that one of Kolthoff s graduate students, Frank Griffith, was doing research on the coprecipitation of sulfides. Griffith was a teaching assistant, and for the first time I realized that graduate students could support themselves as part-time teachers while doing research. This realization, plus disenchantment with my first course in chemical engineering, led to my change to a chemistry curriculum. My next fortunate experience with teachers was to take organic chemistry from Professor Lee Irving Smith. Smith was an active researcher and also a superb lecturer. I took my lecture notes directly in ink into a bound notebook that became the only textbook I had in the subject. I added marginal notes and an index, and I still have this notebook as a prized possession. Later, as a graduate student, I took a course in advanced organic chemistry from Smith just to hear more of his lectures. I recall asking him why he did not write up his notes as a textbook, and he replied that there was only one man at Minnesota who could write textbooks while keeping active in research, and that was I. M. Kolthoff. When I was in my senior year, I decided to try to do something about the required course in inorganic chemistry, which did not impress me at all af-
be one of the most valuable I ever had. We sat around a table, and Glockler talked to us about concepts such as chemical bonding, polar molecules, energy concepts, periodic trends, and the like. As it happened, I was to teach general and inorganic chemistry for the first seven years of my career, and many of the ideas came from this course. Graduate student Professor Laitinen did research on electrochemical properties at the University of Illinois in 1960 ter I looked at the notebooks of other students and listened to their accounts. I had noticed a course called "Theories of Inorganic Chemistry" given by Professor George Glockler listed in the catalog. Glockler had handled the quiz section of my elementary physical chemistry course, and I liked his style, so I asked him whether I might petition to substitute this course for the required inorganic one. He said that the course had not been offered for several years but expressed willingness to teach it if he had at least six students. So I rounded up seven of my classmates and we had a class of eight. This course proved to
Finally, we come to my mentor, I. M. Kolthoff. As a classroom teacher, he could not compare with some of the others I have mentioned. He had a two-quarter sequence called "pH and Electrometric Titrations" that was scheduled for two lectures per week but in which he actually gave three, so that the lectures were over by midyear. What impressed me most about this course was that there was a constant reference to basic principles that were applied to new situations. Thus, there was little need to memorize details once the basic principles were mastered. Under the title of "Special Topics" Kolthoff would undertake a critical review of some subject of special interest. For example, the topic of nonaqueous solvents was discussed by having each student read one or more papers that had been assigned and then present a critical discussion. I re-
For years, to get data from measurement hardware all the way
1414 A · ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 58, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1986
call discussing some of the early work of Conant on equilibria in liquid ammonia. Many years later I published a short series of papers on electrochemistry in liquid ammonia. Another format was to use the weekly seminar series on one theme for the whole term. An example was a series of seminars that took place in 1936 on the formation and properties of precipitates. This was a transition period in Kolthoff's research during which about equal numbers of students were working on precipitates and electrochemistry. Later I found this seminar series invaluable in writing several chapters on this subject for my book Chemical Analysis, which appeared in 1960. Beginning instructor in general chemistry When I began my career at the University of Illinois, I was hired on a oneyear contract in 1940 because this happened to be the off year of the biennium. I was assigned a lecture section of general chemistry, in parallel with another section taught by B. Smith Hopkins, who was approaching retirement. Hopkins gave the nine o'clock lecture, to which I listened, and then I tried to duplicate it as closely as possible at eleven o'clock. John Bailar was in charge of general chemistry, and I recall going to him
"... there was little need to memorize details once the basic principles were mastered." around the middle of the first semester to complain about what I considered to be an inadequate presentation (for example, the subject of atomic structure was not introduced until about mid-term). He said in effect that I should keep in mind that Illinois had been in the business of teaching chemistry for about half a century and had turned out some very good chemists, so the system could not be all bad. He advised me to go through the first semester without complaint—that I would have the same assignment during the second semester, and he felt sure that Professor Hopkins would listen to my suggestions. Indeed he did, and I recall that atomic structure was moved to about
