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00:00:30 You are about to see an interview with Dr. Herman F. Mark,

00:00:35 Dean Emeritus of the Polytechnic Institute of New York,

00:00:38 conducted by Dr. Charles Overberger

00:00:40 for the American Chemical Society's Eminent Chemists videotapes program.

00:00:45 Herman Mark is acclaimed widely

00:00:47 as a founder of the field of polymer chemistry

00:00:50 and as a most prolific contributor to its growth.

00:00:53 Dr. Mark was born in Vienna in 1895

00:00:57 and received his doctorate in chemistry

00:00:59 from the University of Vienna in 1921.

00:01:02 Dr. Mark's early career took him to the University of Berlin,

00:01:06 to the Institute of Fiber Research in Dahlem, Germany,

00:01:09 and to the IG Farben Laboratory in Ludwigshafen.

00:01:14 In Ludwigshafen, Dr. Mark's group made the first serious efforts

00:01:18 to produce commercially polymeric materials

00:01:21 such as polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride,

00:01:24 polymethyl methacrylate, and synthetic rubber.

00:01:27 Mark also began to study the structure of cellulose,

00:01:30 which laid the foundation for the development of polymer theory.

00:01:34 In 1932, Dr. Mark returned to the University of Vienna,

00:01:38 where he added the study of polymer theory to the curriculum.

00:01:41 Six years later, Dr. Mark emigrated to Canada

00:01:44 to work for the Canadian International Paper Company.

00:01:47 Dr. Mark later joined the faculty of the Polytechnic Institute of New York,

00:01:51 where he remained until retirement.

00:01:53 During these years, he founded the Polymer Research Institute at the Polytechnic.

00:01:58 Herman Mark's impact on polymer chemistry

00:02:01 is due both to his fundamental research

00:02:03 and to his efforts in disseminating information about the field.

00:02:07 He has been described by his peers as a great teacher,

00:02:10 a man of great warmth, wit, and unfailing optimism.

00:02:14 In this interview, Dr. Mark describes his early days as a scientist

00:02:18 and reviews highlights of his career.

00:02:21 The interviewer, Dr. Charles Overberger,

00:02:23 is vice president for research at the University of Michigan

00:02:26 and a longtime associate of Dr. Mark.

00:02:29 They began their relationship in 1947

00:02:32 when Dr. Overberger became assistant professor

00:02:35 at the Polymer Research Institute headed by Dr. Mark.

00:02:38 When did you begin to feel

00:02:41 that you might want to enter a career in science?

00:02:46 As far as I remember, there were really two reasons.

00:02:49 When, beginning with 15, 14, 15,

00:02:54 in our high school,

00:02:58 in physics and chemistry,

00:03:00 we had a teacher who actually was a priest.

00:03:06 His name was Lavati.

00:03:08 He was very strict,

00:03:10 but he really gave us fantastic lectures in physics.

00:03:16 It started with physics and then came to chemistry.

00:03:20 And he was one of the sources

00:03:24 of kindling the interest in natural sciences,

00:03:29 in the exact natural sciences.

00:03:32 The other one was a friend of mine.

00:03:35 His name is Gerhard Kirsch, K-I-R-S-C-H.

00:03:40 He was the son of a professor

00:03:44 at the Technical University in Vienna.

00:03:47 His father was professor of material sciences

00:03:50 at the Technical University in Vienna.

00:03:52 When I was 16, he was 19.

00:03:54 He already started to study at the University of Vienna,

00:03:57 where he later became a professor.

00:03:59 He later was professor of physics at the University of Vienna.

00:04:02 So that when I approached the end

00:04:06 of the high school studies,

00:04:09 it was a foregone conclusion

00:04:11 that I would study either physics or chemistry.

00:04:14 The question, of course, which I find

00:04:19 that is extremely interesting

00:04:21 is that there would be a material science program

00:04:26 that early in the social events

00:04:31 of the chemistry world,

00:04:33 because material science really did not develop here

00:04:38 nearly that early in any formal structure anyway.

00:04:42 And I'm very interested in the fact

00:04:44 that there was a professorship of material science.

00:04:47 Well, I called it material science.

00:04:51 The German word, I mean his professorship,

00:04:55 the professorship of Bernhard Kirsch,

00:04:58 he was the father,

00:05:00 was known as Materialkunde.

00:05:03 Materialkunde.

00:05:04 Materialkunde.

00:05:06 Well, kunde is not science.

00:05:09 Kunde is descriptive.

00:05:12 But metals would be...

