Then and Now
On November 2, 1891, Throop University, named for its founder, Amos Throop, was born. According to the book Millikan’s School: A History of the California Institute of Technology by former Caltech archivist Judith Goodstein, the school was a “thoroughly undistinguished little college” that barely survived its first year in Pasadena. Two years later, it expanded its course offerings, becoming “all things to all people, teaching a great variety of subjects, with considerable stress on manual training,” for men, women, boys, and girls, grammar school age and up.
It would take 27 more years and two additional name changes before the founders of the California Institute of Technology—astronomer George Ellery Hale, chemist Arthur Amos Noyes, and physicist Robert A. Millikan—established Caltech as the science and engineering stronghold it is today.
To honor both the school’s humble beginnings and the leaps and bounds it—along with technology, society, and science—has made over these first 125 years, we decided to compare facets of the school, past and present.
