech, he did pioneering work in that specialty.

Noyes was constantly on the alert for new developments and new experiments under way in England or on the continent, and equally vigilant about sending his people there to learn about them so that they could bring that expertise back to Caltech. Among the people he brought from MIT was his graduate student Roscoe Dickinson, who immediately started his research in X-ray crystallography. The first PhD Caltech awarded was to chemist Dickinson in 1920.

Another of Noyes’s future mainstays came out on the train with him as a new graduate student in 1919. Ernest Swift had met Noyes at the University of Virginia and had sought his advice about graduate study. Noyes’s "advice" was to accept Swift on the spot for Caltech and to offer him a teaching fellowship (later called assistantship). On the long trip west, Swift later recalled, there was not much talk about chemistry but a lot of bridge-playing, with both Noyes and his MIT student James Ellis, who was also traveling with him.

Noyes was revising his textbook on qualitative analysis and solicited Swift’s help in testing the experimental procedures being used in the book. One summer he also asked Swift to teach an intensive course to a group of about 20 undergrads, in order to push them along toward their junior and senior requirements. Swift belatedly learned that Noyes had personally paid his salary for teaching that course.

During Swift’s second year at Caltech, an instructor position opened in the sophomore chemistry course that he had been assisting in, and, to this young graduate student’s immense surprise, Noyes asked if he would like to teach the course. Ultimately, Swift would succeed Pauling as division chairman, serving from 1958 to 1963.

Along with his prowess in chemistry, Swift was an accomplished tennis player–even after his retirement in 1967, it was generally conceded that he was still the man to beat on the court. Noyes played him only once, Swift said, adding that "he never really was a robust physical specimen at all. Always kind of gaunt, moved slowly and talked slowly–exceedingly formal. I don’t remember his ever once addressing me by anything, after I got my degree, but ‘Dr. Swift.’"

Despite his formal manner, Noyes liked to invite his students and coworkers to join him on outings, no longer by boat but by car, which he drove out to the desert or to Corona del Mar.

In this 1917 photo, Noyes sits in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac touring car given him by George Ellery Hale. In Pasadena, Noyes drove Techers around and relied on their technical skills to keep the car running somewhat smoothly.

George Ellery Hale had given Noyes his Cadillac touring car, and it was in this vehicle that Noyes and his two Irish maids drove to Pasadena from Boston. His students named the car "Mossie," short for Demosthenes, because of its stuttering habits. Not an expert driver, Noyes would sometimes try to start off in second gear or fail to use the choke properly. His passengers would be called upon to solve various mechanical problems, which in turn supplied them with lasting anecdotes.

In his early days at Caltech, Noyes was the chemists’ admissions committee, sizing up the candidates in person or by letter, and readily accepting likely ones. He often met newcomers at the railroad station and helped to make arrangements for their living accommodations. He also firmly held the purse strings for their support. With his and Hale’s longstanding ties to the East Coast scientific establishment, Noyes had ongoing support from such institutions as the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which between 1920 and 1930 funded 20 projects under Noyes’s direction in the Gates Laboratory of Chemistry. By 1930 the Gates Lab had published 269 research papers.

Noyes had been promised a laboratory when he agreed to move to Caltech, and, with the building of Gates in 1917, his dream of having a modern chemical-research laboratory had come true. But within a decade he was complaining that there was absolutely no more space available in the lab for additional researchers. Investigations had grown to encompass not only physical chemistry but also biochemistry, organic chemistry, and industrial chemistry–the latter, when specific projects were approved.

The need for more space eventually led to the addition of a western wing to Gates, and in 1937, a year after Noyes’s death, to the construction of Crellin Laboratory. In 1967, yet another chemistry building, the Arthur Amos Noyes Laboratory of Chemical Physics, was added to the campus.

