The division chair that Bacher now occupied at Caltech had been vacant since Robert A. Millikan had retired in 1945. Although nominally a professorship, it was primarily an administrative post. In 1949 there were 17 professors in the department, of whom nine were physicists, two were astrophysicists, and the remaining six were mathematicians. There were two world class research laboratories funded by the Office of Naval Research, the Cosmic Ray Laboratory that had been founded by Millikan, which was now directed by Carl Anderson, and the W. K. Kellogg Radiation Laboratory which was directed by Charles Lauritsen. But there were no facilities for high energy physics; these would have to be created from scratch.