Look, when most people think “prestigious university,” they picture students in cardigans sipping lattes while discussing Proust in hushed library corners. Then there’s Caltech—where the students are more likely to be plotting how to “borrow” a 1.7-ton cannon from across the country or figuring out how to remotely control the Rose Bowl scoreboard just for giggles.
Welcome to the California Institute of Technology, where approximately 1,000 undergrads casually produce more Nobel Prize winners per capita than any other school on Earth, manage NASA’s coolest space missions, and still find time to pull pranks so epic they make international news.
If MIT is the nerdy kid who got swole, Caltech is the chaos gremlin who somehow became a genius. Let’s dive in.
The Origin Story: From “Wait, Who?” to “Wait, WHAT?”
Picture it: Pasadena, 1891. A guy named Amos Gager Throop (yes, “TROOP”—stop giggling) decides to start a school. He calls it Throop University, which honestly sounds like something you’d name after a sound effect in a Batman comic.
The school went through an identity crisis worthy of a teen movie:
1891: “Throop University” (okay, decent start)
1893: “Throop Polytechnic Institute” (getting warmer)
1913: “Throop College of Technology” (almost there…)
1920: “California Institute of Technology” (FINALLY!)
Fast forward to today: This “little school that could” has 80 Nobel laureates associated with it. To put that in perspective, that’s more Nobel Prizes than some COUNTRIES have won. And they did it with fewer students than your average high school.
Talk about overachievers…
The Great Rose Bowl Hoax: The Prank That Launched a Thousand Legends
Alright, buckle up for the GOAT of all college pranks.
It’s January 2, 1961. The Rose Bowl is packed with 100,000 fans watching Washington play Minnesota. The Washington cheerleaders have prepared this elaborate halftime show with flip cards—you know, where fans hold up cards to make pictures and messages. Enter the “Fiendish Fourteen”—a group of Caltech students who basically said, “We should be part of this game… despite the fact that we don’t have a football team and weren’t invited.”
These absolute legends broke into the cheerleaders’ hotel room (the 1960s were a different time, y’all) and replaced all their instruction cards with nearly-identical forgeries. For 13 card stunts, everything went normally. The Washington fans were like “Go Huskies!” holding up their cards without suspicion.
Then came card stunt #14.
Suddenly, 2,232 unsuspecting Washington fans held up their cards and spelled out—in massive letters visible to the entire stadium and national TV—the word “CALTECH”. The crowd went WILD. The announcers were extremely confused!!! The cheerleaders were having existential crises. And somewhere in the stands, fourteen Caltech students were probably trying not to die from laughter.
The beauty? They had to:
Forge thousands of instruction cards
Make them look identical to the originals
Execute a heist that would make Ocean’s Eleven proud
Keep it secret
This prank is so legendary that in 1997, the Caltech Alumni Association voted it the #1 prank in school history. It’s basically the “Mona Lisa” of college pranks.
“Hey, Let’s Just Casually Change the Hollywood Sign”
In 1987, Hollywood was turning 100 years old. Caltech students were like, “We should help them celebrate! By completely changing their most iconic landmark!”
On May 18, 1987, students from Page and Ricketts houses pooled together several hundred dollars (a fortune in ramen money), bought a ton of black and white plastic sheeting, and under cover of darkness, transformed the Hollywood sign to read “CALTECH”.
Can you imagine waking up, looking at the Hollywood Hills, and seeing “CALTECH” instead? That’s main character energy right there.
The prank required:
Climbing Mount Lee at night (cardio ✓)
Carrying massive amounts of plastic (strength training ✓)
Not getting arrested (luck ✓✓✓)
Having the audacity (Caltech DNA ✓)
Honestly, if you’re going to prank someone, prank THE ENTIRE CITY OF LOS ANGELES. Go big or go home.
Caltech vs. MIT: The Nerdiest Rivalry in Existence
Most college rivalries are about football. The Caltech-MIT rivalry is about who can pull off the most technically impressive, hilariously audacious pranks. It’s like watching two super-geniuses play 4D chess… except the chess pieces are cannons, lasers, and fake newspapers.
The 1984 Scoreboard Hack: “Did… Did We Just Win?”
In 1984, some Blacker House legends decided the Rose Bowl needed them again. This time, they hacked the electronic scoreboard during the UCLA vs. Illinois game.
First, they changed “UCLA” to “U.C.L.A” (with periods, because grammar matters even in pranks). Then they went full chaos mode and changed the teams to read:
CALTECH 38, MIT 9
The scoreboard manufacturer was so impressed they literally offered the students jobs. That’s the Caltech flex: prank so well you get recruited.
