Academic Chemical Engineering in an Historical Perspective Rutherford Aris Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
T o concentrate on the academic aspect of chemical engineering might, a t first blush, seem a left-handed tribute to one who in an editorial of this very journal (Sherwood, 1969) called for that completeness of competence which is needed to bridge the gap between the academic analysts and the industrial builder. For, by common consent, T. K. Sherwood was one of the really great men of the profession who so rejoiced in that wholeness and in communicating it to others that the best tribute that some of us can bring must inevitably be partial. Yet he chose to devote himself to the academic art of teaching and to contribute in full measure to the excellence of a department that had initiated the whole idea of a chemical engineering curriculum and which, in his prime, was a t the height of its influence on chemical engineering education. Therefore it will not be entirely inappropriate to discuss the history and prospects of academic chemical engineering, the more so as this essay is related to some remarks made by the author a t a symposium on the future of chemical engineering held to celebrate the opening of the Landau building, M.1.T.k new home for chemical engineering-a landmark in the history of his department to which he looked forward but whose full completion he was, alas, not permitted to see. In seeking a perspective on academic chemical engineering it is natural to turn first to the past. As Sherwood’s mentor and much esteemed colleague, W. K. Lewis, remarked in his review of the development of the concept of unit operations: “Looking to the future, one finds no ground to forget the lessons or abandon the methods of the past,” rather will it “be necessary to build on them.” (Lewis, 1959). One of the first records of a chemical engineering question raised in the academy concerns ion exchange. “Why,” asks Aristotle in the twenty-third book of the Problemata, “is it in Libya, if one digs by the seashore, the water one comes to first is drinkable, but soon becomes brackish?” Like Pilate, he does not stay for an answer, but goes on to the next question, so that the problem of the break-through curve is not solved for a couple of millennia. In certain industries, such as the ancient and honorable one of wine-making, many chemical engineering problems of reaction and separation were solved and the practical art and craft brought to a high degree of perfection. But it was the 19th century before chemical industry became sufficiently distinct and demanding that an appropriate curriculum and training were devised. Out of the demands of industry for the technical chemistry of specific processes there gradually grew the notion of chemical engineering as bridging the gap between physical chemistry and mechanical engineering or metallurgy. In 1880, George E. Davis coined the term “chemical engineer” and promoted it in the proposal to found “A Society of Chemical Engineers”. But a t one of the organizing meetings a prominent manufacturer was heard to say to a neighbor, “I did not know before that there was an animal of that genus in existence” and, in spite of provisional approval of the earlier name, the title “Society of Chemical Industry” prevailed when that body was formed in 1881. In January of 1888, Davis gave the first “course of twelve lectures” on the subject of chemical engineering-“in which great attention is now being paid in Germany”-at the Manchester Technical School. The report of the first of these lectures in The Chemical Trade Journal of Jan. 14,1888,tells of some introductory remarks by a hlr. Wm. Mather that have
a remarkably modern ring. “They would find,” he said, “that with regard to their alkali manufactures, a combination of the chemist and the engineer was absolutely essential for the best results. His belief was that if chemical engineering was better understood, both by chemists and engineers, the laws of both combined in perfecting the operations on one side and the other, would enable us to prevent the continuance of those pernicious influences to vegetation, and even to the human system, which were caused by the various gases and the emission of smoke in our large towns, and would yet allow us to carry out our various manufactures without those injurious effects we all deplored. If the young engineer was to undertake the many duties which would be demanded of him in the future, he must be acquainted with these allied sciences, which had been sadly neglected in the past.” Davis himself was keenly aware of the social conditions in which the profession might grow up and an extract from his first lecture is worth quoting: “It is common enough in the chemical industries to hear the expression ‘Science and practice will never work together.’ Now, having heard this myself for the greater part of two decades, I have no hesitation in saying it is a gross libel on science; but I do nevertheless hesitate in pronouncing the expression a greater libel on science than on careful practice. And this brings me to a point where I would fain say a few words on the subject of technical education, seeing that it has largely been brought so prominently before the country in a variety of ways. I may have peculiar views upon this subject, but it is a matter I have thought and talked over for many years, and my opinions are strengthened as years roll on. “Beyond the materials necessary in any chemical industry (and in fact in any other) there is labour and thought required, and it is the successful combination of these two that makes a prosperous business. The man of thought often learns much from the man of labour, and the man of labour should therefore be just as much encouraged as the man of thought, and his life made easy and comfortable for him. “Until we have succeeded in totally eradicating laborious work, executing the same with thews of iron and steel, for which event we may vainly wait for ever and a day, it seems to me to be our bounden duty, and our first duty, to look after the sanitary and social welfare of the muscle producing class, to make their homes more alluring to them so that the younger members of the family who prefer to combine brain-work with muscle-combustion may be able to study a t home in the evening, a thing absolutely impossible in nine-tenths of the houses it has been my lot to encounter in several of the chemical districts. Strong and healthy men are as requisite in the chemical industry as in an army, and it is the height of absurdity to talk of expecting a man to study the theory of his work on his return home a t night after twelve hours of bodily labour and fatigue. And on the other hand, we may inquire whether it is necessary that the manual labourer should be educated technically in the art and mystery of all he is required to do, and for my part I say decidedly No! as before doing this it would be far more rational to teach him languages Ind. Eng. Chem., Fundam.. Vol. 16, No. 1, 1977
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so that he might correspon’d and converse with his neighbours, the laws of health so that he may be able to keep his body in good working order and do his duty to himself, and after this is done let him inquire, if he has the inclination, into the principles of the various processes he has daily to manipulate. Amongst men of middle age I have met with but few of such inquirers, the aptitude for study residing in younger men, and therefore I feel that it is quite necessary to deal with technical education on the lines that it is of primary importance only to those who have charge of processes, or who seek to hold such positions in the future.”
His lectures dealt with “the technical experiment” (i.e., on a larger scale than the laboratory experiment but not of full scale) and the mills, filters, “electro-motors”, furnaces and decoction presses needed to validate such experiments for educational use. He discussed the materials of construction of plant and apparatus (both nonmetallic materials, metals, and alloys), “prime-movers’’(wind, water, and steam), insulation and thermal properties. These lectures were published in The Chemical Trade Journal for 1888 and it was necessary to preface with some remarks to allay the fears of “a certain manufacturer, on seeing the before-mentioned lectures advertised, exclaimed-“It is all very fine for Davis after having had the entree of all the chemical works in the country to now go and lecture about them.” This little speech shows the absolute ignorance of the speaker upon the subject of chemical engineering. The science of chemical engineering does not consist in hawking about trade secrets-if a chemical engineer were discovered taking the processes and the details of them, from one works to another, his professional reputation would soon come to an end, and therefore it would be the height of absurdity to think that any sound thinking man would endeavour to carry on his business by the aid of such practices. Chemical engineering has higher aims, it endeavours to work out the application of machinery and plant to the utilisation of chemical action on the large scale-in the laboratory and drawing office, so that processes may be made to work at once with certainty and freedom from that expense which is always attendant upon the old-fashioned process of trial and error.” If these remarks sound a little old-fashioned there is every token of modernity in Davis’ statement that “we cannot expect anything else than foreign competition while Government departments exist which put all possible hindrances in the way of trade.” One has to blink to realize that this is an ex-government inspector in 1888 and not the panel a t an N.A.E. meeting 87 years later. Meanwhile back in Massachusetts a whole curriculum was being forged “to meet the needs of students who desire a general training in mechanical engineering, and a t the same time to devote a portion of their time to the study of the applications of chemistry to the arts, especially to those engineering problems which relate to the use and manufacture of chemical products”-as the M.I.T. catalogue of 1888-1889 puts it. By local usage this four year curriculum was known as a “course”. In fact it was the famous “Course X” the graduates of which over the years must surely have equalled, if not excelled, any comparable body of alumni of any institution, academic or technical, both in the range and level of their success and the loyalty and generosity of their support. If “course” is used in the sense of a coherent sequence of lectures then priority must go to Davis, but in the sense of a complete four year curriculum it seems clear that M.I.T. was five years ahead of anywhere else in this country or the world. Lewis Mills Norton was the initiator and in the faculty minutes of Nov. 30,1887 it was “voted that a committee consisting of the President, Profs. Norton, Lanza, Drown and Cross be appointed to consider the question of instruction in engineering 2
