Community Relations

History of Caltech's Community Involvement

Early in this century, George Ellery Hale made enduring contributions to the city of Pasadena's design of what is now called the Civic Center area. In the 1920s and 1930s, Caltech hosted summer sessions for high-school teachers from around the state, to update them on the latest developments in physics.

In 1923, Caltech helped Southern California Edison complete the long line from Big Creek to the Los Angeles area, which carried a then-unprecedented 220,000 volts of electricity to the region. Also in the 1920s, staff in the newly constructed Bridge Laboratory of Physics offered free Friday evening lecture-demonstrations, aimed at building a public understanding of science; popular in the community, the lectures were forerunners of today's equally popular Earnest C. Watson Caltech Lecture Series. In the 1930s, the Colorado River aqueduct project employed Caltech geologists, as well as its civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers.

For more than 50 years, Caltech's earthquake engineers have aided in planning earthquake-resistant buildings, while its Seismological Laboratory has been an important source of public information about earthquakes, especially those in Southern California.

Before and after World War II, Caltech played a key role in the development of the aerospace industry and was a pioneer in the Space Age through the emergence of the city's largest employer, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA. In the 1970s, Assistant Provost Neil Pings led the Pasadena Redevelopment Agency as it sought to mitigate urban blight in the center of the city. In the 1980s, Caltech engineer Paul Jennings was deeply involved in helping the city evaluate the seismic safety of its police department building.