2005: Operation “Let’s Troll MIT on Their Own Campus”
April 2005. MIT is hosting Campus Preview Weekend for prospective freshmen. A group of Caltech students said, “Road trip!” and flew 2,500 miles to Cambridge, Massachusetts to execute what can only be described as a multi-pronged assault on MIT’s dignity:
Phase 1: The T-Shirt Bamboozle They handed out 400 FREE T-shirts packaged to show “MIT” on the front. Score! Free merch!
But when students opened them, the back read: “Because Not Everybody Can Go To Caltech” 💀
Absolutely SAVAGE.
Phase 2: The Blimp They floated a giant orange blimp with “CIT” inside MIT’s Lobby 7. Just… casually.
Phase 3: The Sign Makeover They changed MIT’s building inscription from “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” to “That Other Institute of Technology”
I repeat: SAVAGE.
Phase 4: The Laser Show Using a green laser they built from scratch, they projected “CALTECH” onto MIT’s tallest building. When MIT students tried to find the source, the Caltech students turned it off just in time.
The Caltech students had even made fake MIT ID cards. They thought of EVERYTHING.
MIT’s Dean of Admissions responded by calling it “hilarious” and “performance art.” That’s how you know it was a good prank—even the target was impressed.
2006: MIT Steals a1.7-Ton Cannon (Yes, Really)
MIT’s revenge came a year later, and oh boy, they brought the drama.
Caltech’s Fleming Cannon is a 130-year-old, 1.7-ton relic from the Franco-Prussian War. It’s one of the few things at Caltech that’s supposed to be “unprankable” because it’s literally irreplaceable.
MIT said, “Hold my calculator.”
On March 28, 2006, about 30 MIT students executed an Ocean’s Eleven-level heist:
Two flew to Pasadena
They posed as construction contractors with a fake work order
They fooled security guards
They transported a 1.7-TON CANNON across the country
They placed it at MIT with a giant gold-plated Brass Rat ring around the barrel
When Fleming House students flew to Boston to retrieve their cannon, MIT students greeted them with:
A friendly barbecue (wholesome!)
Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” blasting (not wholesome—this song is BANNED at Caltech during finals!)
The Fleming students left a miniature toy cannon with the note: “Here’s something a little more your size.”
The level of petty? Chef’s kiss!
The Little Things That Make Caltech Weird (in the Best Way)
The Model T in a Dorm Room (1940)
In 1940, some students bought a Model T Ford for $10, completely disassembled it, carried it into Ricketts House Room 49, and reassembled it with the engine running.
The car fit with FOUR INCHES to spare. That’s not a prank, that’s engineering performance art.
The Disappearing Dorm Room (1972)
A student went on vacation. When they came back, their room had VANISHED.
The prank involved:
Filling the room with over a TON of crumpled computer paper
Plastering over the door
Painting the hallway
Adding baseboards
Moving a light fixture
Imagine coming back from spring break and your room is just… a wall. The existential horror. 😱
The McDonald’s Monopoly (1975)
McDonald’s ran a contest: “Enter as often as you wish!”
Page House students: “Say less.”
They printed and submitted OVER 1 MILLION ENTRIES at 98 different McDonald’s across Southern California. They won 20% of ALL prizes including a station wagon and $3,000.
The car went to charity, the money paid for the prank and house improvements. Chaotic good energy at its finest.
The Sentient Coke Machine (1990s)
Lloyd House had a vending machine that could:
Play Simon
Applaud when you bought something
Tell you the time
Be controlled via the internet
Had a WEBCAM
This was in the 1990s. These students built the Internet of Things before it was cool.
The Toilet Seat Café (1998)
When the grad student apartments got new toilets, students replaced all 76 chairs in the outdoor café area with the old porcelain toilets.
Because sometimes, the best pranks are just pure, unfiltered chaos.
The Serious Stuff (Where We Remember They’re Actually Super Smart)
Okay, okay, enough about pranks. Let’s talk about why Caltech is actually, you know, one of the best research universities on the planet.
Nobel Prizes: Collecting Them Like Pokémon Cards
Caltech has 80 Nobel laureates associated with it. That includes:
Richard Feynman: Physics Nobel winner, bongo drummer, safecracker, and the guy who made physics cool. His lectures are still THE definitive way to learn physics.
Kip Thorne & Barry Barish: Won the 2017 Physics Nobel for detecting gravitational waves (literally ripples in spacetime from black holes colliding). No big deal, just proving Einstein right 100 years later.
