Linus Carl Pauling Linus Carl Pauling was born in 1901 and died in 1994. He was an American chemist and physicist, whose investigations into the structure of molecules led to discoveries of how chemicals bond. Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon, on February 28, 1901, and educated at Oregon State College and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He began to apply his insights into quantum physics as professor of chemistry at Caltech, where from 1927 to 1964 he made many of his discoveries. By devising techniques such as X-ray and electron diffraction, he was able to calculate the interatomic distance