PERKIN MEDAL J
OHN Van Nostrand Dorr, the active head of The Dorr Company, Inc., of New York, received the Perkin Medal of t h e S o c i e t y of Chemical Industry o n J a n u a r y 10, 1941, a t a joint m e e t i n g of t h e American Section of that society, the New York Section of the AMERICAN C H E M I C A LSoCIETY, the American Institute of C h e m i c a l Engineers, the ElectroJ. V. N. DORR chemical Society, and the Societe de Chimie Industrielle, a t The Chemists’ Club, New York. Lincoln T. Work presided, and Dr. Dorr was introduced by M. C. Whitaker, vice president and director of the American Cyanamid Company, who spoke on his scientifio accomplishments, and Goldthwaite H. Dorr, brother of the medalist, told of his personal side. Marston T. Bogert made the actual presentation of the medal, and Dr. Dorr then delivered the address. The Perkin Medal was founded in 1906 in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the coal-tar color industry, the
first medal being awarded to Sir William H. Perkin, discoverer of aniline dyes. The medal may be awarded annually by the American Section of the Society of Chemical Industry for the most valuable work in applied chemistry. The award may be made to any chemist residing in the United States of America for work which he has done a t any time during his career, whether this work proved successful a t the time of execution or publication, or whether it became valuable in subsequent development of the industry. The medalist is chosen by a committee representing this society, the AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY,the Electrochemical Society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the Soci6t6 de Chimie Industrielle. The list of medalists from the date of founding to the present is as follows: 1906 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 I920 1921 1922 1923 1924
Sir William H. Perkin J. B. F. Herreshoff Arno Behr E . G. Acheson Charles M. Hall Herman Frasch James Gayley John W. Hyatt Edward Weston Leo H. Baekeland Ernst Twitchell Auguste J. Rossi F. G. Cottrell Charles F. Chandler Willis R. Whitney William M. Burton Milton C. Whitaker Frederick M. Beoket
1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941
Hugh K. Moore R. B. Moore John E. Teeple Irving Langmuir E. C. Sullivan Herbert H. Dow Arthur D. Little Charles F. Burgess George Oenslager Colin 0. Fink George 0. Curme, Jr. Warren X.Lewis Thomas Midgley, Jr. Frank J. Tone Walter S. Landis Charles M. A. Stine John V. N. Dorr
(For list of achievements of each medalist up to 1934, see
IND. ENO.CHEM.,February, 1933, page 229.)
The Work of the Medalist M. C. WHITAKER L
South Dakota School of Mines in 1940, and D.Eng. by Michigan College of Mining and Technology, also in 1940. He has been unanimously chosen by the five great chemical societies of America t o receive the highest honor they have to confer for what he has done for the chemical industries and for our profession-the Perkin Medal. Dr. Dorr was trained as a chemist. When Rutgers cast him out upon the world in 1894, they had not yet discovered what they and we now all know, that besides being chemicalminded, he had a native genius for basic thinking and he was a self-starter. He had an unerring ability t o pick out the most needed thing to be done and solve the problem of doing it. This is in strong contrast to the type who never sees the important thing in the first place and therefore spends all of his time on the unimportant elements of his problem. The medalist’s first problem after he left college was to get the right job. This he solved by accepting a stipend of a hundred dollars a month from a gold mill in Deadwood, S.
