Pioneers in chemical engineering

Williams, G. C., and Vivian, J. E. (1980). Pioneers in Chemical Engineering at MIT. In History of Chemical Engineering, edited by W. F. Furter. Washington, DC American Chemical Society. 

Thanks to the leadership of Lewis and his colleagues, the chemical engineering department became an intellectually powerful center during this period. Its preeminence was fostered by the publication of the pioneer text in 1923, Principles of Chemical Engineering, by Walker, Lewis, and William H. McAdams. At the same time, Lewis developed a new kind of relation with industry, one that proved to have enormous impact on the chemical process industries and on teaching and research in academia. In fact, petroleum refining was the industry that provided the key to many future developments in chemical engineering. 

The manufacture and use of petroleum-based fuels has been a major factor in the growth and content of chemical engineering. Chemical engineers have pioneered advances in separations, catalytic processes such as fluid catalytic cracking, hydroprocessing, and many others. Many of the advances in chemical engineering science have been stimulated by the need for quantitative understanding of these processes. 

Chemical Metallurgical Engineering has done its part in developing data on chemical uses. Their pioneer work, in 1937 and 1939, was the result of Henry Batter s following, for many years, the status of chemicals and their markets. Data were published in Chemical Facts Figures issues, which were followed by an annual statistical review in Chemical Engineering, published every February. 

BASF, on the other hand, concentrated more on the manufacture of standard dyes, and produced much more of the basic intermediates, both organic and inorganic. Of the Big Three, BASE was the leader in chemical engineering and process innovation. Between 1903 and 1913, two of its chemists—Fritz Haber as the discoverer and Carl Bosch as the co-developer—pioneered a way to produce nitrates from air that became the basic ingredients for fertilizers and military explosives. 

Professor Robinson s joy was teaching undergraduates in chemical engineering, and he is remembered well by his students for his often risque historical anecdotes concerning some famed pioneers in chemistry and thermodynamics, as well as for his insistence on numerical accuracy on home problems and quizzes. He was an avid mountain climber and an accomplished solo and choral singer. 

After Neal Amundson s pioneering work on mathematical methods in chemical engineering, numerical procedures penetrated more and more into chemical engineering applications. Forced to reduce the costs and time for the development and design of new chemical processes, mathematical approaches have proved to be indispensable tools. The main advantages of numerical methods in chenndcal engineering are ... 

The United States was the pioneering country of chemical engineering. A curriculum in chemical engineering was started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1880. The old Europe followed the trend, starting from Denmark, Great Britain, and Imperial Russia. 

In 1945 the School started hiring new faculty members, prominent among which would be J.M. Smith and D. Holcomb. Clifton Lovell, this pioneer of chemical engineering, would stay active only until 1946 when he took a leave of absence for health reasons. He had time to produce one more biochemical engineering M.S. thesis on the Clarification of Malt Converted Degerminated Corn Mash Prior to Fermentation (Francis A. Hilinski, M.S. 45). 

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