00:05:14 Metal, ceramics, wood...

00:05:16 Ceramics would be the principal...

00:05:18 Anything which was used for building purposes,

00:05:21 of course, not plastics,

00:05:22 because it didn't exist at that time.

00:05:24 But certainly wood was,

00:05:27 and certainly all metals were,

00:05:29 and all the ceramics were.

00:05:31 But it was essentially descriptive

00:05:33 because, well, metallurgy, of course, was already,

00:05:37 and metallurgy existed already as a science.

00:05:41 So I think the chair for Materialkunde

00:05:46 was a little bit scientific,

00:05:49 mostly descriptive.

00:05:51 Because of Gerhard, who was a physicist,

00:05:56 I was first inclined to major in physics.

00:06:02 Well, the first two semesters, of course,

00:06:04 makes no difference.

00:06:05 You have to take mathematics, physics, chemistry,

00:06:07 anyway, whatever you do later.

00:06:09 But then, as you said,

00:06:13 there was a personality

00:06:16 which changed my mind and influenced me

00:06:20 quite considerably during the next years, in fact,

00:06:24 and that was Professor Wilhelm Schlenk.

00:06:28 He was a...

00:06:30 He was a...

00:06:32 He came from Munich.

00:06:34 And he was a pupil of Adolf von Bayer,

00:06:40 organic chemist, real organic chemist.

00:06:45 And he had already, several years ago,

00:06:52 chosen for his studies

00:06:55 what was called at that time

00:06:58 the trivalent carbon atom.

00:07:02 The stable free radical type.

00:07:04 We would call it stable free radical.

00:07:07 Now, in fact, it's interesting that

00:07:11 the first scientist who ever did that with great precision

00:07:17 was Gomberg, here in Michigan.

00:07:21 He studied in Germany with Bayer

00:07:26 and came over to the United States

00:07:29 in 1905, 1904,

00:07:32 and became professor here

00:07:35 and started here work on these strange compounds.

00:07:43 There are certain organic compounds

00:07:45 where carbon, which always is tetravalent,

00:07:49 seems to be only turvalent.

00:07:52 He made a number of them and crystallized them

00:07:57 and just established groundwork.

00:08:00 And Schlenk, who worked with Bayer,

00:08:03 I think Gomberg had already left Munich when Schlenk came in.

00:08:08 But anyway, there was some tradition

00:08:10 and Schlenk continued that work in Munich.

00:08:17 And when he came to Vienna, he continued it in Vienna.

00:08:21 And it was good, plain organic chemistry.

00:08:24 You would take a certain compound

00:08:27 and see to it that one substituent would be taken away

00:08:32 and, much to your surprise,

00:08:34 the material would not have the tendency to add another substituent.

00:08:38 It would remain with one arm cut off.

00:08:41 As you said it before, today we call it the stabilized free radical.

00:08:46 And that was exciting.

00:08:49 That was really exciting.

00:08:51 And he was also an excellent teacher.

00:08:55 His general chemistry course was most stimulating.

00:09:02 So I decided I would not study physics but instead chemistry.

00:09:08 And since he was an organic chemist, I would study with him.

00:09:12 I would try to get him as my graduate advisor,

00:09:18 as my graduate professor.

00:09:20 And I had very good teachers in physical chemistry.

00:09:23 There was Professor Emil Abel, you would call him,

00:09:27 who was a modern physical chemist.

00:09:31 And there was Professor Weichscheider,

00:09:33 who was a classical physical chemist, thermodynamics.

00:09:37 So I had very good instructors there.

00:09:42 And then, you see, it was the first time in my life, really,

00:09:45 that I became interested in swimming between two boats.

00:09:53 Not be a hundred percent organic chemist,

00:09:56 not be a hundred percent physical chemist,

00:09:59 but try to learn as much as possible between these two disciplines

00:10:05 and eventually profit from this dual information.

00:10:13 Later, it all went ahead with polymers.

00:10:18 Do you remember your doctoral thesis exam?

00:10:21 Yeah, sure, sure.

00:10:23 First of all, of course, I remember very well the work on my thesis itself,

00:10:28 which was the preparation of a highly aromatized ethane and butane,

00:10:37 which would then break into two pieces

00:10:41 because of the absorbency of valence forces through the aromatic rings.

00:10:49 And then you would have two free radicals, highly colloid,

00:10:55 very unstable, a little bit of oxygen, and it would be an end.

00:11:00 And I still remember very well these,

00:11:05 those were really two years, graduate work were two years.

