Bridging Divides: The Origins of the Beckman Institute at Illinois

1. Forging the Proposal

................. Forging the Proposal . . . . . 1 1 FORGING THE PROPOSAL O ur story begins quite a long time back.*Arnold Beckman was born in the small town of Cullom,Illinois,about seventy miles north of Urbana-Champaign.He grew up there and in Bloomington ,Illinois,where he was a student at the laboratory high school associated with what was then Illinois Normal University . After military service as a marine in World War I, during which he met his future bride,Mabel Meinzer,Arnold attended the University of Illinois and received a BS degree in chemical engineering in 1921 and an MS degree in physical chemistry in 1922.He had a very successful career at Illinois as a student. After marrying Mabel and working two years at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he went on to receive his PhD at the *Arnold Beckman’s biography, Arnold Beckman: One Hundred Years of Excellence, by Arnold Thackray and Minor Myers Jr. and published by the Chemical Heritage Foundation , is an excellent source of more information on his remarkable life. 2 . . . . . Bridging Divides California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and become a member of the faculty there. In 1939 he left Caltech to found the company that eventually became Beckman Instruments,arguably the greatest scientific instrument manufacturer of the twentieth century. Arnold Beckman was an inventor par excellence. His initial instrumental invention was a pH meter that was the first to incorporate detection and measurement functions into a simple, robust, and accurate device, one that also for the first time included the use of electronic amplification of signals.The Beckman DU spectrophotometer, another classic instrument, appeared in 1941; it revolutionized the measurement of light signals from samples and was of vital importance in war research during World War II. Arnold Beckman became a very successful businessman and public servant. He was a leader in the affairs of Caltech; indeed, he served as chairperson of the board of trustees of that institution from 1964 to 1974. In addition,he and Mabel made many financial contributions to Caltech. He was also active in public affairs in the state of California. Although he had spent nearly all his time in California after graduating from the University of Illinois, Arnold never lost touch with his Illinois roots— particularly with Cullom, his birthplace, and the University of Illinois. He became a member of the University of Illinois Foundation in 1962 and was within a short time a member of the President’s Council.In 1980 he was a member of the Illinois Cabinet, the national governing board of the Campaign for Illinois,the university’s first major university-wide fund drive. I first met Dr. and Mrs. Beckman in 1978, during the fall University of Illinois Foundation meeting.My spouse Audrey and I were invited to go to dinner with the Beckmans after the opening reception.I was at the time not an administrator,simply a chemistry faculty member appointed to the Campus Research Board, which operated under the leadership of the dean of the graduate school to make awards of funds and other forms of support for faculty research. As a mere faculty member, I was not aware that the Beckmans were being asked to make a leadership gift to get the Campaign for Illinois off the ground.They eventually made a gift of $2.5 million in Beckman stock and 2,000 acres of valuable farmland in the Cullom area, to be used to support the activities of the Campus Research Board. The Beckmans insisted on a match of $5 million from Forging the Proposal . . . . . 3 other sources, and so the total endowment from which funds could be drawn was worth $10 million. The income on that amount represented a big boost in the monies available for support of faculty research. As it happened,I was appointed vice chancellor for research and dean of the Graduate College in the fall of 1980,just as the Beckman gift was announced.I was therefore in the enviable position of being able to take advantage of the new resources that the Beckman gift represented. We established Beckman Fellowships for junior faculty in the Center for Advanced Study. The fellowships provided release time for a semester for not-yet-tenured faculty to devote themselves more intensively to their research activities. For more senior faculty, a select number of research grants were labeled Beckman Research Awards. In addition, we established the annual Arnold...