T
HROUGHOUT the mining world John Van Nostrand Dorr is known as a metallurgist. He has been honored by the mining profession for his contributions to the metallurgical arts and by the chemical engineering profession fop his contributions to their problems of low-cost mass chemical production. His accomplishments are based upon the rare qualities of clear seeing, thorough fact finding, straight thinking, simple answering. He was the John Scott Medalist of the Franklin Institute in 1916, the James Douglas Medalist of American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers in 1930, president of the United Engineering Trustees in 1931, president of American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 1932 and 1933, Chemical Industry Medalist of the Society of Chemical Industry in 1938, and recipient in 1940 of the Modern Pioneers Award of the National Association of Manufacturers. As academic recognition of his scienti6c achievements, Dr. Dorr was awarded the degree of D.Sc. by Rutgers in 1927, D.Eng. by 361
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Dak., in exchange for which he was to do their chemical and assaying work. The 40-hour week, the time and a half for overtime, and the two-hundred-dollar per month initiation fee to professional rating had not yet been invented, and this young chemist did not bog himself down with that problem. However, the record does not show that he usually worked over 60 hours a t a stretch or more than 126 hours per week. The cyanide process for the chemical separation of gold and silver from its ore was sixteen years old, and the flotation processes for the concentration of sulfides from low-grade ores was about to be born when this young chemist was a t large in Deadwood. His employer was one of the first mills in America t o adopt the new cyanide process which had already been introduced into South Africa, Australia, and India, and which was even then promising to revolutionize the methods of recovery of gold and silver from low-grade ores. The American mining industry was on the verge of going chemical. With the introduction of wet chemical methods, as contrasted to smelting methods, into the treatment of ores to recover gold and silver by the use of cyanide, things began to happen. The industry was confronted with new problems, new processes, and a new arrival in their midst in the form of a chemist with a genius for finding and solving basic problems. What was this chemist now running a t large in the metallurgical field-and of all places in Deadwood-to do? He might have undertaken a profound research into the basic reactions involved in the recovery of gold and silver by the use of cyanide, or through mental inertia he could have bogged down the whole development by fighting its problems with the processes and tools a t hand, or he might have had less work and more fun chasing unimportant butterflies. But this is not the way the medalist’s mind worked. He sought out, with unerring judgment, the simple basic problems which had to be solved in order to build a successful and profitable industry for the new chemical methods as they
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developed, all directed to better methods, improved recoveries, and lower costs for carrying out the wet chemical processes now being introduced into the mining and metallurgical industries. In these hectic surroundings the medalist was an active and leading figure. He studied conditions from the standpoint of a chemical engineer, located bottlenecks in the operations, and turned his inventive talent t o the development of processes and mechanical equipment for their solution. When he entered the metallurgical field, he found batch and intermittent operations prevalent, but within ten years he had developed and pioneered the use of such continuous devices as the Dorr classifier, Dorr thickener, Dorr countercurrent decantation system, and Dorr agitator. The intermittent and batch processes had been converted by his revolutionary methods and equipment to continuous processes. The mention of mass production always suggests to the popular mind the automobile industry and Henry Ford. Mass production processes were introduced by the medalist into the chemical industry when automobiles were being built by hand in machine shops. He not only developed continuous processes and equipment for handling great tonnages of materials a t very low costs, but he put the finishing touches on the job by streamlining them. What were the problems which the medalist set himself to solve? The fact that he detected these problems and worked out their solution in the treatment of low-grade ores to recover gold and silver was an incident and an opportunity. Nevertheless, it has benefited many important branches of the chemical industry throughout the world. The lessons learned from his work in the metallurgical field might equally well have been learned in the sugar industry, in the phosphoric acid industry, the paper industry, the business of sewage disposal, or in the important problem of making chemical operations pay, if someone had offered him a job in any of these fields.
DORR TRADE-WASTE TREATMENT COMPLANTAT CALCOCHEMICAL PANY, BOUND BROOK, N. J. 15,000,000 gallons a day of organic and dry color waste are treated before discharge as a clear, harmless liquid to the Raritan River.
