My First Hundred Years

The university was located in an old part of the city described by E. Emmet Reid in his autobiography, My First Hundred Years, published when he was 100 years old ... 

Emmett Reid, My First Hundred Years (Chemical Publishing Co., New York, 1972), p. 60. 

The psychological analysis of the emotions is little more than a hundred years old. Darwin s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872) and William James s "What Is an Emotion" (1884) are the first studies of the emotions using scientific methodology. Over the past century, empirical and theoretical studies of the emotions have accumulated at an accelerating rate. In Chapter IV, L draw on these contributions to outline my understanding of what the emotions are and what they do. 

Reid, 1972. E. Emmet Reid. My First One Hundred Years. New York Chemical Publishing Company. 

In order to keep the size of the volume within practical limits, I have allowed myself to be more critical in the second edition than the first. Published methodology is not taken at face value, but is put into the context of previous work and evaluated in light of my own thirty years of experience in industrial chemistry. Techniques that are only of academic interest are covered in much less detail than those that have immediate application. I have benefited from reader comments on the first edition, as well as from addressing the hundreds of technical questions asked by my colleagues at BASF and our customers over the years. The purpose remains to give the chemist a ready reference for deciding how best to approach the analytical chemistry challenges that present themselves in the world of surfactants. 

Let me make my own personal preference clear from the outset. I have solved literally hundreds of systems of ODEs for chemical engineering systems over my 30 years of experience, and t have found only one or two situations where the plain old simple-minded first-order Euler algorithm was not the best choice for the problem. We will show some comparisons of different types of algorithms on different problems in this chapter and the next. 

The first time I heard about chemical thermodynamics was when a second-year undergraduate brought me the news early in my freshman year. He told a spine-chilling story of endless lectures with almost three hundred numbered equations, all of which, it appeared, had to be committed to memory and reproduced in exactly the same form in subsequent examinations. Not only did these equations contain all the normal algebraic symbols but in addition they were liberally sprinkled with stars, daggers, and circles so as to stretch even the most powerful of minds. 

At the end of his Nobel address in 1966 Robert S. Mulliken stated In conclusion, I would like to emphasize my belief that the era of computing chemists, when hundreds if not thousands of chemists will go to the computing machine instead of the laboratory, for increasingly many facets of chemical information, is already at hand. There is only one obstacle, namely, that someone must pay for the computing time. We now know that the computing power that Mulliken had available at the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s can be had for about the equivalent of one month s salary of an assistant professor Twenty years later, Stephen Wilson, in his book Chemistry by Computer, paraphrased the first of Mulliken s two sentences as follows ... 

Almost his first words were Well, Dr. Weizmann, we need thirty thousand tons of acetone. Can you make it I was so terrified by this lordly request that I almost turned tail I answered So far I have succeeded in making a few hundred cubic centimeters of acetone at a time by the fermentation process. I do my work in a laboratory. 1 am not a technician, I am only a research chemist. But, if I were somehow able to produce a ton of acetone, I would be able to multiply that by any factor you chose. . .. I was given carte blanche by Mr. Churchill and the department, and I took upon myself a task which was to tax all my energies for the next two years. 

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