Careers The Lure of Industry

Their suitability had been particularly appreciated from 1907 by Brunner Mond whose chief chemist and then research manager at its Winnington plant in Cheshire, Francis Freeth, assiduously and snobbishly collected promising men from Oxford and made Winnington into a notable research department in 

It was at Winnington, the home of the Alkali Group of ICI, that polythene, Id s major discovery before the Second World War, was taken from laboratory experiments to large-scale production. Several Oxonians played an important role. Firstly, in 1931 Robinson, who was a consultant to Id s Dyestuffs group, suggested that several reactions be tried under very high pressures without catalysts. One reaction in his list was that between ethylene and benzaldehyde. The work he outlined was done at Winnington by 

Gibson and E. W. Fawcett who studied some 50 reactions. In 1933 they subjected ethylene and benzaldehyde to 2,000 atmospheres pressure and produced a small amount of polythene as the accidental consequence of looking for the chemical result of a specific reaction. Subsequent experiments on polythene were not reproducible and explosions so common that Dyestuffs Group withdrew its support of the work late in 1933. 

---