Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Chemical Achievers: The Human Face of the Chemical Sciences Mary Ellen Bowden. Chemical Heritage Foundation: Philadelphia, PA, 1997. viii + 180 pp. 21.6 × 27.8 cm. ISBN 0941901-15-1. Paper. $20.00 ($10.00 for high school teachers who provide documentation).
At a 1991 summer workshop sponsored by the Chemical Heritage Foundation and taught by Derek A. Davenport and William B. Jensen, high school and college teachers of introductory chemistry requested a source of pictorial material about famous chemical scientists suitable as a classroom aid. CHF responded by publishing this attractive, inexpensive paperback volume, which reflects the considerable research effort needed to locate appropriate images and to write the biographical essays. Printed on heavy, glossy paper and spiral bound to facilitate conversion to overhead transparencies, it contains 157 images from pictorial collections at CHF and many other institutions on two types of achievers: the historical “greats” most often referred to in introductory courses, and scientists who made contributions in areas of the chemical sciences that are of special relevance to modern life and the career choices students will make. The pictures are intended to provide the “human face” of the book’s subtitle —“to point to the human beings who had the insights and made the major advances that [teachers] ask students to master.” Thus, for example, Boyle’s law becomes less cold and abstract if the student can connect it with the two portraits of the Irish scientist even if his face is topped with a wig. Marie Curie can be seen in the role of wife and mother as well as genius scientist in the photographs of her with her two daughters, one of whom also became a Nobel laureate. And students are reminded of the ubiquity of the contribution of the chemical scientists to all aspects of our everyday life by the stories and pictures of Wallace Hume Carothers’ path to nylon, Percy Lavon Julian’s work on hormones, and Charles F. Chandler and Rachel Carson’s efforts to preserve the environment. In addition to portraits (formal and informal, familiar and unfamiliar), caricatures, apparatus, patent drawings, models, manuscripts, memoranda, laboratories, and plants and buildings are featured. The book presents many images of chemists in the work settings where they actually made their discoveries. The quaint pictures of Chandler with his wash bottle, William H. Walker with his slide rule, Carl Djerassi peering at a flask without goggle protection, and Edward Goodrich Acheson with his omnipresent cigar evoke a bygone era that will induce nostalgia in instructors and curiosity or disbelief in students. Many of the 80 featured chemists are minority scientists; 10 are women (Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Curie, Iréne Joliot-Curie, Mme. Lavoisier, Rosalind Franklin, Stephanie L. Kwolek, Ellen Swallow Richards, Alice Hamilton, Rachel Carson, and Julia Brainerd Hall, whose role in her brother Charles Martin Hall’s development of the electrolytic production of metal is underappreciated), and three are African-Americans (Percy Lavon Julian, Walter Lincoln Hawkins, and Henry Aaron Hill). The book’s 11 sections, each prefaced with a short, helpful summary, and the number of scientists profiled in each are Forerunners, 4; Theory and Production of Gases, 4; Electrochemistry and Electrochemical Industries, 12; The Path to the Periodic Table, 9; Atomic and Nuclear Structure, 9; Chemical Synthesis, Structure, and Bonding, 9; Pharmaceuticals and the Path to Biomolecules, 10; Petroleum and Petrochemicals, 4; Plastics and Other Polymers, 6; Chemical Engineering (most of whose practitioners were unfamiliar to me), 6; and Human and Natural Environmental Concerns, 7. An extensive bibliography (five double-column pages), arranged according to these sections, includes books, articles, dissertations, collections, and oral histories. Items as recent as 1997 and even a 1998 book in press are cited. An index (three triple-column pages) facilitates location of material. Chemical Achievers is to some extent similar to Henry Monmouth Smith’s long-out-of-print Torchbearers of Chemistry (Academic Press, 1949), but the quality of the illustrations and paper are much better and the text is much more detailed. The book is virtually error-free; the only one that I spotted was the misspelling of O. Bertrand Ramsay’s name as Ramsey. George B. Kauffman California State University, Fresno Fresno, CA 93740-0070
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Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 76 No. 2 February 1999 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
