Ninety-seven years ago today, Chemistry 1A became the first class ever taught on UCLA’s Westwood campus. After a mysterious fire reduced the university’s chemistry laboratories to ashes in 1929, a group of students unknowingly inaugurated UCLA’s future home in Westwood.
The 125 students enrolled in Professor Hosmer W. Stone’s Chemistry 1A course were in a class by themselves—literally. Early one morning on March 18, 1929, the students met for the first day of instruction on UCLA’s new Westwood campus, months before its official opening. The circumstances behind their history-making move remain one of UCLA’s unsolved mysteries.
The students came to the new Chemistry Building (now Haines Hall)—despite the fact that only 60 percent of it had been completed—because of a suspicious fire. At 2:42 a.m. on January 3, 1929, two students living across the street from UCLA’s Vermont Avenue campus were startled by a small explosion and soon discovered that California Hall, which housed the chemistry laboratories, was on fire. Fueled by highly combustible chemicals, the blaze was out of control by the time firefighters arrived. By dawn, California Hall had been reduced to charred embers.
The cause was not immediately clear to authorities. A chemical fire was one theory. But since a velvet curtain in Millspaugh Hall auditorium was found ablaze at approximately the same time, investigators decided arson was the likely cause of both incidents.
California Hall (Cal’ Hall) was a two-story wooden structure built in 1917 as barracks for the Student Army Training Corps. Chemistry instruction and labs were moved into the building after constant complaints about foul odors and corrosive fumes from the other building tenants – including the biology department.
UCLA Director Ernest Carroll Moore telegraphed the news of the destruction to University of California President William W. Campbell, and measures were urgently put in place to replace all lost materials and push forward the construction of the Chemistry Building at the new Westwood campus.
No one seemed to mind the loss of the antiquated building. The Daily Bruin ran a tongue-in-cheek story that began: “ ‘Cal’ Hall – the bugaboo of the campus – the butt of many a college wise crack – no longer torments the U.C.L.A. campus.”
“Everyone said that some day ‘Cal’ Hall would burn down,” the article continued, “and finally “California” Hall gave up the struggle and submitted to the universal opinion.”
Jokes and rumors as to the cause of the fire abounded. Some campus wits placed blame on USC pranksters. Others joshed that Chemistry Department Chair William C. Morgan found a convenient way to get an emergency appropriation for new supplies and speed up the move to the larger, modernized building at Westwood. Even the characteristically stern chairman couldn’t help but quip about the matter.
“That old barracks should have burned down long ago,” Morgan reportedly said the morning after the fire. “And wouldn’t you know it – when it did, all the witnesses were looking the other way.”
To learn more about the early days of the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry visit the UCLA Alumni History website here.