Frances Arnold: 2018 Chemistry Nobel for directed evolution. She basically taught enzymes to evolve, which is as cool as it sounds.
Andrea Ghez (PhD ’92): 2020 Physics Nobel for discovering the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Casual.
John Hopfield: 2024 Physics Nobel for pioneering neural networks and machine learning. Yeah, Caltech helped invent AI.
The student-to-Nobel-laureate ratio is ABSURD. You’re more likely to win a Nobel Prize as a Caltech alum than you are to get a parking spot on campus.
JPL: Caltech’s Space Division
On Halloween 1936 (fitting, honestly), Caltech professor Theodore von Kármán and some grad students started doing rocket experiments. This eventually became NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—JPL.
Caltech has managed JPL since 1958, and they’ve been responsible for:
ALL the Mars rovers (Curiosity, Perseverance, etc.)
Voyager 1 & 2 (now in interstellar space!)
The Cassini mission to Saturn
The James Webb Space Telescope (partially)
Every time you see a cool Mars pic? Thank a Caltech grad.
The Einstein Connection
Albert Einstein was a visiting professor at Caltech for three winter terms (1931, 1932, 1933). Dude basically used Caltech as his winter vacation spot. “Oh, Massachusetts is cold? Let me just pop over to sunny California and hang with some geniuses.”
There are amazing photos of Einstein at Caltech, looking way more relaxed than in his Princeton days. Caltech weather does that to you.
What It’s Actually Like (The Real Talk)
It’s TINY
Caltech has fewer than 1,000 undergrads. That’s smaller than most high schools. The upside? You know everyone. The downside? EVERYONE KNOWS YOU. No anonymity here.
The student-to-faculty ratio is 3:1. That means you’ll probably take a class taught by a Nobel laureate. Or work in their lab. Like it’s normal.
The Honor Code: “No Cap, Fr Fr”
Caltech operates on an Honor Code: “No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member.”
What this means in practice:
Take-home exams are the norm
You can take tests in your room
No one’s checking if you’re cheating (because you won’t)
Collaboration is encouraged
It’s basically “we’re all nerds suffering together, let’s help each other.”
The House System
Caltech has a House system (like Hogwarts but with more thermodynamics). Each house has its own culture, traditions, and prank history. Fleming, Page, Lloyd, Ricketts, etc.—they all compete, prank each other, and create lifelong rivalries/friendships.
The Workload: “Sleep is a Social Construct”
Let’s be real: Caltech is HARD. Like, brutally hard. The joke is:
MIT: “Drinking from a firehose”
Caltech: “Drinking from a firehose… of firehoses”
But the students are in it together. Everyone’s struggling, so there’s solidarity in the suffering.
Why Caltech Matters (The Emotional Conclusion)
Here’s the thing about Caltech: it proves that brilliance doesn’t have to be boring.
You can be smart enough to detect gravitational waves from colliding black holes AND smart enough to hack the Rose Bowl scoreboard. You can revolutionize chemistry AND steal a cannon from MIT. You can manage Mars rovers AND build the most sophisticated vending machine on Earth.
Caltech students are taught that technical excellence and creative chaos aren’t opposites—they’re best friends.
In a world that loves to put people in boxes (“You’re either a nerd OR you’re fun”), Caltech said “¿Por qué no los dos?” and proceeded to collect Nobel Prizes while pulling off pranks that make international headlines.
With fewer students than most dorm buildings at state schools, Caltech has:
Changed the course of physics, chemistry, and engineering
Sent robots to Mars
Detected the fabric of spacetime bending
Made the Hollywood sign read “CALTECH”
Stolen and returned a 1.7-ton cannon
That’s the Caltech spirit: If you’re going to do something, do it so well that 50 years later, people are still talking about it. Whether that’s your research paper or your prank, excellence is excellence.
So here’s to Caltech—the tiny school with an outsized impact, where Nobel laureates crack jokes, students hack scoreboards, and everyone agrees that the best way to honor science is to have some fun with it.
Because at the end of the day, what’s the point of being the smartest person in the room if you can’t use that intelligence to make everyone else say “wait… HOW did they do that?!”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go figure out how to remotely control the scoreboard at the next big game. For science. Obviously.
P.S. If you’re reading this and thinking “I want to go to Caltech,” just remember: with great nerd power comes great responsibility… and probably very little sleep. But hey, you might win a Nobel Prize. Or at least pull off an epic prank.
Worth it? Absolutely.
Sources: Caltech Official History, Caltech Pranks Page, Wikipedia – Caltech-MIT Rivalry, Los Angeles Times, JPL History
