Professor of Physics, California Institute of Technology, 1930-1962. Papers include personal and professional correspondence, research notes and data, manuscripts, reprints, patents, photographs. Covers work at Caltech, consulting work and professional activities, personal and biographical materials. Topics: cold-emission effect, medical physics work with Kellogg Laboratory, wartime work with U.S. government and the military.

Charles Christian Lauritsen, known to his colleagues as Charlie or C. C., was born in Holstebro, Denmark in 1892 and educated at the Odense Technical School. During World War I, although Denmark officially remained neutral, Lauritsen chose to leave Europe for the United States, where he and his wife, the former Sigrid Henriksen, and son Tommy first settled in Florida. After some years of working at engineering and design jobs around the country, Lauritsen began his formal study of physics after hearing a talk by Robert A. Millikan, Caltech's president. Enrolling at Caltech in 1927, he received his PhD in 1929 and was appointed to the physics faculty in 1930.

6.5 linear feet.

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