00:11:10 It was a field where fundamental research,

00:11:21 and that was really fundamental research,

00:11:23 new information was gathered in this specific field,

00:11:28 was very inexpensive because all you needed was an organic chemical laboratory,

00:11:36 beakers and flasks and stills,

00:11:40 oil glass, of course, small scale,

00:11:43 and then, of course, chemicals.

00:11:47 Well, the simple chemicals you would buy,

00:11:50 and the more complicated you would have to make yourself.

00:11:53 So that from the point of view of expenses,

00:11:57 this research was practically negligible,

00:12:01 very much different today.

00:12:04 I mean, the characterization of our compounds was

00:12:10 that they crystallized through a microscope,

00:12:13 you would establish whether they are needles or whether they are platelets,

00:12:17 and then you would make a melting point,

00:12:21 and then you would check the solubility in three or four different solvents,

00:12:27 and that was all.

00:12:29 And there was no infrared and there was no X-ray.

00:12:32 Well, elemental analysis sometimes.

00:12:34 Of course, elemental analysis.

00:12:35 Elemental analysis would be the first.

00:12:37 Yes, you are right.

00:12:38 Elemental analysis would be the first,

00:12:40 and then would be the other thing.

00:12:42 Did Schlenk take some personal time with his students at that time?

00:12:46 Yeah, well, this was very interesting.

00:12:48 Of course, he was a very busy man.

00:12:50 He was director of the institute and he was dean

00:12:53 and he was a member of the academy

00:12:55 and he had to go to the ministry and so in so many committee meetings.

00:12:59 We never saw him during the day.

00:13:01 Very rarely.

00:13:03 But after he had his dinner,

00:13:06 his apartment was in the institute at 8.30 or so,

00:13:13 he would come over with a cigar

00:13:16 and then he would go from one to the other and chat.

00:13:22 And eventually he would show us how to crystallize something

00:13:27 or how to prevent crystallization.

00:13:32 Once, when I had my final body, so to speak, my final compound,

00:13:40 he himself made the elemental analysis.

00:13:46 He said, give it to me.

00:13:48 And then he lit up this long, long stove, you know,

00:13:54 and made it all himself from the beginning to the end,

00:13:57 which was a three-hour job.

00:13:59 Just because it had to be published

00:14:03 and he did not want to rely on me, he wanted to check.

00:14:09 He considered it important enough to do it.

00:14:12 He considered it important enough.

00:14:13 Also, educationally, he showed us.

00:14:15 We all stood around and watched him.

00:14:19 And then eventually also he would sit on a stool

00:14:26 and we would gather around him

00:14:28 and then he would tell us stories about Emil Fischer

00:14:31 and about Adolf von Bayer and about Wollstetter,

00:14:35 about the current in organic chemistry.

00:14:38 He would tell us the work of Wollstetter on enzymes

00:14:42 and the work of Emil Fischer

00:14:44 and his followers on polypeptides.

00:14:49 So we didn't have to read much in the textbooks.

00:14:53 We got it right from the horse's mouth.

00:14:56 You know, it's always interested me

00:14:58 in reading what you have written and many others

00:15:01 about the period then on from the 1920s.

00:15:07 There was recognition that Fischer's polypeptides

00:15:16 were made by conventional organic processes

00:15:20 and were large molecules or relatively large molecules.

00:15:24 Now, I've often speculated that the reason

00:15:27 that that didn't sink in to the community

00:15:30 was that they were DPs of 20 or 25 or 30,

00:15:36 not so much higher than that,

00:15:38 and people still regarded that as a small molecule.

00:15:43 But conceptually, I've never fully understood

00:15:48 why the organic community didn't see that earlier,

00:15:51 that we're making a large molecule.

00:15:55 Well, I think there were several reasons.

00:16:03 Of course, Fischer, he was extremely scientifically minded.

00:16:09 He would not make any statement

00:16:11 unless he would have 100% quantitative proof.

00:16:17 So he said, I know now how to put those things together,

00:16:21 which was really a precursor of the Merrifield synthesis.

00:16:25 But he only used, I think he only used two or three at that time.

00:16:30 And then when I build up a chain of a thousand,

00:16:36 I am stopped because of solubility.

00:16:40 These things are not soluble anymore.

00:16:42 So how should I put the next link on

00:16:47 if the damn thing is not soluble?

00:16:51 So he stopped.

00:16:53 He said, my experimental power

00:16:57 does not permit me to go any further.

00:17:01 Nature apparently has more experimental power than I have

00:17:06 and goes much further.

