About the Beckmans

Arnold and Mabel Beckman:
The Couple and Their Philanthropy

Arnold and Mabel Beckman met in Brooklyn, New York, in November 1918. Arnold was a young Marine from Illinois, and Mabel was an enthusiastic young Red Cross volunteer serving Thanksgiving dinner to the servicemen barracked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The young Private Beckman lost no time in requesting the privilege of escorting Mabel and her mother back to their Brooklyn home. Mabel consented (even though she had to show Arnold how to navigate the subways) and the rest, as they say, is history.

Arnold had just graduated from high school and was looking to serve his country during World War I. His unit never saw action; indeed, they never left Brooklyn, which was perhaps lucky for Arnold and Mabel’s blossoming romance. They established an active correspondence almost immediately after their first meeting, one that survived for several years of separation. After his stint in the military, Arnold returned to Illinois to pursue his education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mabel stayed in New York where she found employment as an executive secretary for Equitable Life Assurance Company.

Arnold graduated from Illinois in 1923 with a B.S. in chemical engineering and master’s degree in physical chemistry. He was accepted into the Ph.D. program at Caltech and went to Pasadena that fall. He loved both Caltech and California, but Mabel was too far away. He left the Ph.D. program in 1924, after only a year, and booked a passage on a steamer headed to New York through the Panama Canal.

Once in New York, Beckman found a job at Bell Labs in Manhattan. He moved to Long Island to live near Mabel, and the couple saw each other constantly. He and Mabel began to discuss marriage, and they decided that their futures were secure enough to go ahead. They married at All Saints Church in Bayside, Long Island, on 10 June 1925. They took a 10-day honeymoon in Arnold’s Model T, including a stop at Niagara Falls and a boat tour of the Great Lakes. They returned to their jobs in New York and set up housekeeping together.

Before long, Arnold received a caller from the West. Arthur A. Noyes, the head of the chemistry department at Caltech, came to see him in New York to request his return to Pasadena.
Arnold and Mabel's wedding portait, 1925.
Courtesy Beckman family.

In the fall of 1926, Arnold and Mabel set out together for Pasadena in their Model T. The journey took six weeks, and it was quite an experience for Mabel, who was more used to the streets of New York than dusty roads and canvas tents. It was also her introduction to her husband’s love of hiking, camping, and the West, all passions that she would come to share.

Beckman earned his Ph.D. in 1928 and was immediately hired as a member of the Caltech faculty. He did not investigate other job offers, because he and Mabel liked Caltech and Pasadena and saw no reason to leave. In 1933 they were sufficiently settled and successful to begin construction of their dream house at the entrance of Eaton Canyon in nearby Altadena. It was built to Arnold’s exacting and sturdy specifications, and it would be their home for the next 27 years.

Patty and Arnie Beckman.
Courtesy Beckman family. Once settled in their new house, their thoughts turned to a family. Mabel had learned early in their marriage that she was unable to have children. She had suggested a divorce so that Arnold could have his own children, but Arnold flatly refused, saying, "I took a pretty firm view of the marriage vow." The Beckmans had signed up with Cradle, a new adoption service in Chicago, and in 1936 their names had moved to the top of the waiting list. Mabel went to Chicago and came home with three-year-old Gloria Patricia, or Patty, a "very pretty little red-haired girl." Less than a year later, the three Beckmans returned to Chicago to acquire the fourth, the infant Arnold Stone, or Arnie, Beckman.

Soon after their return, Mabel had a brush with death. She had contracted tuberculosis, and the first effective antibiotic treatment for the disease would not be discovered until 1943.

She spent a difficult seven months at the Pottenger Sanatorium in Monrovia, 10 miles southeast of Altadena. Even though they were not far away, it was very difficult for her to be separated from her family. It was especially painful for her that Arnold had to hire household help to do the jobs that Mabel prided herself in doing well. Once she returned home, she gradually reassumed the responsibilities of the family that gave her such pleasure. Even though the family’s fortunes were on the rise at that point, Mabel consistently decreased the amount of outside help she used in the household.

Arnold’s creative mind had led him from the path of academic chemistry into the world of laboratory instrumentation. His combination of intellectual and practical skills helped him make devices of extraordinary cleverness that were highly accurate, very reliable, and extremely easy to use. He began a business on the side in 1934 manufacturing non-clogging ink for National Postage Meter Company, and in 1939 he left his position at Caltech in order to devote his energy to his business interests full time. The contributions to the war effort in the 1940s helped his company grow and prosper, and by the mid-1950s Beckman Instruments had made the Beckmans very wealthy. The company continued to prosper, and its sale to SmithKline Corporation in 1981 was so lucrative for the Beckmans that they decided that they needed a radical program of philanthropy to distribute their wealth.

