High Voltage Research Laboratory
Dublin Core
Title
High Voltage Research Laboratory
Description
In 1923, Caltech and the Southern California Edison Company built the High Voltage Research Laboratory, the first university laboratory in the world to feature a million volt transformer. The building, sometimes called High Volts, was only the sixth building on Caltech’s new campus, so it was surrounded more by trees and lawns than by other laboratories. For its time, High Volts was an unusual partnership between a corporation, which supplied electricity and paid most of the $140,000 construction cost, and a university, which provided land.
High Volts was architecturally bold: Internally, it was a single large room which held the massive transformer and other electrical apparatus. Edison engineers designed a steel frame, the second constructed in Pasadena. Architect Bertram Goodhue designed the exterior, which used a diamond pattern to provide texture in the absence of windows. Architectural sculptor Lee Lawrie produced a relief over the entry which represented the electrical research performed within.
Brought together by members of Caltech’s board of trustees who also served on Edison’s board of directors, the two organizations would share the facility: Edison needed a laboratory in which to test high voltage electrical transmission equipment, including insulators and transmission lines which were later used to transmit electricity to Southern California from the Hoover Dam in Nevada. Caltech physicists, led by Robert Millikan, sought to use high voltage electricity to dismantle the nucleus of the atom.
Millikan and his colleagues were not immediately successful in this effort, but in the late 1920s Charles Lauritsen and Ralph Bennett did use the High Volts transformer as a power supply to the world’s first 750,000 volt x-ray tube. A few years later, his student H. Richard Crane modified his own x-ray tube into a particle accelerator, and Caltech physicists joined the founders of the new field of nuclear physics.
High Volts was architecturally bold: Internally, it was a single large room which held the massive transformer and other electrical apparatus. Edison engineers designed a steel frame, the second constructed in Pasadena. Architect Bertram Goodhue designed the exterior, which used a diamond pattern to provide texture in the absence of windows. Architectural sculptor Lee Lawrie produced a relief over the entry which represented the electrical research performed within.
Brought together by members of Caltech’s board of trustees who also served on Edison’s board of directors, the two organizations would share the facility: Edison needed a laboratory in which to test high voltage electrical transmission equipment, including insulators and transmission lines which were later used to transmit electricity to Southern California from the Hoover Dam in Nevada. Caltech physicists, led by Robert Millikan, sought to use high voltage electricity to dismantle the nucleus of the atom.
Millikan and his colleagues were not immediately successful in this effort, but in the late 1920s Charles Lauritsen and Ralph Bennett did use the High Volts transformer as a power supply to the world’s first 750,000 volt x-ray tube. A few years later, his student H. Richard Crane modified his own x-ray tube into a particle accelerator, and Caltech physicists joined the founders of the new field of nuclear physics.
Creator
G. Haven Bishop
Source
Southern California Edison Photographs, Huntington Library
Date
1929-01-14
Still Image Item Type Metadata
Original Format
Photograph
Physical Dimensions
8" × 10"
Citation
G. Haven Bishop, “High Voltage Research Laboratory,” Electrifying Los Angeles, accessed March 12, 2026, https://electrifying.collopy.net/items/show/2.