00:17:08 I don't know how far.

00:17:11 These were almost his words at a meeting of what would be here

00:17:19 the AAAS in 1906.

00:17:24 No, 1912 in Vienna.

00:17:27 Those were almost his words.

00:17:30 But of course, it's printed.

00:17:33 So then your equivalent of the PhD was obtained in 19-

00:17:40 21.

00:17:41 21.

00:17:42 And then I have forgotten the sequence of events

00:17:47 that precisely perhaps you might remind me of.

00:17:52 In 1920, well, Emil Fischer died in 1919.

00:18:05 And the chair was offered to Wilstetter,

00:18:10 who at that time was professor in Munich.

00:18:15 In 1920, Wilstetter declined.

00:18:19 He says, I am now in Munich.

00:18:21 I have my group.

00:18:22 I'm perfectly happy.

00:18:24 I don't want to change.

00:18:26 And Fischer was in Berlin.

00:18:28 Berlin.

00:18:30 So they looked for another professor,

00:18:37 for another successor.

00:18:39 And they offered the chair to Schlenk.

00:18:42 And he accepted.

00:18:45 In 19- at the end of 1920, beginning of 1921,

00:18:49 he accepted.

00:18:51 And then he got ready to move and decided that he would take

00:18:56 with him four or five of his closest collaborators

00:19:03 so that the work which he was doing in Vienna

00:19:07 would be continuously transferred to Berlin.

00:19:13 And I was one of these six.

00:19:15 He took with him six assistants, we would say,

00:19:18 from Vienna to Berlin.

00:19:20 And so in the summer, soon after I got my degree,

00:19:26 I went with him to Berlin.

00:19:29 The whole gang went up to Berlin

00:19:32 and established ourselves in the old institute of Emil Fischer.

00:19:38 Now, there were there several of the-

00:19:42 this was a big institute.

00:19:45 And in fact, each part of it had a full professor as director.

00:19:54 Now, the organic chemist was Gabriel,

00:19:59 the man who worked on alkaloids.

00:20:03 The other organic chemist was Loix, Hermann Loix.

00:20:08 Yes, carboanhydride synthesis.

00:20:10 Of the Loix synthesis.

00:20:11 Loix anhydride, yeah.

00:20:13 The third was Freudenberg.

00:20:17 So there were three people of this character.

00:20:22 And the physical chemical division was Panet.

00:20:28 Very radical, Panet.

00:20:29 And the inorganic division was a certain Dr. Tide,

00:20:33 also a very famous inorganic chemist.

00:20:36 So those were five full professors,

00:20:39 and above all of them was the director of the entire institute.

00:20:44 So we six learned a tremendous amount

00:20:50 by just going to these people

00:20:53 and just listening to what they would say.

00:20:56 And then I worked on the Schlenk, or with Schlenk,

00:21:02 again on a few modifications of these free radials.

00:21:09 Not very long, because one day

00:21:17 Schlenk told me, tomorrow,

00:21:22 a good friend of mine, Geheimrat Haber,

00:21:26 of the Haber ammonia synthesis,

00:21:32 wants to talk with me about setting up a new institute,

00:21:41 and maybe I will want you to come in for a while.

00:21:47 So I was there the next day,

00:21:49 and sure enough he called me in.

00:21:52 And they were sitting, the two professors,

00:21:54 each of them smoked a big cigar, the whole room was full of smoke,

00:21:57 I couldn't breathe.

00:22:01 And they were chatting.

00:22:05 And then Haber said,

00:22:11 the German industry is now planning

00:22:19 to use the ammunition factories,

00:22:26 that is the nitrocellulose factories,

00:22:30 which were very large, built up during the war,

00:22:34 for peaceful purposes.

00:22:37 Of course, they are not permitted to make explosives.

00:22:41 Well, nitrocellulose is a cellulose derivative,

00:22:45 and because of that, the equipment and the people

00:22:51 are so that this has to be converted into some cellulose chemistry.

00:22:59 We look about cellulose acetate, for film, for fiber, for molding.

00:23:06 We look about cellulose xanthate for cellophane and for rayon.

00:23:12 And then he said, out there in Dahlem, in my Kaiser Wilhelm Institute,

00:23:20 we have a lot of good physical chemists.

00:23:24 We have also physicists.

00:23:27 But cellulose is an organic compound, so we need organic chemists.

00:23:33 And my friend Professor Schlenk has told me

00:23:38 that you are interested in physical chemistry,

00:23:41 but you are trained in organic chemistry.

