Arthur Amos Noyes MIT to Caltech transition

Cited (Tom couldn't recall the name on tape; bracketed in L3) as illustration of the German dominance of physical chemistry through ~1900 — the founder of Caltech, formerly MIT acting president, had studied in Germany around the turn of the century. Used to motivate why MIT undergraduates were required to read German in the 1880s.

The famous names in quantum mechanics — Pauli, Niels Bohr, de Broglie was French, Albert Einstein was Austrian, but anyway they're all Prussians. You had to study in Germany if you wanted to be a great physicist or chemist all the way up through the 1930s. The guy who founded Caltech, the greatest US physical chemist [Arthur Amos Noyes], had been president of MIT. He had studied in Germany around the turn of the century. You had to take German as an MIT student so you could read the scientific literature in the 1880s and around 1900. After World War II, we brought all those great scientists back — if they hadn't already come back because they were Jewish — people like Werner von Braun, who was head of their rocket program.