9. California Institute of Technology

You may have run into the work of past Caltech scientists without even knowing it.

If your mom ever told you to take Vitamin C to fend off a cold, you can thank Linus Pauling, the Caltech chemist who discovered the nature of the chemical bond in 1930 (his ideas about vitamins came later). Pauling won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962.

After an earthquake, news anchors can tell us how relatively shaken up we were, courtesy of the formula geophysicist Charles Richter devised in the 1920s for measuring the size of Southern California earthquakes.

And if anyone's ever told you to stop acting so 'left brain', it's because of the pioneering brain hemisphere research done by Caltech psychobiologist Roger Sperry (another Nobelist).

Caltech was established thanks to Pasadena philanthropist Amos Throop.

In September 1891, he rented the Wooster Block building for the purpose of establishing Throop University, the forerunner to Caltech.

Throop might have remained just a good local school had it not been for the arrival in Pasadena of astronomer George Ellery Hale. The first director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, Hale became a member of Throop's board of trustees in 1907, and envisioned moulding it into a first-class institution for engineering and scientific research and education. Under his leadership Throop's transformation began.

By 1921, Hale had been joined by chemist Arthur A Noyes and physicist Robert A Millikan. These three men set the school, which by then had been renamed the California Institute of Technology, firmly on its new course.

Today, 30 of the Institute's alumni are Nobel Prize recipients.

Information courtesy California Institute of Technology.