one-third of the way along. In later years, I was to offer similar advice to a number of beginning lecturers impatient with the course they were teaching. On another occasion toward the end of the first term I asked Bailar whether I should be looking for another job for the next fall because, after all, I had only a one-year commitment. He assured me that they would not have brought me in for just a single year and suggested that I talk with him later in the year about the upcoming year. At the same time, he told me that he and his colleagues were impressed with my research more than my teaching and offered several suggestions for improvement (talk slower and louder, do not hesitate to repeat difficult points, etc.). John Bailar was to be a rich source of wisdom on many topics over the years. On one occasion, I asked him how he could give advice on diverse subjects to people that he couldn't know very well. He told me that the secret was simply to encourage the person to talk until the real direction of his desires emerged and let the decision come in due course. After teaching general chemistry for a couple of years, I was assigned to teach my first advanced course in inorganic chemistry, beginning in January 1943. This was a course called
into 1-2-3 you hadtodo it manually or write your own program.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 58, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1986 · 1415 A
"Chemistry of the Less Familiar Elements," which had been taught for many years by Professor Hopkins. This would have been a reasonable assignment under ordinary circumstances, but it happened that the wartime synthetic rubber program was just getting under way, and I had been invited by Professor C. S. ("Speed") Marvel to head an analytical group in his program. I was placed on a halftime appointment, but we were short of teaching staff because several professors who were in the army reserve were called to active duty. There also were special training programs for the military, which called for their own chemistry courses. Hopkins was teaching such courses, so Bailar advised me to see him about the course I was to teach. (Incidentally, the course was to be three lectures per week, and I still retained two lectures per week of the main chemistry course for majors). Previously the course had been for a full year with two lectures per week. When I asked Hopkins for advice he reached up to his shelf, handed me a copy of a ringbound set of mimeographed sheets with the title "Chapters in the Chemistry of the Less Familiar Elements," and said that much of the needed material was there. I was horrified to find that these
ished with just three because the others had gone off to wartime jobs. I recall that Henry went to Oak Ridge and later returned to become my first "official" graduate student. One of the other remaining students was Charlie Overberger, who was also on the rubber project. Professor of analytical chemistry
The Fisher Award in Analytical Chemistry was given to Professor Laitinen in 1961 chapters covered the elements one by one in the old traditional way, covering subjects such as occurrence, preparation, properties, reactions, compounds, and uses—without any discussion of periodic trends, oxidation potentials, or the like. I still recall poring over books such as Latimer and Hildebrand, Latimer's Oxidation Potentials, and books in structural chemistry. Three evenings a week, before the next morning's lecture, I would study about four hours, compiling a set of notes that would be consumed the first hour of the next day. I started out with seven students, one of whom was Henry Holtzclaw, and fin-
The rubber program was to have a great influence in my later career because it kept me in analytical chemistry. In 1946 I had a couple of chances to move to other academic jobs, but it was Speed Marvel who told me in no uncertain terms that if I chose to stay at Illinois it should be in the analytical chemistry division. He pointed out that I had been trained in this field, and a good part of my research was in this field, and "besides, we need you." So, after straddling the two divisions for a year, I made the switch in 1947, and in a sense began my teaching career all over. At Minnesota, I had served as teaching assistant in physical chemistry, so I had no experience either in lecture or laboratory teaching of analytical chemistry. I had presented a lecture series a few times on polarography for the analytical students, but in the spring of 1947 I offered a laboratory course in electroanalytical chemistry for the
Then you could acquire
1416 A · ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 58, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1986
first time at Illinois. My teaching assistant was A. L. Crittenden, now professor at the University of Washington. We would work over each experiment with one section of students, and then he would take the other section and repeat the experiment with them. This was quite a learning experience for us as well as for the students. Another of the early courses I taught was Advanced Qualitative Analysis, inherited from John Henry Reedy, who retired in 1946. This course had used the same general approaches as elementary qualitative analysis but covered the less familiar elements. I changed it quite a bit, feeling that the purpose of an advanced course was quite different from an elementary one, the latter really being a course in solution chemistry. I felt that the advanced course should emphasize detection as a goal, so I introduced methods such as microscopic crystal tests, spot tests, and ion exchange. This course lasted for only a few years because of the pressure to introduce other courses, especially in instrumentation and separation methods. Changes in the analytical curriculum During the late 1940s and continuing into the 1960s, a profound change took place in the types of analytical
