Personal Side of Francis
C. Frary
JAMES G.VAlL T IS a pleasant duty to intzoduce a valued friend to other friends, but it is also a responsibility. The present circum-
I
stances suggest some consideration of the nature of the occasion and the purpose to be served by presenting the personal characteristics of the medalist. It poses the deep philosophical question of ends and means. If whnt I have to say should have no other effect than to inflate the ego of the person we have assembled to honor, it would be a disservice to him and to you. If, on the other hand, an evaluation of those elements of character and experience which have led to achievements of special merit could guide or encourage other wayfarers in the field of science to more worthy attainment, the effort will be justified. The slave who rode behind his master in the triumphal procession to remind him amid thunderous applause, “Scipio, thou art but a man”, performed an important office. This service, like certain trusted household remedies, should be kept handy. Happily there is no need for such medicine in the presence of an inherently modest man. A recommendation is often more convincing to an employer if it reflects the positive elements of a person’s character with a critical awareness of his limitations. This is immensely more difficult than flattery but inore likely to be useful. Francis Cowles Frary is a curious person. All of us are born curious, but as ltomain Itolland put it in Jean Christophe: “Most men die about the age of thirty.” Francis Frary did not; this means that he never reached a point a t which he v a s satisfied with his knowledge of the vorld around him or led into tjhe temptation to assume that it had not much to teach him. He began, like the rest’ of us, by discovering his toes, but as he grew in wisdom and in stature we find him at a n early age copperplating the key to the kitchen door with the aid of a battery of his own devising. The bright red color of that plated key is a landmark in his memory after fifty years, perhaps exceeding the satisfaction of many important later results on which the world would set a higher value. As a sophomore in high school it was photography which gripped his curious mind. He searched the literature, made his own blueprint and other papers, improved on the published formulas with the most meager equipment-patent medicine bottles, the kitchen sink, and the closet devoted in the summertime t o the storage of the wood-burning stove which heated the family living room in winter. The discovery of this period was that chemistry was t,o be his lifework. The quality of curiosity was early associated with the idea of discipline. This may have been natural to a boy growing up in a family which had moved int,o the new country of the upper Mississippi to make its way, but when curiosity drew attention t o an outcropping of ore, Frary expected as a matter of course to have to dig for the values. -4homely incident suggests his philosophy of discipline. When daughter Faith was a little girl, Mrs. Frary refused a request with the comment, “You may do that when you have reached the age of discretion.” She ran to her father and asked him what that meant; Francis explained, “That means when you are so old that you will not want to.” But the relationship never lacked tenderness or understanding, for the same young lady remarked after a session in the garden with her father, “The dear old thing, he was out there talking to me just as if I were grown up.” Or again when he tactfully helped to settle a childish problem, “Father seems to have ideas.’’ “Out of the mouths of babes” sometimes comes insight.
The concept of discipline sometimes bore heavily on son John who, at the age of twelve, after being held relentlessly to his school work, on one occasion protested, “Well, I know that Father is a big success, but if you ask me he has missed a lot of fun.” It takes maturity to know the joy of sustained effort. I n his presidential address before the American Electrochemical Society in 1930 we have a presentation of Frary’s philosophy of research which is of interest in terms of self-portraiture: “ A characteristic which is a vital part of a man’s personality. is the presence of that combination of imagination and curiosity which may make research the most fascinating adventure into the unknown”; he goes on to say that without this only a “routine success” is possible. Passing from the picture of Frary the curious man, let us see him as the energetic man. It takes more than ordinary vitality to accomplish the amount of labor which Francis Frary has done. It, is not possible to tell how much of this vitality is congenital and how much results from the sustained applicat,ion of will power, but the forty-nine titles cited to the Perkin Medal committee for the purposes of this award represent an enormous amount of work. Perhaps intellectual toil and physical stamina are more interdependent than we ordinarily assume. However that may be, Francis Frary has dynamic qualities of both body and mind. At the Universit’y of Minnesota there is a treasured memory of his speeding several steps a t a stride on the way from his classroom in the basement to his laboratory on the third floor. They say that his electrochemical education developed his muscles as well as his intellect. Or yet more precious, perhaps even slightly scandalous a t the time, there is a photograph taken in 1903 to preserve for posterity the manly chests and muscular curves of the fifty strongest men in the university. I n the middle of this sits our hero as the strongest of the strong, reminiscent of Michael Angelo’s statue of Moses but xithout the beard. Frary was a member of the gymnastic squad that won the national intercollegiate championship in 1903, when both Harvard and Columbia went down before them. The application of energy develops heat, often in the wrong place without the lubrication of tact and that great reducer of hypertension, a sense of humor. One day Frary was checking some laboratory purchase requisitions and, noting the absence of certain essential data, he telephoned the man who had signed the form and called his attention to bhc error. The man thought the ea11 was coming from a clerk in the accounting division SO when the voice said, “You should find such errors yourself”, the man replied, “What do you think we keep you down there for’?” The answer came, ‘[Well, I guess there’s something to that, this is Frary speaking.” Francis Frary has a prodigious capacity for absorbing detailed information along new lines. Once he found his knowledge of pipe fitting inadequate, got hold of a Crane Company catalog, and ended with a competence t’hat would do credit to a piping or plumbing specialist. One of the anecdotal gems of Aluminum Research Laboratories illustrates how Frary gets down to fundamentals in his study of any question. For many years he has been much interested in the physiological effects of ingested fluoride compounds. On one occasion there were received at the laboratories the bones of a cow which had had an excessively heavy fluoride diet,. The cow had been killed and the disassembled skeleton
. ..
125
126
INDUSTRIAL AND ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
sent in. From a pile of these bones Frary proceeded to assemble one side of the skeleton. He did this on his hands and knees on the floor. The job took the better part of a day, but xhen he had completed it, he was an authority on the skeletons of cattle suffering from acute fluorosis. His long record of directed energy has resulted in a mind unmore sentences from the address on usually n-ell furnished. TWO research may be noted here:
