00:00:00 Kurt Meyer must have had a...

00:00:21 Stand by, this will be a recording.

00:00:29 Kurt Meyer must have had a significant impact on your scientific development.

00:00:35 Yes.

00:00:36 I think I've heard you speak of him many times,

00:00:39 and apparently an extremely talented, interested, hard-driving personality,

00:00:46 but yet someone who could understand the problems of a younger person.

00:00:55 Certainly.

00:00:56 You see, he was a pupil of Wollstetter.

00:01:00 And from Munich, on the recommendation of Wollstetter,

00:01:06 he was made, in 1923, director of a central laboratory of the IG Farben in Ludwigshafen.

00:01:14 And after he had been there for a while,

00:01:18 he realized strongly the fact that this laboratory has to be modernized.

00:01:24 It has to be adapted to the future demands of the company.

00:01:29 And that's what he told Haber, and when I met him the next day, told me.

00:01:36 He said, now we have a general, qualitative idea of what all these substances are,

00:01:44 but now we have to have those methods which you have developed here to study them quantitatively.

00:01:53 So do you want to come?

00:01:55 So I said, well, that's very interesting and challenging, no question about that.

00:01:59 And my answer is, in principle, yes, but of course I have to talk with my wife.

00:02:05 So Meyer said, I know that.

00:02:07 Whenever I do anything, I have to talk with my wife.

00:02:10 So why don't you come down with your wife and have a look at it?

00:02:13 So we went down for a few days, and on the 1st of January of 1927,

00:02:20 the family, my wife and I, we had no children yet, we moved to Mannheim, Ludwigshafen.

00:02:28 Now when I then started to work there, a new element came in, the element of practicality.

00:02:36 Until now, it was structure, it was behavior of materials, more or less from the fundamental point of view.

00:02:50 Whenever we had to make a certain substance, we made 5 grams.

00:02:55 Now, whenever we were interested in a substance, we would make 5 tons.

00:03:02 Which means that it was now a very much larger group.

00:03:08 In fact, it was a group which spanned from organic chemistry right into physics

00:03:15 and from preparation of new monomers over the polymerization reactions

00:03:26 and know-how into the purification and into the preparation of a fiber or of a film

00:03:34 and into the quantitative testing.

00:03:38 At that time, it was probably one of the largest corporate labs in the world.

00:03:42 Yes.

00:03:44 It sounds like the DuPont lab in the late 20s and early 30s, or maybe ICI,

00:03:52 but certainly it must have been one of the largest corporate laboratory structures studying polymers.

00:03:58 Probably the largest.

00:03:59 Yes.

00:04:00 There were others in the IG farm.

00:04:02 One was at the Höchst, that was on dyestuffs.

00:04:09 And one was in Leverkusen at Bayer, that was on pharmaceuticals.

00:04:15 So they concentrated their research on pharmaceuticals, Höchst on dyestuffs, and we on polymers.

00:04:26 There were some 65 people, and of course when we had to do something on a larger scale,

00:04:31 we had a technicum with kettles and with stills and with high-pressure or medium-pressure equipment.

00:04:38 And, well, what was done there, on top of refining the original Staudinger principle,

00:04:45 because our position, or my position and Mayer's position was, of course those were chains.

00:04:51 I mean, Staudinger has discovered and established the fact that all these materials are long chains.

00:04:58 First question is, how long are they really?

00:05:01 Second question is, what are their properties?

00:05:05 Are they stiff? Are they flexible?

00:05:07 Have they certain preferred conformations?

00:05:10 Have they certain preferred reactivities?

00:05:13 In other words, all the details had to be added.

00:05:16 As I remember, you wrote your first book, an X-ray diffraction, before you went to Ludwig Sabin.

00:05:28 This book was published in 1926, and I presume that its appearance to a certain extent

00:05:34 was responsible for the fact that Kurt Mayer wanted me to come to Ludwig Sabin.

00:05:38 Well, what made me think of it is I know you wrote several books with Kurt Mayer also.

00:05:42 Yes, later.