"... analytical research consists of more than the development of new methods and approaches to analysis." courses being offered. Traditional courses had been offered in the analysis of various types of materials: ores, rocks, foods, iron and steel, nonferrous alloys, water, etc. These were gradually replaced by courses stressing methodology: spectrochemical, electrochemical, separations, instrumentation, etc. At Illinois, a graduate-level course in spectrochemical methods had been offered even in the 1930s, but the approach was essentially empirical. Professor G. L. Clark had offered courses in X-rays since the late 1920s, but the first graduate course in electroanalytical chemistry was the course I have mentioned, beginning in 1947. One of the forerunners was Kolthoff's course in pH and electro-
metric titrations, beginning soon after his arrival at Minnesota in 1927; his text on the subject appeared in 1931. In the more general instrumental area, a pioneer was the Willard, Merritt, and Dean book of the late 1940s. Although G. F. Smith had taught an advanced undergraduate course featuring potentiometric titrations, the first systematic undergraduate course in instrumental analysis was not offered at Illinois until Ralph Johnson and I undertook to teach such a course in 1948. Thinking back to the days when analytical chemistry was under real pressure, I feel that one contributing factor was the slowness with which the adjustment from materials-oriented to fundamental analytical courses was being made. Another was that chemists in influential positions retained the image of analytical chemistry as it had been during their student days and failed to keep up with the modern advances. An important event in the fall of 1951 was the arrival of Howard Malmstadt. I still recall that in 1950 Sam Scott, an Illinois Ph.D. and a recruiter for Du Pont, mentioned a young man he had met at Wisconsin who expressed interest in academic work and had stayed on for a year's postdoctoral research with Walt Blaedel. Scott
data onto a disk, but the data and 1-2-3 were still toofer apart, llllllillllilllll
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 58, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1986 · 1417 A
thought he would be an excellent addition to Illinois. I passed this information on to Professor G. L. Clark, at that time head of the Division of Analytical Chemistry, and in due course Howard was hired. We had tried to introduce electronics instruction into our analytical offerings with indifferent success, and I recall telling Howard that there were two things that we really needed: the electronics course and a modernized spectrochemical analysis course. Professor D. T. Englis, who taught the optical methods course, was primarily interested in food and water analysis and welcomed a chance to give up this course. So Howard went off for a summer job with ARL in California and came back with the first grating instrument we had, and the only costs were the shipping and installation charges. On the occasion of the symposium to honor Howard Malmstadt two years ago, I recounted our experiences as colleagues. One of these was the experiment in the teaching of quantitative analysis through the use of introductory experiments designed to show the causes of errors. This proved successful for the best students but a failure for the worst students, and it was finally abandoned. Another was our effort to improve the quality of instru-
"In the larger sense, we are all involved in teaching... : mentation for the teaching of undergraduate analytical chemistry. My role was to persuade the administration to put up grant money to match awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for undergraduate teaching equipment, and Howard's was to prepare the details of the proposals. We were successful, as I recall, for five years in succession, and this made quite an impact on the teaching program. About this time our colleagues in other branches of chemistry were putting pressure on us to decrease the amount of lab instruction in analytical chemistry, so we went through a rather difficult period as did many other schools in the early 1960s. It was our
Look at measurement hardware. Look at Lotus* l-2-38They are two of the critical tools used today to collect, analyze and display data. They have to work together, but they're not tied together. And that's a real problem. Introducing Lotus Measure™ the first software that seamlessly moves data from measurement hardware directly to 1-2-3 in real time, for immediate display, analysis or storage. And because it was designed by Lotus, you'll be pleased to see how it works as part of 1-2-3. You will recognize 1-2-3's familiar interface. You can even run Measure from 1-2-3 macros. What data acquisition environment do you work in? Measure can manage intelligent instruments over an IEEE-488 or RS-232-C interface bus or control A/D boards directly. Actually, Measure works with over 8,000 kinds of instruments, in hundreds of applications. Call 1-800-345-1043 to buy your copy of Lotus Measure and ask for lot # VD-1666. To order the complete Measure demo package for a $ 10 cost that's refundable with purchase, call and ask for lot # VD-1674. Or, for more information write Lotus Development Corp., 55 Cambridge Rarkway, Cambridge, MA 02142.
