The First Chemical Engineering Curriculum

Lewis Norton died young, less than two years later, and the curriculum reverted to mechanical engineering plus industrial chemistry, one of the combinations that began to be called chemical engineering elsewhere. At the Royal Technical College in Glasgow, Scotland, the applied chemistry curriculum in 1888 took the name chemical engineering for a time [17]. For another example, at Minnesota the first curriculum in chemistry, established 

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Many other examples exist, showing that the words chemical engineering were adopted slowly in universities, particularly among the older departments. At any one school the dates are very different for the first use of these words for an individual course, a curriculum, a degree, the name of a department, and the title of a professor. Frequently several decades elapse at a school before all of these items have... 

Revision and modernization of the-text material from previous editions has been incorporated in a different sequence of presentation. It is assumed that the reader has a sufficient background in process calculations and technology, thermodynamics, unit operations and processes, and elementary engineering economics as taught in an undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum. The first six chapters of the present edition can then be used as a text for course work in process development where the ultimate goal is to arrive at a preliminary cost estimate. 

Typical chemical engineering curriculums consist of the equivalent of three semesters of calculus capped off by a course in elementary ordinary differential equations. This usually occurs within the first two years of a four-year program (five years, if co-op is an option). The next two or three years are usually dedicated to solving unit operation problems using prederived formulae. The point being, with few exceptions, the use of the four semesters worth of mathematics is not applied until the first year of graduate school. 

An example of a typical chemical engineering curriculum required during the first quarter of the 20th century is shown in Table 1. This is the ChE curriculum of Purdue University for the year 1923-24. It includes a plethora of chemistry-oriented courses, with some thermodynamics and elements of chemical engineering introduced in the senior year. 

One hundred years ago, in September 1888, Professor Lewis Mills Norton (1855-1893) of the Chemistry Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduced to the curriculum a course on industrial chemical practice. This was the first structured course in chemical engineering taught in a University. Ten years later, Norton s successor Frank H. Thorpe published the first textbook in chemical engineering, entitled Outlines of Industrial Chemistry. Over the years, chemical engineering developed from a simple industrial chemical analysis of processes into a mature field. 

Solved examples given in the chapters are straight forward direct applications. They are hand-solved. It is meant to be a kind of refresher for a first course in chemical engineering curriculum. Some are worked out by Excel. Application problems for Section I are included in Appendix A. 

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