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as relating especially to applied chemistry”. They lost no time for on Dec. 21, 1887 it was “voted that a course in chemical engineering be established-details of such a course (to be) made special business for the next meeting provided such meeting does not take place before two weeks.” Two weeks had indeed scarcely elapsed before on Jan. 4 the “course in chemical engineering presented a t previous meeting (was) adopted with the understanding that the hours in the 4th year be not definitely fixed.” The curriculum itself as promulgated in the 1888-1889 catalogue coincided in its general engineering studies with the work of students in mechanical engineering, but industrial and applied chemistry were taken in the third and fourth years in place of the mechanical engineers’ “Forging, Chipping and Filing”-a course with a faintly Dotheboys’ ring to it. A fourth year course in metallurgy was common to the two curricula, but the chemical engineers took analytical chemistry in their second year, elements of organic chemistry in their third and thermo-chemistry and fuels in their fourth. The “tincture of humane learning” (Public Orator, 1972) that tempered these prevalently banausic studies was given by two complete years of German and single terms of English prose, literature, European history, and political economy. In his report of the Corporation of M.I.T. dated Dec. 12, 1888, the President noted that eleven members of the second year class (the first year of the curriculum was common to all courses) had already entered upon this course and went on to give a brief description of the general purpose of the course since, as he put it, “the chemical engineer has been but little known in this country or England, and perhaps not a t all under that name”. Unfortunately Professor Norton died within a couple of years of the first graduating class of 1891 and though his ideas were to some extent carried on by Thorp in his attention to “manipulations” and though the leadership of Noyes in physical chemistry ensured (as Lewis (1955) put it) that there would be “no iron curtain between chemistry and engineering at M.I.T.,” the momentum of chemical engineering as such did not pick up until the appointment of William H. Walker in 1902. Meanwhile Pennsylvania began a curriculum in 1892, Tulane in 1894, Michigan in 1898, the Armour Institute of Technology in 1900, and Columbia in 1905. Wisconsin’s first program belongs to this period and several other schools had formulated curricula by the time the American Institute of Chemical Engineers was founded in 1908 (White, 1933). It was Walker (1905) who defended the notion of chemical engineering as an autonomous discipline and the title of chemical engineer as the correct analogue of the established titles of civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers. He reorganized the course and, as he said in a letter to Alfred White “was most fortunate in early ‘discovering’ a farmer’s boy from Delaware who had carried a t the same time the full course in chemistry and the course in mechanical engineering. This was Warren K. Lewis . . . to whom,” says Walker, “is due a great portion of the success which the course later achieved.” (quoted in White, 1933). Thus the broad applicability of scientific principles which Hausbrand had described in his books on distillation, drying, and evaporation during the 1890’s became an established part of the curriculum. The concept of unit operations, latent in the organization of Davis’ early lectures, was germinating and growing even before it was given that name in A. D. Little’s report to the President and Corporation of M.I.T. in 1915 and came to fruition in Walker, Lewis, and McAdams’ “Principles of Chemical Engineering” eight years later. By this time chemical engineering education was much more widespread, the Institute’s committee under A. D. Little left a lasting imprint on the educational scene, and graduate studies were under way. From a low in the mid-20’s enrollment began to climb. The incorporation of more thermodynamics
and kinetics was seen in the work of Hougen and Watson a t Wisconsin in the 30’s and ~ O ’ S ,while a t Princeton the “decorum ingenium” of Wilhelm limned the morphology of chemical reaction engineering. In the 50’s a t Minnesota, Neal Amundson began to show the power of
. . . thatt supersensuous sublimation of thought the euristic vision of mathematical trance, (as Bridges calls it) and the triumvirate of Wisconsin were to write that famous book which can be read either by rows or columns. Nuclear engineering was recognized as cousin german to chemical; biochemistry was her wash pot and over biology itself she had cast her shoe. This accelerated whirlwind of a tour does no sort of justice to the range and depth of chemical engineering and still less to the considerable number of pioneers and leaders in the field, but some impression of the surge and swell of the subject is intended in Figure 1. I t is meant to convey in graphical form the changing proportions of emphasis: the decline of descriptive industrial chemistry, the rise of unit operations, physical chemistry (including thermodynamics and later statistical mechanics), and design and the newer developments with reaction and bio-engineering. I t would be a valid exercise in the much-debated game of cliometrics to remove the personal distortions that I have undoubtedly built into the diagram by quantitatively assessing the roles of the several areas