Lotus Measure™ © 1986 Lotus Development Corporation. All rights reserved. Lotus and 1-2-3 are registered trademarks of Lotus Development Corporation Lotus Measure is a trademark of Lotus Development Corporation.
CIRCLE 129 ON READER SERVICE CARD 1418 A · ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 58, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1986
conviction that the way to keep analytical chemistry a vital part of the curriculum was to modernize its instruction to keep pace with the spectacular advances in instrumentation and the application of fundamental new approaches to analysis. Editor and interdisciplinary researcher A basic motive in my acceptance of the editorship of A N A L Y T I C A L C H E M -
ISTRY beginning in January 1966 was to bring it more into line with the other American Chemical Society (ACS) journals while retaining its unique character as a magazine-cum-journal. There was no single revolutionary change, but a number of small changes were gradually made that I believe helped raise the prestige of the publication. One might argue that this has little to do with teaching, but I think that in the larger sense it was a matter of educating the scientific community to the real status of analytical chemistry. Whether this was a significant factor I shall leave for others to decide, but the fact is that there was a significant improvement in the status of analytical chemistry as a science and a profession during the decade of the mid1960s to mid-1970s. Of course an important factor was the coming of age
of a new generation of teachers who had learned from mentors such as Howard Malmstadt. Their basic contribution was to convey to their students that analytical research consists of more than the development of new methods and approaches to analysis; it consists of the investigation of the basic principles underlying those methods. In 1969 we set up an Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Illinois, and analytical chemistry played a central role in providing analytical data for large numbers of samples of wide variety. NSF-RANN supported an interdisciplinary study of heavy metals (mainly lead) in the environment. The first year was largely spent learning how to set up and operate an interdisciplinary research project on a university campus. Since moving to the University of Florida in 1974 I have derived a good deal of satisfaction in doing research cooperatively with scientists in several other departments, and I feel that this type of research will become increasingly important in the future. Teaching and communication Teaching is essentially a matter of information transfer and therefore of effective communication. It begins with the classroom, but by no means
does it end there. It is the one-to-one relationship between research mentor and student, a partnership that develops in which two-way communication and learning come about. Kolthoff has often said that he expected his students to know more about their research than he did. I suspect that this expectation was seldom if ever realized, but the goal was a good one. In the larger sense, we are all involved in teaching. The patent attorney speaks of "teaching" an art in patent disclosure. In all our professional activities involving communication there is an element of teaching. In a recent appearance in a courtroom as an expert witness, I felt my job was first to teach the attorneys and finally to teach the jury, in much the same way as teaching a section of elementary students in a language they could understand. Other aspects of professional life, such as committee work and consulting, also involve communication and therefore teaching. Finally, I would like to speculate about the teaching of creativity. If there is a way to do this, it has eluded me for all these years. Some people seem to have a knack for originality while others lack this quality. For many years I have held research seminars attended by a group, and I have tried to encourage discussion by all
those present. New ideas often spring from unexpected sources—not always from the brightest or the best educated. Some people seem to be thirsty for knowledge, but they simply store it away, whereas others can come up with new ideas or flashes of intuition. I do think there is such a thing as a creative atmosphere that encourages our best performance, but I am still mystified by the process through which a new idea emerges.
Herbert A. Laitinen received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1940. He joined the faculty at the University of Illinois, where he remained until 1974 when he became graduate research professor at the University of Florida. Professor Laitinen was Editor of ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY
from 1966 to 1979.
Together at last, thankstoLotus Measure.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 58, NO. 14, DECEMBER 1986 · 1419 A
