California Institute of Technology history

At a time when scientific research in the United States was still in its infancy, George Ellery Hale, a solar astronomer from the University of Chicago, founded the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1904.

The vocational school was disbanded and the preparatory program was split off to form the independent Polytechnic School in 1907.

He engineered the appointment of James A. B. Scherer, a literary scholar untutored in science but a capable administrator and fund-raiser, to Throop's presidency in 1908.

In 1910, Throop moved to its current site.

Theodore Roosevelt delivered an address at Throop Institute on March 21, 1911, and he declared:

The new funds were designated for physics research, and ultimately led to the establishment of the Norman Bridge Laboratory, which attracted experimental physicist Robert Andrews Millikan from the University of Chicago in 1917.

The school was known successively as Throop University, Throop Polytechnic Institute (and Manual Training School) and Throop College of Technology before acquiring its current name in 1920.

In 1925, the school established a department of geology and hired William Bennett Munro, then chairman of the division of History, Government, and Economics at Harvard University, to create a division of humanities and social sciences at Caltech.

In 1926, a graduate school of aeronautics was created, which eventually attracted Theodore von Kármán.

In 1928, construction of the Palomar Observatory began.

In 1930, Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory was established in Corona del Mar under the care of Professor George MacGinitie.

A 200-inch telescope was dedicated on nearby Palomar Mountain in 1948 and remained the world's most powerful optical telescope for over forty years.

From April to December 1951, Caltech was the host of a federal classified study, Project Vista.

The earliest was a 1968 protest outside the NBC Burbank studios, in response to rumors that NBC was to cancel Star Trek.

Caltech opened its doors to female undergraduates during the presidency of Harold Brown in 1970, and they made up 14% of the entering class.

The project was established in 1986 to assemble, preserve, translate, and publish papers selected from the literary estate of Albert Einstein and from other collections.

Since 2000, the Einstein Papers Project has been located at Caltech.

In fall 2008, the freshman class was 42% female, a record for Caltech's undergraduate enrollment.

In 2010, Caltech, in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and headed by Professor Nathan Lewis, established a DOE Energy Innovation Hub aimed at developing revolutionary methods to generate fuels directly from sunlight.

Jean-Lou Chameau, the eighth president, announced on February 19, 2013, that he would be stepping down to accept the presidency at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

The gift is the largest ever for environmental sustainability research and the second-largest private donation to a US academic institution (after Bloomberg's gift of $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University in 2018).

In 2019, Caltech received a gift of $750 million for sustainability research from the Resnick family of The Wonderful Company.