in terms of the average fraction of the curriculum or of research effort. This brings up the question of how we can apprehend the structure of chemical engineering as a discipline within the area of natural philosophy. Nonhebel, in an excellent “sixthform” introduction to “Chemical Engineering in Practice” (1973) has illustrated the functional activities in a diagram isomorphic to the second figure. Academic chemical engineering has to say to these functions in the sense that it must prepare students to grow and develop in their professional careers in whatever way suits them best and also in contributing to the basic knowledge which underlies each activity. But what of the interrelationships in the subject matter of chemical engineering? T o adopt a Victorian mode of presentation (Figure 3), it grows from the four tap roots of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology through the trunk of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, mass transfer, and chemical kinetics and branches into the unit operations, chemical reaction engineering, energy, materials, and the various industrial processes. But in reality the tree analogy fails to do justice to the multiple interconnections of the subject which are sufficiently intricate as to defy any geometrical representation. Figure 4 takes up some of the subjects surrounding the question of plant design and energy production and even with this limitation of area and incompleteness of coverage the diagram is intricate, not to say messy. But what are the marks of the academic chemical engineer? Or has he indeed a place in the academy? Some no doubt would deny chemical engineering any position in the scheme of things academic, much as Thorstein Veblen found no place for lawyers in the university. Alfred P.Sloan seems to have gone even further and rejoiced that a whole institution was technological and not academic (Technol. Rev., 1976). But there is surely a sympathetic bond between academic workers of all disciplines in their search for structure. The primary task of the academic chemical engineer is not to develop an engineering process or devise a new product, but to understand what he is doing and to see how this knowledge is related to the old. New processes and products may indeed come about as the serendipitous result of his efforts but they are not intended. This is not to set the academic in opposition to the
Figure 1.
A -
Figure 2.
Figure 3.
commercial, nor to assert that there can be no combination of both activities in one person, but it is t o insist on the primacy of the Aristotelian desire--“All men by nature desire to know.” Not but what the thirst for knowledge may not get the better of us. You might be excused for wondering whether some of these figures are not a bit like Uncle Toby’s map of Namur. As Tristam Shandy remarks, “The more my Uncle Toby pored over his map, the more he took a liking to it!-by the same process and electrical assimilation, as I told you, through which I ween the souls of connoisseurs themselves, by long friction and incumbition, have the happiness, a t length, to get all be-virtued, -be-pictured, -be-butterflied, and be-fiddled.’’ (Sterne, 1760). Nevertheless the first and great commandment is t o seek understanding and, from the academic point of view, “practice” is an aspect of understanding and not an end in itself. Thus the academic will never be unmindful of generality and comprehensiveness even though the particular and partial may have to suffice for the moment. Nor will his tools be disposable furniture but, because teaching is never far from his Ind. Eng. Chem., Fundam., Vol. 16, No. 1, 1977
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J
Figure 4.
research, he must have a certain preoccupation with method which is superfluous in an applied context (Aris, 1976). This indeed is the best policy both for the academic and non-academic sectors of the profession. Goal oriented research is the necessary life blood of industry and basic research to some degree a luxury; in the academy it must be the other way around. If geometry be interpreted in the broadest sense as a feeling for structure then indeed no one ignorant of it should enter there. The concept of autonomy in basic research is much under attack these days and, were it not so dangerous, it would be amusing to note politicians of Right and Left joining hands on the hilt of the sharp knife of a Marxist philosophy of science to slay their sacrifices on the altars of Accountability. Rather must we return, if the academy is to survive, to a reverence for theory. Not “theory” in its popular sense as the antithesis of experiment, but in its original sense of “vision”-that vision, without which “the people perish.” But what are we to suppose that the future holds for academic chemical engineering? Is it to be more of the same or are there any vital new areas just about to open up? Certainly the need to provide a fundamentally sound chemical engineering education is still paramount. We have seen the inclusion of more biology in the curriculum in the last decade as the problems of environment have come to the fore. This must not be allowed to recede just because the energy crisis has dominated the scene in the last year or two. Yet the latter is an area in which the chemical engineer has always had a role and in which he is now, more than ever, obligated to take an increasing interest. These topics will refresh the curriculum if they are intelligently apprehended. In particular I believe that