00:23:44 So that's the kind of people I'm looking for,

00:23:47 not only for you alone, for others too.

00:23:51 And what is going to be done is a new institute will be,

00:23:55 or has already been founded,

00:23:59 the Institute of Fiber Research, the Faserstoff Chemie.

00:24:05 The director is Professor Herzog,

00:24:09 and I'm now helping him to get his staff together.

00:24:14 So then I went out to Dahlem, after all, under Herzog.

00:24:20 And there was a group of young people,

00:24:26 typically assembled, you know.

00:24:30 Polanyi, who was from Budapest,

00:24:35 Katz, who was from Amsterdam,

00:24:38 Weissenberg, who was from Vienna,

00:24:42 Vacek, who was from Graz,

00:24:45 Szilard, who was from Budapest,

00:24:49 Wigner, who was from Budapest.

00:24:51 In other words, everybody saw that Herzog

00:24:55 put together whatever he could get hold of.

00:24:57 But every one of those names in later life did something.

00:25:02 They had a good feeling.

00:25:04 They moved out in different directions,

00:25:06 but it was obviously a superb choice

00:25:09 of intellectual excitement at this point.

00:25:13 And for a while we started to work,

00:25:16 and we were not told,

00:25:18 now, we would like you to work on cellulose

00:25:22 and its derivative,

00:25:24 eventually starch and its derivative,

00:25:27 because this also would be an industry,

00:25:31 silk, of course, because that was a fiber,

00:25:34 wool, because that was a fiber,

00:25:37 and then, because that was used as an important adhesive,

00:25:44 on rubber.

00:25:46 In other words, the assignment was

00:25:50 to work on what we today call

00:25:53 high-polymer materials.

00:25:56 Nobody called it that way.

00:25:58 And the interesting thing is,

00:26:00 and I remember that very strongly,

00:26:03 each of these disciplines

00:26:07 was a world.

00:26:10 And yet there was no concept

00:26:12 that they were really similar things.

00:26:14 That's correct.

00:26:16 I mean, rubber and cellulose,

00:26:19 at that time,

00:26:21 they were like Venus and Mars

00:26:23 before Copernicus.

00:26:26 Different worlds.

00:26:29 And those were the early 20s.

00:26:32 This is the time, you see,

00:26:34 when all these materials are solid.

00:26:39 So it was really the beginning

00:26:42 of solid-state physics of organic compounds.

00:26:47 And, of course, solid state means

00:26:50 x-ray diffraction, it means infrared absorption,

00:26:54 it means electron diffraction.

00:26:57 In other words, it means new methods.

00:26:59 Now, we embarked on x-ray, of course,

00:27:02 and Brill, you know, Rudy Brill.

00:27:04 Of course.

00:27:05 He was a graduate student at that time.

00:27:07 And he and I would build up x-ray tubes,

00:27:10 which you couldn't buy at that time,

00:27:13 and started to work on cellulose.

00:27:16 And when Katz came and showed that

00:27:18 stretched rubber would give an x-ray diagram,

00:27:20 of course, rubber was included

00:27:23 and silk was included.

00:27:25 And so the first x-ray diagrams

00:27:29 and their evaluation, Polanyi, I think,

00:27:31 was the man who evaluated

00:27:33 the first diagram of cellulose.

00:27:36 And Weissenberg,

00:27:37 they were really excellent theoreticians.

00:27:42 Now, then, of course,

00:27:45 in the early 20s,

00:27:50 Staudinger had published

00:27:52 his first progressive and exciting article

00:27:58 on rubber.

00:28:00 Freudenberg had published

00:28:04 his exciting article on cellulose

00:28:08 so that the concept of chain structure came in.

00:28:13 And then, of course,

00:28:15 everything became clear.

00:28:18 They're all chains,

00:28:20 and all the difference is

00:28:22 they have different substituents.

00:28:24 One is a hydrocarbon,

00:28:26 and one has hydroxyl groups,

00:28:28 and the other one has amino groups.

00:28:32 In other words, one was back in good old organic chemistry.

00:28:36 We knew those groups from small molecules,

00:28:39 and it was quickly established

00:28:41 that such a group doesn't care

00:28:44 whether it's affixed to a small molecule

00:28:46 or whether it's affixed to a long chain.

00:28:48 And that was really the opening up

00:28:53 of a new era.

00:28:56 You were at that institute for...

00:28:59 At that institute until 1926.

00:29:02 And then the IG...