should apply t o the treatment of low-grade ores. These problems were so simple that it took a genius t o find them. Less well-endowed people throughout the older chemical industry had missed them for generations. The period from 1902 to 1913 was one of great activity in the new field opened up €or the chemical treatment of ores. Old mills were being redesigned, new ones built, and processes
LET us examine the selection of problems and the contributions t o the solution of those problems which have been made by the medalist. He recognized as a basic problem in the manipulation or treatment of solids in liquids the importance of control over particle size. The study of this problem led to the invention of a continuous mechanical classifier for separating coarse
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I N D U S T R I A L A N D E N G I N E E R I N G CHEMISTRY
particles from fine. The coarse particles might now be returned to the grinding operation and there reduced with greater ease and efficiency to the proper size, or the coarse and fine particles might be treated separately. The Dorr classifier was patented in 1907. He recognized as a problem in the chemical treatment of solids with liauids the basic imnortance of contact. His studies of this ‘problem led to the invention of Dorr continuous agitators, the basic patent for which was issued in 1915. He recognized, after having the proper mixture of solids suspended in liquids, the necessity of later separating them for the purpose of segregating the values on the one hand and eliminating the waste on the other. The study of this problem led to the invention of the Dorr thickener, the basic patent for which was allowed in 1907, and the improvement patent for continuously separating solids and liquids allowed in 1915. The application of the Dorr thickener principle for separating solids from liquids soon led to general processes and equipment for simultaneous reaction, solution, and separation operations, and for continuous decantation. This has been further developed in many phases of chemical industry, to a combination of continuous chemical reaction and physical separation-for example, in the treatment of soda ash with lime to produce caustic soda. Of the 550 United States patents and 2300 foreign patents based upon the fields covered by the Dorr developments, the medalist’s name appears as sole or joint inventor on 26 patents which form the cornerstone of the Dorr Company’s operations throughout the world. These basic inventions range over the period from 1907 to 1940, and over the fields from the original classifier to processes for sedimentation and flocculation. They thus represent a third of a century of productive invention. Over the past twenty years the Dorr organization has considered five thousand ideas directed to further development of the Dorr inventions. These have come in a t the rate of about one each working day. Of these five thousand, about three hundred and thirty have been found novel and patentable, and two hundred and twenty have proved to be commercially valuable. Thus about 4.5 per cent of the total number of ideas considered in the past twenty years have developed into commercially valuable and patentable results as against approximately 2 per cent for the average industry. This high record is probably due to the fact that 66 per cent of the ideas submitted originate within the highly skilled organization, where 6.6 per cent of the technical staff is responsible for more than half of the ideas submitted. DORR spent about eleven years in the metallurgical field. When we consider what he accomplished in that period, he might be classed as a fast worker. By this time metallurgical practices in both cyanidation and flotation had become well standardized, and he had built up a capable organization to carry on. He was now free to turn his attention to a study of the obvious needs of the chemical industry, of sewage disposal, and of sanitary water supply. The metallurgical field was therefore left in capable hands with headquarters in Denver, and Dorr established himself in New York t o begin work on new problems. As might be expected from a man of Dorr’s qualifications, he launched his new expansion in the chemical industry by starting a research laboratory. A well-known member of this club has for years catalyzed discussion a t the round table by asserting that the best research work which has ever been done in this country has been done under court injunction. Some of the early work of the medalist, where he was entirely surrounded by creditors with the sheriff in plain sight, might be urged as a full equivalent of a court injunction. I n any
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LONQ-TUBETESTSDETERMINE THE CRITICAL DATAON Two DORRSPECIALTIBS-SEDIMENTATION AND CLASSIFICATION
event, it was under these conditions, plus the fact that he and his two partners in the early Lundberg, Dorr, and Wilson milling enterprise had all of their earthly possessions a t stake and had even borrowed money from a labor union, that some of his basic inventions were made. However, he had been long enough in the West to discover that research can be done as well on a full stomach as on an empty one, that facilities, environment, and diversified talent are a good substitute for a single pair of hands working in a woodshed with a limited supply of cigar boxes and tin cans. Accordingly, Dorr purchased a beautiful old mill site on the banks of the Saugatuck River in Westport, Conn., with many acres of countryside, and dedicated it to research. When the old mill was destroyed by fire some years later, a new building was erected on the foundation, and lavishly equipped with personnel and facilities to provide him with the sound fundamental basis on which to build further and greater engineering achievements. This laboratory is directed by Dr. Dorr personally. I think we can all rest assured that it is dedicated to the solid, hardheaded, fact-finding type of research necessary to develop chemical processes which will stay developed and not have to be done over again by the application of iifix-it” research. The laboratory and its staff of research workers specialize in the branch of technology which relates to the handling and treatment of finely divided solids suspended in liquids. Its problems constitute an essential step a t some point in almost every chemical operation. The value of the fundamental studies of this laboratory to the chemical industry as a whole can hardly be estimated in dollars and cents. Its contributions to the art of treating and handling finely divided solids suspended in liquids are recognized by research workers, plant operators, and industrialists throughout the world as the last word of experts in this basic field, in which they have specialized for over thirty years. The simplicity of the title of the research fields to which the Westport laboratory devotes itself might be deceptive. As a
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MAGNESIUM PRODUCTS FROM SALTBRINES Dorr thickeners handling magnesium hydroxide at the Westvaco Chlorine Products Company’s plant, Newark, Calif.