the influence of biological problems, whether of biomedical or biochemical emphasis, is far from spent and that research areas will constantly open up into which the chemical engineer can be in the vanguard of exploration. Then again, chemical engineering will always provide a rich and varied habitat where ecological study may be made of that wildlife of the human imagination which the pure mathematicians anatomize and propagate in their laboratory; and for some of us, the feral beauty of a partial differential equation in its physical context will often compensate for its particularity or lack of abstractness. We shall also need to give increasing attention to the interplay of the social and natural sciences. T o many an academic the former have been something of an anathematheoryless concatenations of self-fulfilling prophecies. But economics has clearly an immediate bearing on the chemical engineer, not merely in the details of the design process but in the larger sense of the strategy of the development of a whole industry. Indeed methods for handling large systems such as have been developed for plant design, automatic flow sheet synthesis, or the planning of chemical pathways may be able to repay some of the stimulus they have received from 4
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economics by providing insights into and methods for the great economic questions. Can, for example, the notions of statistical mechanics, allowing, as they do, the random behavior of individual molecules to contribute to the estimation of macroscopic phenomena, be adapted to macroeconomics whose molecules are the individual consumer and producer with all his or her psychological peculiarities? I t seems difficult and yet much success has attended such drastic simplifications as taking molecules to be rough spheres. Nor can sociology and political science be neglected if we are to develop a strong and responsible chemical industry. The insensitivity to local culture and social structure that has sometimes marked the exporting of technology has, in many cases, come home to roost in the form of frustration and expropriation. Our young engineers-and perhaps, a fortiori, our older ones-need to be made aware of the interaction of technological development and social change. The only place where this can be studied disinterestedly is the academy where the primacy of the obligation to understanding permits the necessary detachment. Nor is this detachment to be misinterpreted as subversion or disloyalty. A Christian, for example, is governed ‘by a primacy of obligation that transcends his national or social context, but this does not diminish a proper patriotism; it merely prevents it degenerating into chauvinism. So also the academic can function loyally, yet critically, within the framework of our society. Indeed it is on finding the proper balance between detachment and concern in the largest sense, or between theory and application in the narrower scope of professional matters that the future of academic chemical engineering turns. The words of Julius Stratton, for much of Sherwood’s career the President of M.I.T., can be adapted from his particular referent (M.I.T. as a technological university) and applied to the discipline of chemical engineering as a whole. “We have taken” he says, “science to be our central province. We have been preoccupied with the advancement of science and, through engineering, with the uses of science to enhance the welfare of mankind. But now we acknowledge also a responsibility for the larger influence of science and engineering upon societyfor their impact upon the national economy, upon government, upon international affairs. And therewith we no longer find it possible to define and delineate sharply the boundaries of our concern. We have moved into an intellectual domain that is immense, embracing and touching ultimately upon almost every conceivable human activity. Yet the horizons of opportunity are expanding too rapidly for any one institution to stretch to them all. The most perplexing problem confronting us today is how to select among new fields, how to respond to opportunity, and yet how to retain, within this broadened scope, the unity of thought and action that has given it strength in the past.” (Stratton, 1966).
Acknowledgment I am indebted to Dr. Warren Seamans, the director of M.I.T.’s Historical Collections, for sending me copies of the relevant parts of MIT catalogs and of the faculty minutes and for helpful correspondence. T o him and to Professor Georgakis, who helped me locate the early issues of the Chemical Trade Journal, I am most grateful. A correspondent has pointed out that it might be well to add that this survey is certainly restricted to the English speaking world, and is desultory a t that. It is indeed and I should like, when time permits, to enlarge its scope. Literature Cited Ark, R . , Chem. Eng. Educ., 10, 2 (1976). Aristotle. “Metaphysics,” Vol. I, p 1. Lewis, W. K., Chem. Eng. Prog., Symp. Ser., 55, 8 (1959). Nonhebel, G.,“Chemical Engineering in Practice”, Wykeham Publications, London and Springer Publications, New York. N.Y., 1973.
Public Orator, Cambridge University on the occasion of Julius Stratton’s honorary Sc.D., p 1010, Cambridge University Reporter, June 14, 1972. Sherwood, T. K., Editorial, Ind. Eng. Chem., Fundam., 8, 365 (1969). Sterne, L., “Tristam Shandy”, 11.31Vol. 11, p 3, 1760. Stratton, J., “Science and the Educated Man,” M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass..
Walker, W. H., Chem. Eng., 2, 1 (1905). White, A. H., “Chemical Engineering Education”, in “25 years of Chemical Engineering Progress”, S.Kirkpatrick, Ed., A.I.Ch.E., 1933.
Receiued for reuieu, July 29,1976 Accepted August 23,1976
1966.
Techno/. Rev., 78, 6 (1976).
T h e following twelve papers were contributed b y some o f Professor Sherwood’s former thesis s t u d e n t s at M.I.T. I
Thomas K. Sherwood-Recollections
from the ’Thirties
Warren L. Towle Corporate Applied Research Group, Globe-Union lnc., Milwaukee, Wisconsin 5320 I
Tom Sherwood was my favorite professor. After forty years many memories from my early association with him are still vivid. Since I am sure others were equally drawn to him, it is a pleasure to speak for many as I offer the following. I first met Professor Sherwood at the beginning of my senior year in 1933 when I was scouting around for a thesis subject. This was probably one of the luckiest choices I ever made. It led to an association with him that continued until I finished graduate work four years later. I remember vividly when I first got to call him by his first name. This was a privilege not accorded to undegraduates, at least not in those days. During the first graduate year while I was a t one of the Practice School stations we exchanged letters regarding plans for my continuing thesis work. His first letter was signed quite formally, but the second was signed “Tom” and gave me a tremendous thrill. During the following year I shared his office as his assistant. It is from that period that most of the following reminiscences are drawn. Tom was far more than a superbly competent engineer. I t was his human qualities that made him so beloved by those around him, and which added so much to his effectiveness as a teacher. His characteristic reactions to his students included praise, encouragement and gentle understanding, overlaid with a delightful sense of humor that was never far below the surface. If you had done something he thought well of, he would proudly tell someone else in your presence, thus making it an even more memorable compliment. If you had done something less than your best, he might tell you (alone) about that too, but in such a way that you knew he was still on your side. And he had a knack of getting such a message across in a kidding way that made you squirm and laugh at the same time. I remember that for a while I tutored a couple of our students. Somehow I must have been too easygoing about collecting my fee from them. A few weeks passed without my being paid. Tom heard about it and asked me how come? The reasons they had given me seemed less than convincing to him. So he launched a campaign to try to kid me into taking a firmer, more business-like stance toward them. After each session he would ask me what the excuse was this time. I would
cringe inwardly and tell him, knowing that he would find the answer uproariously funny. I had to admit that some of them were beginning to sound that way. I finally got my money, plus a gratuitous lesson from Tom on sticking up for my rights. He enjoyed being kidded himself, too. He was a pipe smoker, and had an assortment of pipes of various shapes and dimensions. The biggest ones were his favorites. Or a t least it looked that way, we told him, whenever he ran out of tobacco and had to borrow some. “Here comes Tom with that big pipe. You know, the one he uses to borrow tobacco with. Hide your pouches!” One day he gave me one of my early lessons in the value of accenting the positive. We were both in the office, working, when an elderly friend of his came in. Tom apparently hadn’t seen him for a number of years. As they started to reminisce, Tom looked over and said perhaps their talking might bother me. Not getting the point, I answered assuring him that it didn’t bother me at all. Whereupon Tom smiled and said well, why didn’t I come back in a few minutes. At that, I did get the point and excused myself. And I recognized then how Tom had saved both himself and me (and his visitor) the embarrassment of asking me to leave, by reversing the emphasis to the positive side and asking me to return. A small but indelible lesson in graciousness! Speaking of emphasizing the positive, I realize that everything I’ve said here has so far been on the positive side. But Tom was human enough to err once in a while. The midthirties were back in the days when sailing on the Charles River Basin had just become a popular pastime for MIT men. Every so often there were races. Tom told me one day he had signed up to race with one of the groups. He admitted he had had no racing experience. However, he said, with the uncertainty of the winds, etc., the probabilities were that there should be a significant spread in effective speeds from one craft to the next. On that basis he figured at least he shouldn’t finish last. Well, it was a great theory, but he finished last anyway-decisively, Tom had a keen appreciation of the value of other peoples’ ideas. I remember him telling me one time about having had a discussion with Ed Gilliland on the subject of gravity. “Ed Ind. Eng. Chern., Fundarn., Vol. 16, No. 1, 1977
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