Biography|Gordon Moore — The Crellin Labs Where He Finished a Chemistry Doctorate

People treat Caltech as the place Gordon Moore later funded.

He first arrived as a new husband with a Berkeley chemistry degree.

Caltech's own memorial records the sequence: he earned a B.S. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950, married Betty Irene Whitaker the next day, and began graduate study on this campus.

In 1954 he received a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics.

The pin is the Crellin Laboratory of Chemistry, opened in 1938 as the eastern half of the Gates and Crellin pair, still the chemistry court's working labs.

Linus Pauling's group occupied these rooms in the same decade.

Moore's problem set was physical chemistry, not a transistor line.

After the degree he left for the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins in Laurel, Maryland, to work on the physical chemistry of solid rocket propellants for Navy missiles.

Britannica and the Science History Institute both date that first job to the mid-1950s and both record his dissatisfaction with it.

He wanted California and a problem closer to devices.

William Shockley's offer in 1956 pulled him back west.

The later gifts — the Moore Laboratory of Engineering dedicated in 1996, scholarships, a board chairmanship from 1993 to 2000 — sit elsewhere on this same campus.

This facade is the one that issued the doctorate, not the one that carries his name.

Photo: Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons