A century ago, University of California zoologist William E. Ritter dreamed of establishing a marine station on the West Coast of the United States. Beginning in 1892, he and a few of his graduate students pitched a tent each summer at a different town along the Pacific coast and studied marine specimens. In 1903, he was in San Diego and met the Scripps family, who would fund his dream laboratory. Ritter, E. W. Scripps, and Ellen Browning Scripps wrote the bylaws of the newly established Marine Biological Association of San Diego on September 26, 1903. The marine station in San Diego, they wrote, was to conduct, “a biological and hydrographic survey of the waters of the Pacific Ocean adjacent to the coast of Southern California; to build and maintain a public aquarium and museum.”

Day, D. 2003. Scripps before World War II: The men, the science, and the instruments. Oceanography 16(3):15–19, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2003.25.

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