This photo, in this mornings Sunday newspaper, of Scripps Institute of Oceanography in 1910, made me think that that is much how the place must have still looked around 1920 when my great grandfather Professor Samuel Steen Maxwell spent a summer there doing experiments on the inner ears of dogfish. At that time he headed the Physiology Department at the University of California at Berkeley, where he had been brought from his previous post at Harvard. He rented a house for the summer at the corner of Maryland Street and Monroe Avenue in University Heights, San Diego, so he could be near his daughter and his grandchildren who lived a block away on Arch Street. He would sometimes take his little granddaughter Jane (my mother) along with him to Scripps Institute. It probably took him less time to drive to La Jolla then than it would take nowadays nearly a century later. Jane would later vividly remember the many little sharks in a big tank swimming around oriented in all directions, including sideways and upside down. Professor Maxwell had operated on the labyrinths of their inner ears to demonstrate how that controlled their sense of up and down. These experiments resulted in his book Labyrinth and Equilibrium (Lippincott, 1923) which was the first and for many years the only text on how the inner ear works in providing a sense of balance for living creatures. The building is still there, part of the larger Scripps Institute complex which is now connected to the University of California at San Diego.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 18:04:21 +0000
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