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It was Augustus Klock, a cheerful little Ethical teacher, who first introduced Robert to a laboratory. Klock wore Herbert Hoover collars, had a fund of jokes and a communicable delight in chemistry and physics. Julius Oppenheimer—who had begun to consider his son as a kind of public trust—arranged for Klock to give Robert a special, intensive summer course in chemistry. They brought their lunches to the laboratory. While Klock brewed strong tea in beakers over a Bunsen burner, Rbbert turned out "a bushel of work" that never failed to rate the coveted Klock rubber stamp: "OK-AK." In six weeks, Robert completed a year's course. Says Klock: "He was so brilliant that no teacher would have been skillful enough to prevent him from getting an education." Robert got his introduction to the atomic theory ("A very exciting experience . . . beautiful, wonderful regularities!").
He had everything that money could buy, including a 27-ft. sloop, which he christened Trimethy (after trimethylene chloride) and liked to sail when the wind and the waves were highest. A frail, good-looking kid, he picked up dysentery one summer, "chasing rocks" in Europe, and had to be shipped home on a stretcher.
Robert's worried father sent "him west for his health, engaging Teacher Smith as his companion. It was the boy's first look at New Mexico, and he fell in love with it. Teacher and pupil talked like philosophers, and dressed like prospectors; Robert added to his crystal specimens, and learned to sit a horse.
Rampage in the Stacks. Then came Harvard, "the most exciting time I've ever had in my life. It was like the Goths coming into Rome." Oppenheimer rampaged through the Widener Library stacks: he read Dante in Italian, got a "working knowledge" of French literature, dipped into Chinese, philosophy, mathematics. In his third year, he took six courses and attended four more (normal quota: five). He liked exams—"the definiteness and excitement"—and got A's. One Oppenheimer remark is a Harvard legend: "It was so hot today the only thing I could do all afternoon was lie on my bed and read Jeans's Dynamical Theory of Gases."
At Harvard, Oppenheimer sought out and apprenticed himself to two great teachers: Physicist Percy Williams Bridgman and the late Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He had already made an important discovery: the best way to learn is to find the right person to learn from.
Gruff, honest Bridgman assigned Robert to a project involving a copper-nickel alloy. Oppenheimer built a furnace, made his alloy, completed the study with sufficient precision for Bridgman to publish the findings. Says Bridgman: "A very intelligent student. He knew enough to ask questions." After hours, at the Bridgman home, the conversation ranged far & wide, giving Oppenheimer chances to display his often irritating erudition. Once Bridgman identified a picture as a temple at Segesta, Sicily, built about 400 B.C. Young Oppenheimer quickly set his professor straight: "I judge from the capitals on the columns that it was built about 50 years earlier."