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From left to right: Warren E. Stewart. R. Byron Bird, and Edwin N. Lightfoot reading galley proofs of Transport Phmnmrnn during the winter of 1959-1960 in Madison. WI.
Thirty-Fifth Anniversary of the Textbook Transport Phenomena It is our pleasure to dedicate this issue to the 35th year of the very successful and influential textbook Transport Phenomena by R. Byron Bird, Warren E. Stewart, and Edwin N. Lightfoot, published in 1960 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. It has become a tradition of this journal, and others, to produce special issues or festschrifts that honor distinguished colleagues upon reaching some important landmark in their life or career. As far as we know, bestowing a similar honor to a textbook is unprecedented; this novel idea grew out of a discussion a t a meeting of our Advisory Board. A list of potential contributors for this special issue was formulated with the help of a number of people, and invitations to submit manuscripts for the 35th anniversary of this textbook were issued. The resulting collection of papers that survived the normal peer review process is contained within this issue; many reflect progress that has occurred in this field over the past three decades. The Editors and the authors of these papers join me in this salute to this landmark textbook in chemical engineering and, of course, to its authors. The impact of Transport Phenomena has been phenomenal. It has been translated into Russian, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and Czech; as of this date it is in its 50th printing and over 200 000 authorized copies have been sold. More than any other, this textbook has
stimulated debate about how chemical engineering should be taught and the discussion continues to this day. As an undergraduate student, I took three separate unit operations courses dealing with fluid flow,heat transfer, and mass transfer. It was a revelation to see these three subjects come together so elegantly in the course on transport phenomena that I took during my first semester as a graduate student. Since then I have participated in many discussions about whether it is better to learn the fundamentals, i.e., transport phenomena, first and then go to applications, i.e., unit operations, or to do the reverse as I was forced by circumstances to do as a student. There probably is no best answer, but it is clear that the classical unit operations sequence alone would have been inadequate preparation for my subsequent career dealing with issues of polymer processing and properties. The lead paper by Astarita and Ottino provides further facts and discussion in this area. I entered graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1961,just one year after the formal version of this textbook was first published. At the time I made the decision to go to the University of Wisconsin I had not yet learned of the new book by Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot; I was attracted there by the series of books by Hougen, Watson, and Ragatz that I used as a n undergraduate student and the work of Hougen et
0888-5885/95/2634-3175$09.00/0 0 1995 American Chemical Society
3176 Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., Vol. 34,No. 10, 1995
al. on generalized correlations of fluid properties by the principle of corresponding states that I used as a summer student a t DuPont. There was a great deal of excitement among the new graduate students t o learn transport phenomena from Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot themselves. There were older graduate students still around who had been part of the early experiments in teaching the first versions of this course, offered for the first time in the fall semester of 1957, and the preliminary edition of the book in mimeographed form, “Notes on Transport Phenomena”, that appeared in the fall of 1958. From these recollections and various written accounts, I reproduce here my own version of the intersection of events that led to this textbook. The three coauthors happened t o join the faculty of the Chemical Engineering Department a t the University of Wisconsin within a few years of each other during the mid 1950s. They came from very different backgrounds. Bob Bird received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin. His doctoral background led him to coauthor a monumental book on thermodynamic and transport properties, with J. 0. Hirschfelder and C. F. Curtiss, and eventually to an interest in polymer processing problems via a summer experience a t DuPont. Warren Stewart earned both B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate from MIT; he then spent 6 years a t Sinclair working in the area of catalysis and reactor design. Ed Lightfoot received all of his degrees from Cornel1 University and then worked for several years with the Pfizer Company on biochemical processing and fermentation operations. It is important to understand the environment that these young assistant professors entered. Some of the major names in the Department of Chemical Engineering at that time were 0. A. Hougen, W. R. Marshall, and R. A. Ragatz; while key faculty in Chemistry were R. A. Alberty, C. F. Curtiss, F. Daniels, J. D. Ferry, and J. 0. Hirschfelder. There was a strong sense of collaboration between the two departments. While I was there, most of the chemical engineering graduate students minored in chemistry while the chemistry graduate students took key chemical engineering courses including transport phenomena. While these faculty were noted for their research, there was an exceedingly strong interest in teaching at all levels and especially in writing textbooks, Graduate students were encouraged to become involved in the teaching process; my choice to pursue an academic career was a direct result of this environment and the specific encouragement that I received from R. A. Ragatz and Bob Bird. As a graduate student I taught thermodynamics and transport phenomena with these individuals; interestingly, it is now frowned upon in my o w n institution, and many others, to use graduate students in the classroom as instructors.
According to published accounts (Bird, R. B.; Stewart, W. E.; Lightfoot, E. N. The Role of Transport Phenomena in Chemical Engineering Teaching and Research: Past, Present, and Future. In History of Chemical Engineering; Furter, F., Ed.; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 1980; pp 153-1651, the idea for a course in transport phenomena grew out of plans for an undergraduate curriculum in nuclear engineering a t the University of Wisconsin in order t o give students background for dealing with heat-transfer and flow problems as well as separations techniques. After some debate, the Chemical Engineering Department decided to offer a three credit course on transport phenomena a t the junior level. It was agreed that Bob Bird would prepare a set of mimeograph notes for the first offering of the course in the fall semester of 1957, and Warren Stewart and Ed Lightfoot offered to assist in this effort. It is evident to all who have read or used Transport Phenomena that this textbook was prepared with a great deal of care and an intense attention to detail. For example, it is organized into a matrix arrangement of chapters that permits alternate ways of teaching the material, i.e., by columns or by rows. At the end of each chapter the homework problems are graded according to difficulty and there is a list of study suggestions. During its preparation the authors read the entire manuscript aloud as a group to ensure the accuracy and consistency of presentation. The photograph reproduced above shows the authors reading galley proofs of the book. The well-known “secret messages” contained in the Preface and Postface are simple examples of clever attention to detail. The message in the Preface may be seen by assembling the first letters of each sentence; it is a dedication to 0. A. Hougen, who provided considerable encouragement to the authors to undertake this project. The message in the Postface may be seen by assembling the first letters of each paragraph; it gives the famous cheer for the University of Wisconsin. It is our hope that these reminiscences and the following collection of papers on current topics in transport phenomena and other aspects of chemical engineering are interesting and stimulating for our readers. We all thank Bob Bird, Warren Stewart, and Ed Lightfoot for their vision and their hard work to produce an educational tool that has benefited so many faculty and students. We can hope that future years will bring similar inspirations to our field.
Donald R Paul Editor IE950419B
