Word: lee
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...than 850,000 scientists and engineers, but only about 3% are engaged in fundamental research. The reason for the imbalance is that 1) such research seems dreamy and impractical, and 2) there are tremendous demands for scientists to work in technological fields, both military and commercial. Pure science, explains Lee DuBridge, is "not the development of new devices or techniques. It is not the discovery of new cures for diseases. It is not the development of new weapons of war." Pure science is "simply knowledge...
Sewing Machines & Flying Trips. Today, after eight years as president of prosperous (endowment $30 million) Caltech, Lee DuBridge is still a man who will happily spend an afternoon fixing an ailing sewing machine, and then fly off to Washington for a top-secret meeting of the Science Advisory Committee. He runs his campus much as he did the radiation lab, and nowhere is the open-door policy more faithfully followed. Though his days are filled to capacity, he seems always to have time for the unannounced visitor, the troubled student, or for a session of weighty talk punctuated by friendly...
...Ironing Boards. Like Caltech. DuBridge also emerged out of an unlikely background. Born in Terre Haute. Ind., the son of a Y.M.C.A. physical-education instructor, he grew up in a succession of cities from Mount Vernon. Iowa to San Jose, Calif, to Sault Sainte Marie, Mich. Though Lee fished in Lake Superior and watched the ships pass through the locks, he was better known as that studious young fellow in knickers who was so often with a book. At one time, he tried to be a reporter ("but I was too scared to go up and ask the right people...
...Koht of Reinbeck, Iowa. The first time she saw him, he was waiting on table. "He wore nose glasses," she recalls, "and looked more like a professor than he does now." After a series of unromantic dates (they spent one hunting frogs) and a number of awkward starts, Lee finally proposed. But it was another four years before the marriage actually took place...
...Great Shakes. Lee graduated third in his class, out of 120. He went on to graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, eventually turned out a doctoral thesis called Variations in the Photoelectric Sensitivity of Platinum ("I'm afraid it didn't shake science at all"). Later at Caltech, he kept on with his arduous experiments ("I learned to hate liquid air," says Mrs. DuBridge), and at his post as assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, he started collaborating on a book ("It took the evenings of four years," says Mrs. DuBridge). The book, written with...