00:29:05 Yeah, and in 1926,

00:29:08 sometimes in the summer of 1926,

00:29:11 Haber called me in his office,

00:29:16 and he said,

00:29:18 tomorrow I will have the visit

00:29:21 of a good old friend,

00:29:23 Professor Meyer, K. H. Meyer.

00:29:26 There were so many Meyers

00:29:28 that one had to use the initials.

00:29:33 And he is the director of a big laboratory

00:29:36 in Ludwigshafen,

00:29:39 IG Laboratory in Ludwigshafen.

00:29:43 And he would like to talk to you.

00:29:48 So next day,

00:29:51 I was there, Haber was there,

00:29:53 and Meyer said,

00:29:56 we now in the IG

00:29:59 have done

00:30:02 what the Faser Institute started to do.

00:30:06 We have converted cellulose plants

00:30:09 into nitrocellulose plants

00:30:12 into useful new stuff.

00:30:15 But we cannot make materials

00:30:18 which compete successfully

00:30:20 with what the English people do,

00:30:22 what the French people do.

00:30:24 We don't know enough fundamentally

00:30:26 about all those things.

00:30:28 Also, we want to make synthetic materials,

00:30:31 something like polystyrene

00:30:33 or something like polyvinyl chloride.

00:30:36 We sit on the raw materials,

00:30:38 but we don't know how to polymerize them

00:30:41 intelligently.

00:30:43 So I want to set up, he said,

00:30:46 a laboratory for

00:30:50 polymer science and engineering.

00:30:54 Now, when I then started to work there,

00:30:56 a new element came in,

00:30:59 the element of practicality.

00:31:02 Until now,

00:31:04 it was structure,

00:31:07 it was behavior

00:31:09 of materials

00:31:13 more or less from the fundamental point of view.

00:31:17 Whenever we had to make a certain substance,

00:31:19 we made five grams.

00:31:22 Now, whenever we were interested in a substance,

00:31:25 we would make five tons,

00:31:28 which means that it was now

00:31:31 a very much larger group.

00:31:34 In fact, it was a group

00:31:36 which spanned from organic chemistry

00:31:39 right into physics

00:31:41 and from preparation of new monomers

00:31:46 over the polymerization reactions

00:31:51 and know-how

00:31:53 into the purification

00:31:56 and into the preparation of a fiber or of a film

00:32:00 and into the quantitative testing.

00:32:04 There were some 65 people,

00:32:07 and, of course, when we had to do something

00:32:09 on a larger scale, we had a technicum

00:32:11 with kettles and with stills

00:32:14 and with high-pressure or medium-pressure equipment.

00:32:17 And, well, what was done there,

00:32:20 on top of refining the original Staudinger principle,

00:32:24 because our position,

00:32:27 my position and Mayer's position was,

00:32:29 of course, those were chains.

00:32:31 I mean, Staudinger has discovered

00:32:33 and established the fact

00:32:35 that all these materials are long chains.

00:32:38 First question is, how long are they really?

00:32:41 Second question is, what are their properties?

00:32:44 Are they stiff? Are they flexible?

00:32:46 Have they certain preferred conformations?

00:32:49 Have they certain preferred reactivities?

00:32:52 In other words, all the details had to be added.

00:32:55 When did the call then come from the University of Vienna?

00:32:59 Yeah.

00:33:00 Well, then in 1932, early in 1932,

00:33:06 Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany.

00:33:12 And one saw already

00:33:14 that the general direction in which things would move.

00:33:19 And the director of our whole plant,

00:33:25 a certain Dr Gauss,

00:33:28 one day he called me and said,

00:33:30 look here, you are a foreigner, Mayer is a foreigner,

00:33:35 you are of Jewish ancestry, he is of Jewish ancestry,

00:33:39 I think it is best if you both see to it

00:33:46 that you get some other jobs, academic jobs.

00:33:49 So Mayer went to Geneva, I went to Vienna.

00:33:51 Well, then when I came to Vienna,

00:33:53 another new element had to be added,

00:33:58 and that was teaching.

00:34:01 Of course, there was no teaching in the polymer field at all.

00:34:05 Now then, of course, as you know,

00:34:07 how this was teaching at the university,

00:34:09 it has to be integrated into the entire plan.

00:34:13 In other words, the other professors have to agree,

00:34:16 the faculty has to agree.

00:34:18 And it took some time, you see,

00:34:21 until, let us say, my colleague of organic chemistry,

00:34:25 Professor Spade, a very famous organic chemist,

00:34:28 and others, until they agreed.

00:34:33 And what they really told me is this,

00:34:36 I told them what I would like to do,

00:34:38 I would like to start giving a five-hour course a week

00:34:45 on fundamentals of polymer chemistry.