Although Noyes was closely involved in divisional activities and in the making of policy, he believed in sharing the decision-making process, as evinced in a memo he wrote entitled "A Plan for Bringing Younger Faculty Members Outstanding in Research or Education into Contact with the Problems and Ideals of the Institute." His plan was to set up a policy advisory committee that would be appointed by the executive council, "and directly responsible to it," with members to serve for two-year terms, "with privilege of reappointment." The 12 representatives he suggested for the initial membership were drawn from physics, mathematics, engineering, chemistry, geology, and biology. Within the chemistry department, he divided up administrative responsibilities and used committees extensively for cooperative planning and research.

In his mission he had one superb ally–George Ellery Hale. Hale and Noyes shared the same philosophy of education and the same goals, and they worked well together.

As a private institution, Caltech had to attract a lot of money–from the trustees, from scientific foundations, from prosperous friends wherever they were. It was a constant, never-ending pursuit, and Hale, Millikan, and Noyes bore the greatest responsibility as they tried to attract the best for the least amount of money possible. During the difficult Depression years, Noyes gave freely from his own pocket for salaries, prizes, special student events, and research support. When he died he left his fine Corona del Mar house to the Institute. His Pasadena house on San Pasqual, close to campus, was bought by another Caltech chemist, Don Yost.

In spite of painful health problems during the last decade of his life, Noyes held to his rigorous work schedule as much as possible, chairing the division and publishing revisions to his textbooks. Days before he was scheduled to go to the Mayo Clinic for surgery, he was writing letters on Institute matters. He kept a cot in his office for occasional use. Less than two months after the surgery, he died back in Pasadena of pneumonia, in June 1936, shortly before his 70th birthday.

Noyes, who never married, left the proceeds of his estate to Caltech for the support of research in chemistry. Later, the Arthur Amos Noyes Professorship was established.

In addition to the Noyes building on the Caltech campus, there is another local building that bears his name. It is the Arthur Amos Noyes School, an elementary school dedicated in 1954 on Pinecrest Drive in Altadena.

The Caltech campus itself holds another memento–Noyes’s handsome grandfather clock, which now resides in the office of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division Chair David Tirrell. And in Arnold Beckman’s home in Corona del Mar, a small chair belonging to Noyes, rescued and repaired by Beckman, has a place of honor.

After Noyes died, two of his old friends at Caltech–Richard Tolman and William Lacey–agreed that possibly his greatest achievement lay in founding the science of physical chemistry in America. And Robert Millikan commented on Noyes’s contributions to Caltech beyond chemistry by saying: "He spent more time than any other man on the campus trying to create here outstanding departments of physics, of mathematics, of the humanities, of geology, of biology, and of the various branches of engineering; and what these departments are today they owe, more than they themselves know, to Arthur A. Noyes."

The Caltech Board of Trustees gave Noyes this tribute:

Only one characteristic seems to be missing from this eulogy. He was said by his friends to have a good sense of humor, even a dry wit. Too bad he couldn’t have heard all the compliments paid him. The only trouble is, he would undoubtedly have been greatly embarrassed by them. "A. Noyes annoys A. Noyes," he was overheard to say on at least one occasion.

But not too frequently, one hopes.

Sources: The following people who were at Caltech when Dr. Noyes was here were interviewed by this writer (those who are now deceased are indicated by an asterisk): Albert Atwood, Jr.*, Arnold Beckman, James Bonner*, Joseph Koepfli, William Pickering, Kenneth Pitzer*, Robert Sharp, Verner Schomaker*, and Vito Vanoni. Other sources were the Noyes file in the Caltech Archives, and the Caltech
Archives’ oral histories of Beckman, Koepfli, Ernest Swift, and Oliver Wulf. My special thanks to Bonnie Ludt in the Archives, Pat Bullard in the chemistry division office, and Arnold Beckman’s daughter, Pat. Professor John Waugh of MIT supplied a copy of the Virginia log. University Archivist Judith Goodstein’s Millikan’s School is an essential source for anyone interested in Caltech history. Among other useful sources was the detailed article on Noyes written by Linus Pauling and published in the Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences in 1958.