matter of fact, their investigations cover agitation, classification, grinding, cyanidation, flotation, leaching, sedimentation, filtration, flocculation, differential settling, blanket concentration, tabling, sizing of particles above and below subsieve range, control of crystal size and structure, control of particle size, treatment of trade wastes, and biological process studies. Besides the diversified laboratory facilities, space and equipment are available for pilot-plant work. No laboratory process is permitted t o go t o the field engineers until it has been checked, confirmed, and demonstrated on a pilobplant scale. Thus the research workers and the engineers are brought together on a common stamping ground of the laboratory, before the developments are exposed to the discouraging and critical comments of the “doubting Thomases” who supply the mental inertia to industrial progress. While it may be argued that opulence extinguishes the divine spark of the inventor, and that he cannot produce results in a gorgeous laboratory, entirely surrounded by an enticing countryside and money, the fact still remains that the Dorr laboratory a t Westport does produce. It still has the genius to see the essential problems and find the way t o their solution.
TO ADAPT continuous agitators and countercurrent decantation to the process of causticizing soda and t o replace the batch by a continuous process required fundamental study of rates of reaction, the reason for variables in different plants, the control of physical properties of the precipitated carbonate, and many other factors directed to differences in raw materials, operating conditions, and finished products. The manufacture of phosphoric acid by the wet process did not yield to the medalist’s method of treatment without his determining the factors involved in the continuous digestion of phosphate rock and the precipitation of the resultant calcium sulfate in the form t o be easily eliminated, without much preliminary study. I n the cane sugar industry the conical-bottom settling tanks and the batch operations were not replaced by the tray clari-
fiers without a profound study of the problem of separating the sugar juice from fiber, suspended solids, and other impurities. The carbonation step in the beet sugar industry alone required five years of study in order to eliminate the batch gasification which could be entrusted only t o skilled operators of long experience; the battery of carbonation tanks which had to be filled, gassed, and discharged in sequence, and the numerous pressure filters where the juice was separated from the precipitate, were all replaced by two improved carbonators, a single Dorr clarifier, and an automatically controlled gas valve. The skilled operator with his 2000-valve operation per shift had been mechanized and his job civilized. The adoption of fine and uniform wet grinding in the portland cement industry by introducing the closed circuit with classifiers into the milling operation was based upon results of research directed by Dorr. It solved the problem of producing a finished cement with a minimum amount of free calcium oxide and with accelerated setting properties. For twenty-five years the medalist has been considering the many fundamental problems involved in sewage disposal. After three and a half years of intensive research, dealing with the various chemical, physical, and biological factors that influenced digestion of sludge, he was able to apply these results commercially in several hundred municipalities which now use his system. A by-product of this investigation showed that the increased amount of gas evolved in such reactions, under properly controlled conditions, would supply more than enough heat units to maintain the tanks a t correct temperature and generate power for operating a portion of the plant as well. In the field of municipal water treatment many fundamental problems connected with the use of chemical reagents, the acceleration of floc formation, and an increase in rate of sedimentation had to be solved. A research program conducted a t stations located in the Mississippi Valley laid the ground work for the technique now widely accepted. The initial application of the principles determined in this inves-
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tigation, a t a 50,000,000-gallon-a-day water treatment plant in St. Louis, resulted in an annual saving of 50,000 dollars. Continuous processes developed by Dr. Dorr have been applied t o the manufacture of alumina from bauxite, and these methods are employed for the greater portion of the alumina used for the production of metal in England, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, and Canada. The processes or mechanical inventions made by Dorr, and subsequently developed and exploited throughout the world by his organization, are familiar to everyone who comes in contact with chemical processes involving reactions between solid and liquid phases, or the simple physical treatment and separation of solids from liquids. The fact that most of these Dorr processes have been mechanized has led to the superficial conclusion on the part of some that his work has been in the engineering and mechanical field rather than in chemical research and process development. They seem to lose sight of the fact that the Dorr equipment is the end product of a painstaking study of the basic chemical and physical facts on which the desired result may be based, and that the reasons underlying the success of such mechanical devices is that the research work on which it was founded was of a high order and well executed, and that the findings are complete and sound.
