Lower Tech . . . but High Hopes in 1886

On a clear day you can see the observatory atop Mt. Wilson from the ninth floor of Caltech’s Millikan Library. On any day you can see an arcade of prewar laboratories below and an unfinished astrophysics building to the south.

Surrounding the Pasadena campus today is a grid of neatly paved streets that marches uphill through Altadena, where, a hundred years ago, poppy fields attracted visitors from as far away as Long Beach. Neither the observatory nor the institute existed in 1886 when Pasadena became a city.

Science and higher education were not uppermost in the minds of the citizens who incorporated what came to be called the Crown City.

Caltech Parent

Throop Polytechnic Institute--the parent of Caltech--would not be founded for another seven years, and the Sierra Madre College, which had opened on Columbia Street between Pasadena and South Pasadena in 1884, had already closed its doors by December, 1885.

Those with very young children might have taken heart in January when Leland Stanford announced the acquisition of land in Palo Alto for what he proposed would be the largest private university in the West.

If education was not uppermost in the minds of the civic leaders in Pasadena, technology was. The year 1886 saw construction of the first municipal gas plant, as well as the first public service system sprinkling water on the dusty city streets. The only record we have of any interest in science is the opening of the Pasadena Natural History store by W. H. Wakely, who presumably sold fossils--a lively interest then as now--and preserved specimens of local flora and fauna.

Elsewhere in the United States, science and technology attracted a large enough following to support two weekly science magazines. The pages of Science and Scientific American in January, 1886, reflect a fascination with scientific problems. Then, as now, people all over the continent prepared to combat an epidemic, but it was cholera, not AIDS, that people feared that year. At the same time, physicians warned about endemic drug addition. They pleaded that opium addicts be treated with compassion rather than with moral condemnation.

Some of Wakely’s customers undoubtedly followed news of the return to Atlantic waters of the “right whale” (a name separating it from the wrong whale, a bony species with little fat), a species presumed to have become extinct. But the news is not cloaked in terms of preservation. There was no save-the-whale campaign in 1886. The automobile had yet to be invented, along with the bumper designed for bumper stickers and the sensibility that the whale is an intelligent and remarkable creature whose extinction would diminish us all.

A Wealth of Oil and Bone

Instead, the large bull whale and cow killed off Long Island, N.Y., were valued in terms of the estimated 150 barrels of oil and 1,800 pounds of whale bone (used abundantly then in female undergarments) that would enrich its killers.

Naturalists in the late 19th Century were familiar with the concept of extinction and the possibility that these whales might vanish forever as many species of turtle and duck already had. But they felt no obligation to maintain what we now label “endangered species.” Perhaps that was because the natural world still seemed like a cornucopia where almost every week someone reported a new species, such as the wonderful California road runner (a bird in the cuckoo family that, according to Scientific American, had none of the European bird’s antisocial habits). For every species lost, it seemed, a new one was discovered.

Americans, then as now, were fascinated by invention. While a Mr. Jarman discussed his new ice-making and refrigerating machine, Alexander Graham Bell fought for the validity of his patent for the telephone, already a staple in many American homes. Invention, in fact, was the word of the day. Lobbyists in Washington urged the federal government to establish a public laboratory for inventors in the nation’s capital.

Federal Patron of Science

Nineteenth-Century Americans regarded the federal government as a patron of science. Members of the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia praised the great contributions to science made by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey with its physiographic data and tidal observations (contributions akin to the work today of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in tracking meteorological events).

Americans in 1886 knew a world at peace. From January to December they planned new tunnels and bridges, determined, it seems, to draw the continent together. A hundred years ago Americans searched for new species, looked for new ways to use electricity and new ways to battle disease. Singularly missing from all discussions was any mention of weapons.

The Arroyo Seco in Pasadena was filled with farms and squatters. On even the clearest day only a seer could have envisioned the rocket launching site of the 1940s, or Mission Control in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where computers today are monitoring Voyager 2 as it races toward a rendezvous with Uranus on Jan. 24, 1986.