00:34:50 A kind of a general lecture.

00:34:53 And they said, well, if you want to do that

00:34:55 on top of all the other things which you have to do,

00:34:58 we don't care.

00:35:00 But certainly this could not be done

00:35:03 at the expenses of the rest of our educational program.

00:35:09 All right, fine.

00:35:11 So what I did then, I assembled a large number of young people.

00:35:16 Some of them came from Germany,

00:35:18 others came from other places.

00:35:21 And with the aid of them, you see,

00:35:23 we organized such a course.

00:35:25 One of them gave the synthesis of monomers,

00:35:27 the other one gave polymerization kinetics,

00:35:29 the other one gave viscosity measurements,

00:35:32 and so on and so on.

00:35:34 So that really, after three years,

00:35:37 that means in 1935,

00:35:40 there was a solid background of polymer teaching established.

00:35:49 One of the things that I've always admired about you

00:35:53 is that decision that you had to make,

00:35:57 you didn't have to make, and yet you had to make,

00:36:00 to get out and get out fast.

00:36:02 And I know it wasn't easy.

00:36:04 But you see, I had the great advantage

00:36:06 that I had been in Germany.

00:36:08 I was in Germany for ten years, from 1922 to 1932.

00:36:14 And I had seen how that comes up

00:36:17 and how that works.

00:36:19 And as soon as I saw that Austria would be in the same situation

00:36:23 and in the same quadrant, I just left.

00:36:26 Now, I had a big advantage that I had an offer from Canada,

00:36:30 from the Canadian International Paper Company.

00:36:33 The director, a Norwegian,

00:36:37 he visited Europe quite frequently.

00:36:40 In 1937, he also visited my institute

00:36:43 because he knew that we were working on cellulose.

00:36:46 And he told me, look here, we have a big research laboratory,

00:36:50 we call it a research laboratory,

00:36:52 in Hawkesbury, in Canada.

00:36:55 But now that I travel through Europe,

00:36:58 I see that our laboratory is obsolete.

00:37:01 I would like to have somebody to come over,

00:37:04 take that laboratory and modernize it.

00:37:06 So I said, well, for the time being,

00:37:08 I can't get away so fast.

00:37:10 But one year later, I got away very fast, you see.

00:37:15 And then I went to Canada with the family, to Hawkesbury.

00:37:20 Big paper company, pulp and paper company.

00:37:24 A company which made most of the pulp

00:37:31 which was used by the DuPont Company.

00:37:34 And the DuPont Company needed several types of pulp.

00:37:38 They needed one for cellulose acetate,

00:37:41 they needed one for tire cord,

00:37:43 and they needed one for standard rayon.

00:37:46 And we had to cook up these different pulps

00:37:51 together with the DuPont paper.

00:37:54 That must have been quite a change

00:37:58 to go to Hawkesbury,

00:38:01 and yet you didn't lose your enthusiasm and interest,

00:38:05 and their interaction with the DuPont Company

00:38:08 soon had you in interaction with the DuPont Company.

00:38:10 Yes. It all came about like this,

00:38:13 that one of the directors of DuPont,

00:38:22 William F. Zimmerly...

00:38:24 I knew him, yes.

00:38:26 He was on the board of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.

00:38:32 And Dr. Benger, the director of the research division

00:38:40 of the family department,

00:38:44 he came up to Canada quite a few times

00:38:49 to discuss problems.

00:38:52 And then some day,

00:38:55 they probably went to Dr. Rogers

00:38:59 and told him, look here,

00:39:01 we have the feeling that this fellow

00:39:04 would like to come to the States,

00:39:06 why don't you offer him

00:39:08 at least an adjunct professorship?

00:39:11 And so with Dr. Kirk and Dr. Rogers,

00:39:14 they did that at the instigation

00:39:18 or maybe at the suggestion of these two DuPont people.

00:39:23 Now, up in Hawkesbury, of course,

00:39:26 my director wasn't very happy about it,

00:39:28 but he couldn't say very much

00:39:30 because DuPont was his best customer,

00:39:32 so he didn't want to antagonize DuPont.

00:39:34 He got a very good successor for me, anyhow.

00:39:38 And then in 1940, I came down to Brooklyn.

00:39:43 I don't know if you want to say anything

00:39:47 about those early days at the Polytechnic

00:39:50 before, in that interim period,

00:39:53 before we had the growth of the institute exponentially

00:39:59 right after the war.