Arnold and Mabel Beckman established the Beckman Foundation in September 1977 in order to support basic scientific research, with a special emphasis on chemistry. There was no staff and no public office, and Arnold and Mabel made all the decisions themselves over the dining room table of their new home in Corona del Mar. In its first years of existence, the foundation made numerous small grants to a number of organizations, as well as two significant grants to the Scripps Clinic and the University of Illinois. The Beckmans explored the use of matching-grant gifts in this period, where they achieved maximum effect from their gifts by requiring the recipient to match their funds from other sources.

Arnold Beckman had become a member of the board of directors of the System Development Corporation (SDC), a non-profit who produced software and systems for the U.S. Air Force. As the information technology sector matured, however, SDC began to have trouble maintaining a competitive edge as a non-profit. Beckman and the other members of the board decided to take SDC public as a for-profit company with the majority of the shares belonging to the non-profit System Development Foundation (SDF). By 1980, SDC had become sufficiently lucrative that the Burroughs Corporation made SDF a handsome offer for its acquisition. SDF accepted the offer, and it was suddenly left with $65 million in cash and no defining purpose. The decision was made to give away the entire capital and disband SDF. Arnold’s close experience with SDF led him to propose a similar scheme to Mabel. They would give away their entire fortune, recently doubled by the merger of Beckman Instruments and SmithKline, in their lifetimes. This radical philanthropy turned out to be a full time job for both of them.

Over the course of the 1980s, five major Beckman Institutes were founded across the country. They represented Beckman’s vision of major centers that would engage in cutting-edge work in the molecular sciences. The Beckmans gave generously to help achieve this vision, and in keeping with their principles they ensured that the institutions that bore their name would be second to none.

The first such center was the Beckman Research Institute at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. The Institute was constructed to be a center for advanced research rather than for clinical care. The Beckmans were concerned that most philanthropic money was going to patient care, without a sufficient commitment to the basic research that constituted real progress in medicine. In keeping with Arnold Beckman’s interests, the Beckman Institute at the City of Hope focuses on molecules and the processes of life. At about the same time, the Beckman Laser Institute at the University of California at Irvine opened. This center investigates the use of lasers in medicine and provides cutting-edge treatment based on its research. It is not technically part of the University of California; it is a private nonprofit that shares space and other resources with the University. A final clinically-allied organization officially opened in 1989 at Stanford University. The Beckman Center, part of the university’s Medical School, was dedicated to the fields of molecular and genetic medicine. It was intended to be "an interface between bench and bedside," furthering both basic research and the quick application of those advances.

The Beckman Institute at the Univeristy of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Courtesy Beckman Foundation. Following their generous gift to the University of Illinois in support of research, the Beckmans decided to build a Beckman Institute at Urbana-Champaign. This Institute would be the first without a link to a clinical institution; indeed, the new Beckman Institute would be dedicated to extremely basic pioneering research. It was dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to scientific progress, one that fit well with Arnold Beckman’s own opinions about problem solving. After this show of generosity to his undergraduate institution, Caltech was not far from Beckman’s mind.

A similar center, the Beckman Institute at Caltech, was opened there in 1989, with a special mission to support research "too far afield for conventional funding sources." Also in keeping with Beckman’s interests, the Institute was established with a special emphasis on providing Caltech with the most advanced instrumentation available. These five Institutes, at City of Hope, Irvine, Illinois, Stanford, and Caltech, were to become the five jewels of Beckman’s philanthropy.

Over the course of the 1980s, the Beckmans made several smaller grants to support other worthwhile endeavors. They built the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine in order to provide a focal point for the scientific community of the West. Beckman was worried that history had placed all the significant organizations for science on the East Coast, and his new Center attempted to remedy that situation by providing a Western counterpart. He gave $2 million to the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia to support the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, dedicated to both scholarly research and public understanding. Further grants went to Illinois Wesleyan University, the University of Southern California, UC San Francisco, Rockefeller University, Harvey Mudd College, Pepperdine University, the Patty and George Hoag Cancer Center in Orange County, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Orange County Boy Scouts, and the Cullom Memorial Library back in Cullom, Illinois. Despite their active effort, the Beckmans could not give away their sizeable fortune before Mabel’s passing in 1989.

Mabel’s passing was very difficult for Arnold; she had been his best friend, closest companion, and confidante for 64 years. Despite the fact that they had distributed almost $200 million together in the last decade of Mabel’s life, Arnold’s personal fortune was still significant. He decided to reconfigure his foundation to be a foundation in perpetuity, a strategy associated with more traditional philanthropy. This was a difficult decision, because it went against what he and Mabel had decided. The Foundation currently exists to provide funding to the established Beckman Institutes and to give grants for other worthy projects that further the Beckmans’ areas of interest, such as science in education. Beckman personally administered the foundation until his final retirement in 1993. He dedicated his retirement years to his extended family. Arnold O. Beckman died at the age of 104 on 18 May 2004.