Whitney, Willis

Wise, G. (1985) Willis R. Whitney, Genera Electric, and the Origins of US Industrial Re.search (Columbia University Press, New York). 

As an industrial outsider, he d been fortunate to go to work at a laboratory that was, in 1910, a unique combination of industrial urgency and professional science. General Electric s interest in better light bulbs provided him with a problem. The freedom of choice of methods established by laboratory director Willis R, Whitney allowed him to attack that problem in his own way. The combination of the problem and mode of attack led Langmuir into the realm of kinetic theory. When his interest turned to catalysis, the experience he d gained from years of low pressure experiments enabled him to reject almost intuitively the Bodenstein-Fink theory. 

III, Haynes, 1933, 231. Holland and Pringle s hagiographic sketches of such industrial explorers as Willis Whitney, Leo Baekeland, Arthur D. Little, C. E. K. Mees, and Charles L. Reese give the flavor of contemporary faith in industrial research see III, Holland and Pringle, 1928. 

Of these individuals, Willis Whitney was the only one to have moved out of academe by the time he was elected president of the American Chemical Society. Although he spent most of his active career as director of the General Electric Research Laboratory, his first position upon returning from Leipzig in 1896 was in the chemistry department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Marston Taylor Bogert Willis Rodney Whitney Wilder Dwight Bancroft Alexander Smith Arthur Dehon Little... 

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