00:40:01 Yeah, well, you see,

00:40:04 the great advantage for me was

00:40:07 that the word polymer was unknown in the United States.

00:40:10 The only man who had worked on,

00:40:12 well, there were two people who had worked on polymers.

00:40:15 One was Carothers in an industrial laboratory

00:40:18 who published wonderful papers which nobody read,

00:40:22 and the other one was Speed Marble

00:40:24 in the organic chemical department

00:40:26 at the University of Illinois

00:40:28 who published wonderful papers which nobody read.

00:40:31 So there was a chance to use them both

00:40:36 or cooperate with them both as much as possible.

00:40:39 With Carothers, you couldn't cooperate anymore

00:40:41 because he was dead.

00:40:43 And then what my feeling was

00:40:46 that one would have to set up

00:40:49 some kind of literature in the field

00:40:52 because if a field is supposed to develop,

00:40:55 it can only develop on the basis of books

00:40:58 and eventually of journals.

00:41:01 That's the reason why Proscauer and Decker and I,

00:41:04 we published the Carothers book first.

00:41:07 First of all, just to have a firm background.

00:41:11 And then Marbury joined this group

00:41:16 and from then on we started to publish these various books.

00:41:20 So it was really an additional element

00:41:25 was now literature.

00:41:28 And then, as you pointed out,

00:41:31 during the war, things were very irregular.

00:41:34 I still remember we had kind of crazy assignments

00:41:39 for the army, the weasel,

00:41:42 and the Habakkuk.

00:41:47 Before we leave also,

00:41:50 I've often thought to myself,

00:41:54 is it just your own individual idea

00:41:58 that there are certain periods of time in science,

00:42:03 not necessarily one discipline alone,

00:42:07 that are more exciting than others.

00:42:11 And it's easy to fall into the trap of personalizing.

00:42:18 But I can't help think that that period,

00:42:24 in Germany particularly,

00:42:27 from 1920 to 1938-40,

00:42:37 if you look at all chemistry and physics,

00:42:41 there was an enormous number of things which emerged.

00:42:46 Not just the polymer alone,

00:42:48 but there were an enormous number of things.

00:42:50 Quantum mechanics emerged at that time.

00:42:54 Really, quantum mechanics emerged,

00:42:56 polymers emerged,

00:42:57 and semiconductors emerged at that time.

00:43:00 Those were the three fundamental things.

00:43:03 And, of course, a lot of biochemistry.

00:43:05 I mean, the enzyme work of Wollstetter

00:43:07 and the hormone work of Wieland and of Hans Fischer.

00:43:11 That was really the background of all the things which go on now

00:43:15 in the biofields.

00:43:18 Now, maybe we are nearing the end of our conversation.

00:43:24 Let's talk about what should our institute do next.

00:43:29 Now, you see, some institutes are strongly inclined

00:43:33 to move into the biofield,

00:43:38 biopolymers and everything,

00:43:40 bioengineering and such things.

00:43:43 This is nothing for us.

00:43:45 I mean, all the people who are doing that,

00:43:47 they do it very well.

00:43:48 What I think we should do

00:43:50 is to refine methods

00:43:54 for the detailed characterization of polymeric materials,

00:44:01 such as fluorescence.

00:44:03 The method exists,

00:44:06 but it can be tremendously refined

00:44:09 with relatively little expenses.

00:44:13 All you have to know

00:44:15 is how to make a polymer

00:44:17 which has these fluorescent or quenching units

00:44:21 in a certain place.

00:44:23 In other words, again,

00:44:24 you need a man who can make a polymer

00:44:26 absolutely according to specification

00:44:31 and then have an improved,

00:44:34 have a short-time equipment

00:44:38 like George Porter has at the Royal Institution.

00:44:43 This doesn't cost very much.

00:44:45 I think this is one area.

00:44:50 In other words, I think we should carry on

00:44:53 the refinements of existing methods

00:44:57 for the characterization of polymeric materials.

00:45:01 Well, it is certainly an important aspect.

00:45:04 And we can do that.

00:45:06 It doesn't cost too much.

00:45:07 It doesn't cost too much.

00:45:10 Of course, the Institute has always had

00:45:14 a reputation of developing new instrumental methods.

00:45:17 Yeah, the light scatter.

00:45:19 And this is another area

00:45:21 that you have always been interested in and pushed.

00:45:25 Well, I want to thank you very much

00:45:27 for taking the time and trouble

00:45:30 to discuss the history of polymer chemistry,

00:45:35 which is the history of Hermann Mark.