ONE of our great problems in chemical industry is the frequent obsolescence of processes and equipment. Analysis of the causes underlying the short life of many developments usually brings to light the fact that the research work on which the obsolete process was based was not broadly conceived, carefully executed, or thoroughly completed. USUally this is due to hurry-up type of research. I n the long run, hurry-up research to lay the foundations for processes and equipment development results in the loss of time and money. Furthermore, such research, if not continued to the point of establishing the facts on a sound base line, is never finished. Processes and equipment designed and built on hurry-up research are almost immediately followed by long, painful, and expensive restudies of the problem and its fundamentals, redesigning and rebuilding the plant or its equipment, and extending sometimes for years the over-all period of development. This type of “&-it” research almost invariably follows in the trail of the hurry-up research. The fact that the Dorr inventions have achieved such widespread applications and success in the chemical industry is proof enough that the researches on which these developments are based were guided by a master hand. A development based upon a sound piece of research may best be illustrated by the fact that the first classifier which Dorr built was used for commercial work, in spite of the fact that it cost very little, for a number of years. The modern machine, based upon the same research findings, has since been improved to the point where it now has one hundred times its original capacity. Incidentally these improvements have been made at a cost of over a million dollars for research and engineering design alone in the past thirty-five years. The most noteworthy thing about the Dorr developments is the fact that his processes and equipment have held their place in chemical industry for over thirty years. They are still going strong in the old industries and are finding applications in the new industries with astonishing regularity. This points clearly to the kind and quality of research work done from the beginning by Dr. Dorr. His inventions stay invented. Necessity and not choice now drives me to the presentation of figures in order to visualize the industrial magnitude of Dorr’s work. These figures, estimated by his technical staff, are only close approximations but are sufficiently accurate for our purpose.
EMISTRY
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Prior to Dr. Dorr’s entry into the gold and silver industry in 1904, the total prodqction by the cyanide process in North America alone (United States, Canada, and Mexico) was: Gold Silver
130 000 000 dollars 1SS:OOO:OOO ounces
Since the introduction of his processes and equipment into this field, where they are used for 95 per cent of the current production, the output has risen to: Gold Silver
2,128,000,000 dollars 821,000,000 ounces
Dorr processes and equipment are used in 93 per cent of the copper industry, 93 per cent of the lead industry, 85 per cent of the zinc industry, 100 per cent of the nickel industry, 100 per cent of the aluminum industry, and 15 per cent of the iron industry. This impressive total, expressed in metric tons of finished metal turned out in recent years, is perhaps better illustrated by the following table:
The daily amount of other major products, processed by Dorr machines and/or methods may be illustrated by the following: Alum (17% AlzOa) Cement (raw grinding only) Caustio soda (100% NaOH Concrete sand (washing and grading) Chemical pulp (sulfate and soda) Magnesia (from sea water only) Phosphate rook (benefioiation) Phosphoric add (phos hate rook equivalent) Beet sugar (U.E. only? Cane sugar (entire world)
350 tons 32,000 barrels 3,000 tons
225,000 tons 7,500 tons 200 tons 14,000 tons 1,800 tons 2,000 tons 12,000 tons
Municipal water supplies, to the amount of 2,450,000,000 gallons per day, are now treated by Dorr processes and equipment. This is enough sanitary water to supply 24,500,000 people, or more than one sixth of the total population of the United States. Finally, a great desilting plant has recently been built at the head of the All-American Canal, which is to carry Colorado River water to Southern California. This plant covers 28 acres. It is mechanically operated throughout. It is designed to handle 8,000,000,000 gallons of turbid water per day, and remove 70,000 tons of dry silt. For comparison, the water handled in this plant is equal to one twentieth of the average flow over Niagara Falls, and if the silt were dried instead of being discharged as a sludge into the river again, it would require for removal fourteen hundred 50-ton gondola cars per day. This plant ranks in daily tonnage with the rate of dirt handling in the excavation of the Panama Canal, or with the ore handling at the great mines of the Utah Copper Company. Chemical industry without processes and tools to carry them out is like a carpenter without tools. The salvation of low-cost mass production in chemical industry, assuming a sound process, is brains, tools, and money. It has always been my contention that the outstanding need in chemical industry is more process improvements, more plant layout engineering, and more tools to carry oiit their operations. More of the rare talent of the type which has been furnished this industry by Dr. Dorr is needed. No honor within the gift of the chemical profession and industry is too great for him to receive.
