Becoming
In 1904, astrophysicist George Ellery Hale moved to Pasadena to found and direct Mount Wilson Observatory. Three years later, he joined Throop Polytechnic Institute’s board of trustees and began to reinvent the institution. “It would be far better to do some one thing extremely well than to teach such a variety of subjects in a mediocre way,” wrote Hale, and that one thing was to be engineering.
In 1908, Hale recruited a new president, historian and Lutheran minister James Scherer, who had previously taught in Japan and served as president of Newberry College in South Carolina. Under Scherer, Throop shed courses to focus on mechanical and electrical engineering. In another narrowing, in 1910 Scherer stopped admitting women as students, a policy the Institute would reverse for graduate students in 1953 and for undergraduates in 1970.
Scherer resigned his presidency in 1920 only three weeks after announcing that Throop had become the California Institute of Technology. He went on to work as a screenwriter, as president of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, and as a guide offering tours of Asia, while publishing books on the histories of both Japan and California.
