Short answers, pulled from the story.
Caltech was founded on the 23rd of September 1891, by local businessman and politician Amos G. Throop as a vocational and preparatory school on Fair Oaks Avenue and Chestnut Street in Old Pasadena, California. It assumed its current name in 1920.
Eighty Nobel laureates have been affiliated with Caltech, making it the institution with the highest number of Nobelists per capita in America. Chemist Linus Pauling is the only individual in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, accounting for 49 total prizes from 48 affiliated laureates.
The antecedents of JPL were established between 1936 and 1943 under Theodore von Kármán at Caltech. Caltech continues to manage and operate JPL today under a contract with NASA. In 2008, JPL spent over $1.6 billion on research and development and employed over 5,000 people.
The Caltech honor code states that no member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member. It is enforced by an undergraduate Board of Control and a Graduate Honor Council, and it permits professors to assign take-home examinations.
During the 1961 Rose Bowl Game, Caltech students altered the flip-cards held by stadium attendees to display "Caltech" and several unintended messages. The event is now known as the Great Rose Bowl Hoax and is considered the most famous prank in Caltech history.
Caltech alumnus Arnold Beckman (PhD 1928) funded William Shockley, who had attended Caltech as an undergraduate and co-invented the semiconductor transistor. Shockley chose silicon over germanium for his laboratory in Mountain View, California, and the resulting concentration of semiconductor companies in that area gave rise to the term "Silicon Valley." Gordon E. Moore (PhD 1954), one of eight researchers who left Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor, later co-founded Intel.