Telegram Congratulations to J.H. Van Vleck in 1935

Exploring archives means getting to read other people’s mail. We can vicariously join in on moments of celebration from 90 years ago. Personal papers of scientists provide opportunities to explore aspects of scientific discoveries, but they also offer the ability to explore networks of connection and support in the scientific community.

AIP’s Niels Bohr Library and Archives (NBLA) generally does not acquire collections of personal papers. Instead, the primary focus of our archival collections is the organizational records of scientific societies. When we do make an exception and acquire someone’s personal papers, it tends to be because of significant connections between that individual’s work and the work of AIP or the scientific societies in AIP’s federation. J.H. Van Vleck’s papers are a good example of that kind of significant connection. Along with Nobel Prize winning contributions to our understanding of a quantum-mechanical theory of magnetism, Van Vleck also played a key role in the development of AIP’s history programs.

On a recent visit to NBLA, I explored a bit of the J. H. Van Vleck Papers . There is a lot of interesting material in this collection, but today I thought I would use this post to explore the contents of just one small seemingly insignificant folder. Within the series of his papers titled XII. Honors and awards, 1931-1978, is a folder named National Academy of Sciences--Election to, 1935. This folder includes a series of telegrams and letters from scientists congratulating Van Vleck on his election to the National Academies of Sciences in 1935. In this short post I will share four telegrams and one letter from that folder. Reading through these messages lets us see who went out of their way to congratulate Van Vleck, how and when they congratulated him, what they wanted to say to him to celebrate this accomplishment, and some of the norms for how these scientists interacted and celebrated.

Physicist, astronomer, and acoustician Dayton Clarence Miller appears to have been the first to send Van Vleck a congratulatory telegram. His message “Enthusiastic and sincere congratulations on your election to National Academy” has the time/date stamp on it of 12:16 PM, April 24^th,1935.

Roughly an hour later, at 1:32 PM, we have this message, ostensibly from mathematician George David Birkhoff : “Warmest congratulations upon your well-deserved election to the academy today.”

The next day, at least two more telegrams were sent. The one below, time stamped 10:30 AM, presumably comes from chemist Linus Pauling and physicist Edwin Kemble . As further documentation of these scientists’ connections see this photo from our visual archives of Van Vleck, Pauling, and Kemble among others in the physics community at the Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics and Molecular Physics in 1936.

Thirteen years earlier, in 1922, Kemble had served as Van Vleck’s thesis advisor. Kemble and Van Vleck’s lifelong relationship is further documented in AIP’s collections. Twenty-seven years later, in 1962, Van Vleck and Thomas Kuhn would conduct this oral history interview with Kemble for the Sources for History of Quantum Physics initiative . Fast forward to 1979, in the photo below from our visual archives, you can see Van Vleck (right) toasting Kemble at Kemble’s 90th birthday celebration .

Meanwhile, back in 1935, half an hour after the Kemble and Pauling telegram, at 11:02 AM, we have the telegram below. This one, signed “Compton,” is likely from physicist Karl Compton , but could potentially have been from his brother, physicist Arthur Compton.

In short, in this two-day period in 1935, five leading figures in the scientific community rapidly dispatched brief congratulatory telegrams to Van Vleck.

We gain insight into this practice of congratulatory telegrams from a letter in the same folder from physicist Raymond Birge. Sent nearly two weeks later, on May 6^th, Birge opens the letter explaining that he “should like to extend very tardy but none the less sincere congratulations on your election to the National Academy.”

Birge goes on to provide context, which is particularly useful to those of us leafing through this folder some 90 years in the future, on how this whole network of telegrams worked. He explains, “Since no one from the University of California was up for election, no telegrams were received here as to those elected, and since, as you may know (if you do not, this is quite confidential), the number of those nominated was in excess of the number that the Academy permits itself to elect at any one time, I could not be sure of your election until I got the official news. This did not come for several days, and I have also been extremely busy.”

What is it that we learn from reading through this folder of telegrams and letters in the J. H. Van Vleck Papers ? While there are not any revelations about his scientific work, we do gain some understanding of the networks and communities that he was participating in. We also get some sense about the norms around sending this kind of congratulatory message, at least at this point in time in this part of the scientific community. If these had been phone calls, we likely would not have any record of these interactions.

Beyond that, the presence of these items in this collection tells us a bit about what mattered to Van Vleck. We have these messages because they meant enough to him to keep, presumably for decades, as part of his personal papers. Collectively, his papers mattered enough to him that he took the initiative to ensure a new life for them at AIP and planned for them to be donated to our collections. The archivists at the Niels Bohr Library and Archives saw the value of these materials and their relationship to our collections and invested time and energy in arranging and describing them so that people like us could come along in the future and explore them.

Like all documents in an archival collection, these messages are both records and documentation from a specific historical moment and a statement about what the record keeper (and subsequent stewards) thought was significant enough to care for and preserve. I hope more people in the scientific community today are inspired like Van Vleck to be deliberate in maintaining records of their work and collaborations to be preserved and explored like this in the future.