CONTENT AND STRUCTURE OF THE CHEMISTRY COURSE: Alternate Viewpoints
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we wonder i f the blend of rigorous theory and factual chemistry in modern courses hasn't become just a little rich in the former to be compatible with the maturity and experience of undergraduates." 44,553 (1967)
WTL Syrnpostum 1979
WTL SYMPOSIUM PAPER Derek A. Davenport Purdue University West Lafayette.IN 47907
Linus Pauling-Chemical Educator
We are here today to honor an editor, W. T., commonly called Tom. Lio~incott.to honor ~ a sand t future editors in the of n;ll ~ i e f f i r a n .dh e iagowski and to honor the JOI'RNAI. 01: ('HEh4ICAl. EDUCATION whirh remains the prm~dand independent poswssion uf the Divisiun uf Chemical Eduration. Rut more im~ortantlvwe are here tu honor a profession-the honest trade of chemical education. At first sight it might appear slightly strange that we invite such an illustrous figure as Linus Pauling as a chemical educator. For among his enormous range of honors I am not aware that teaching awards are included-he's won virtually everything else, and yet he is, of course, the greatest teacher of us all. It has heen my privilege to introduce Linus Pauling three times. He won't rememl~erbut I certainly do. While I was an undergraduate in London, he was the-first distinguished speaker 1 wascallrd uDon w inrruduce.and he had sent me the least pronounceable of titles. As a neivous young man with a tendency to lisp you tremble at a title such as "The Specificity of Serological Precipitations." I tremhled-but I survived. In 1966 it was my pleasure to host Professor and Mrs. Pauling a t Purdue University where he characteristically gave three talks: the first was "The Scientist and the Public Conscience," the second a graduate seminar in nuclear physics while the third was a response to my request for a general lecture for "very bright sophomores." The last of these was, I think, the most brilliant lecture I ever had the pleasure of hearing-an absolute classic experience. Linus Pauling was, however, once a student-quite a I just happen to have the gradebook number of years ag-and which was used when he took physical chemistry at Oregon Agricultural College. I'd like to show you the results which Linus got as an undergraduate in 1921,for I think it sets things in perspective reasonably well. The course was taught by a late colleague of mine, F. J. b, who had never previ&&taught physical chemistry and was never to teach it again. Clearly Fred decided to retire while he was ahead. Here are the students (Fig. 1) several of whom were apparently delinquent about handing in their books on time. One of these was stu-
dent Pauling. Indeed there is a very high correlation between the students who did not hand in their books on time and those who achipved t'ame and wen immortality thereafter. 1'heexperimen:nrinvolwd thpmeasuremenr of rrfractiw index. and Pruiessor l'aulingoriginally uhtnined n value of O.OK43. He was later to rc~alculatethat data and come U P with 1.3330. Another experiment (Fig. 2) was on the ~ i c t o r ~ e ydeterer mination of the molecular weight of benzene, and we find that Pauling gets two sets of results: themolecular weight of benzene is either about 125 or about 80-you take your choice. I think it is symptomatic of his future greatness that he did not average these. Then we come to the experiment which practically ended the course-"Boiling Point and Degree of Ionization." As you can see (Fig. 3) very few students managed to do this ex~erimentthough Linus Paulina made many measurement:. And then perhaps we see the reason why, fir Fred Allen added: "Not all the class performed this experiment because we ran out of appar&s." Obviously what happened was that Linus Pauling dropped the equipment, and a t that moment perhaps the future theoretician was horn. Linus Pauling was, not surprisingly, a very brilliant student a t Oregon Agricultural College, and two or three years later he went to the California Institute of Technology, an institution which had recently changed its name from Throop College, which had not inspired awe in anybody. Since Ava Helen Pauling is our guest today a further annotation by Fred Allen is perhaps appropriate. Fred wrote: "As a senior he took a recitation for me one day. It was a class of Home Ec. girls. One of them, Ava Helen Miller, caught his fancy. Love at first sight?" In spite of the question mark Fred was always a romantic. "Anyway they were soon married and honey-mooned in a Model T Ford en route to Cal Tech where Linus started graduate work in 1922." I'm very pleased that Ava Helen Pauling is here with her husband for many people know that in spirit at least she shared the second of the Nobel Prizes, the 1962 one for peace. Indeed it is said that it was Ava Helen who encouraged her husband to become politically active. Pauling describes graduate work at the California Institute ~
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Volume 57. Number 1, January 1980 / 35
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Figures 1-3. Pages from gradebook lor F. J. Allen's physical chemisdry course in 1921
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of Technology, which was soon to become the cradle of modern structural chemistry, in a letter he wrote to Fred Allen in October of 1924 (Fig. 4). He writes, "The only graduate work in chemistry is in physical, inorganic, and biochemistry. The last is interesting hot I wouldn't want to do it." So says Linus Panling. "The only inorganic chemistry is qualitative analysis; hut Dr. Noyes is preparing the scheme for all elements now, 'so there is probably not much left to do." So much for inorganic chemistry. "Reaction rates and free energies make up most of the rest of the work." Now in the perspective which we're addressing today there is one sentence here which I think is pregnant with meaning. "The faculty seems to emphasize physics and thermodynamics and statistical mechanics and atomic structure rather than chemistry.'' T h a t "rather than chemistry" is a nice phrase, and if there is one person who is principally to blame for the fact that all of this
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36 / Journal of Chemical Education
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Figures 6 and 7. Letters to Fred Allen from Pauling at time of receiving the second Nobel Prize.
is now part and parcel of chemistry then that person is indeed Linus Pauling. This letter is the first in a sequence of over 70 which Professor Pauling was to write to Fred Allen over a period of 46 years. Three consecutive letters from November 1954 may perhaps serve to emphasize what I mean when I say he's the greatest of all chemical educators. Obviously there are the books from "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics with An~.~~~~ plications to Chemistry" to thirt in
