Roelof Houwink

Like Herman Mark, Roelof Houwink was one of the featured speakers at the 1935 Faraday Discussion on Polymerization [9]. He represented the N.V. Phillips Gloeilampenfabricken at Eindhoven, Holland. He was stiU a major figure in materials science in 1953. He included polymers in all his work, but stressed the need to adopt a very broad paradigm in materials science. This advice is still very good He communicated with all the leading workers in polymer science and convinced them to contribute chapters to many books that took a comprehensive approach to the structure and mechanical properties of polymers. One of his most famous books appeared entirely under his own name in 1937 Elasticity, Plasticity and Structure of Matter [10]. The second edition of this book closes the current period of interest (1953). 

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Roelof Houwink was born in 1897 in Meppel, Holland. He majored in botany and received the Ph.D. degree at the University of Delft in 1934 but his studies of the hevea rubber plant catalyzed an interest in rubber which he maintained throughout his career in the Dutch Government Rubber Service and at the Vredesteen rubber factory. 

On the basis of the assumption that linear macromolecules can also exist as clusters, Hermann Mark (1895-1992, editor s note) co-operated with the Dutch physical chemist Roelof Houwink (1899-1987, editor s note) in Vienna to continue tanpirical development of Staudinger s viscosity equation (Mark-Houwink equation). [...] The corrections/addi-tions to Staudinger s viscosity law made by Mark and Houwink proved to be correct, but they were still being rejected by Staudinger in the 1950s. ([19], p. 410)... 

Maurice Huggins, Raymond Fuoss, Leslie Treloar, G. Stafford Whitby, Roelof Houwink, Walter Stockmayer, John Ferry, Bruno Zimm, Paul Doty, Richard Stein and William O. Baker. The number of stories that can be told about this period in the development of polymer science is very much larger than the page limit for this book. 

In contrast, Mark maintained that macromolecules could assume many different conformations (shapes) and in collaboration with Guth and Kuhn, proposed a power form for the Staudinger equation i.e., qgp=KM . A similar equation was proposed simultaneously by Roelof Houvdhk and the above equation is now referred to as the Mark-Houwink viscosity equation. 

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