00:05:43 At a later stage.

00:05:44 Yes, 1930.

00:05:45 When did the call then come from the University of Vienna?

00:05:50 Well, then in 1932, early in 1932, Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany.

00:06:02 And one saw already that the general direction in which things would move.

00:06:09 And the director of our whole plant is Dr. Gauss.

00:06:17 One day he called me and said, look here, you are a foreigner.

00:06:23 Mayer is a foreigner.

00:06:25 You are of Jewish ancestry.

00:06:27 He is of Jewish ancestry.

00:06:29 I think it is best if you both see to it that you get some other jobs, academic jobs.

00:06:39 So Mayer went to Geneva, I went to Vienna.

00:06:42 And in my case, Dr. Gauss very much assisted this move by retaining me as a consultant

00:06:54 for the IG Farben Laboratory with a very substantial amount of money.

00:06:59 Mayer didn't need that.

00:07:00 He was a rich man anyway.

00:07:02 How did Mimi feel about all of this?

00:07:06 I always had the feeling that Ludwig Sabin was not her favorite place.

00:07:10 No.

00:07:11 She would probably like to go back to Vienna.

00:07:13 Yes.

00:07:14 Well, our two boys were born in Mannheim.

00:07:17 So there was a certain attachment to Mannheim.

00:07:20 But of course she was very happy to go back to Vienna because of her parents.

00:07:24 They were getting old, my parents getting old.

00:07:28 So we were glad that we had an opportunity to go to Vienna.

00:07:34 Well, then when I came to Vienna, another new element had to be added, and that was teaching.

00:07:44 Of course, there was no teaching in the polymer field at all.

00:07:48 If you take the famous books of organic chemistry of these days, like Carrer and like Hollemann,

00:08:00 maybe there was a page on cellulose.

00:08:02 Probably there was nothing on rubber at all except the word somewhere.

00:08:08 Maybe there was a page on proteins.

00:08:10 But that was all.

00:08:11 First of all, they were considered to be absolutely different disciplines.

00:08:15 And then they were more or less ignored for a chemist.

00:08:19 I mean, they were very important for engineers.

00:08:22 Well, I don't want to sound defensive, but you can take 50 percent of the standard organic texts

00:08:31 which are now written in the United States, and there's not more than one page on high polymer.

00:08:37 Yeah, you're right.

00:08:38 So while that sounds a bit harsh on my part, it's essentially true.

00:08:45 It's true.

00:08:47 Now then, of course, as you know, how this was teaching at the university,

00:08:50 it has to be integrated into the entire plan.

00:08:54 In other words, the other professors have to agree, the faculty has to agree.

00:08:59 And it took some time, you see, until, let's say, my colleague of organic chemistry,

00:09:06 Professor Speight, a very famous organic chemist, and others, until they agreed.

00:09:15 And what they really told me is this.

00:09:17 I told them what I would like to do.

00:09:19 I would like to start giving a five-hour course a week on fundamentals of polymer chemistry.

00:09:32 Kind of a general lecture.

00:09:34 And they said, well, if you want to do that on top of all the other things which you have to do, we don't care.

00:09:41 But certainly this could not be done at the expenses of the rest of our educational program.

00:09:50 All right, fine.

00:09:52 So what I did then, I assembled a large number of young people.

00:09:57 Some of them came from Germany.

00:09:59 Others came from other places.

00:10:02 And with the aid of them, you see, we organized such a course.

00:10:06 One of them gave the synthesis of monomers.

00:10:08 The other one gave polymerization kinetics.

00:10:10 The other one gave viscosity measurements and so on and so on.

00:10:15 So that really after three years, that means in 1935, there was a solid background of polymer teaching established.

00:10:31 And as far as the search went, again, it was obvious that under the same roof must be the man who makes a new polymer.

00:10:44 A man who handles it, spins it, casts it.

00:10:51 A man who establishes its molecular weight, molecular weight distribution.

00:10:56 The man who eventually makes physical tests.

00:10:59 In other words, it doesn't work to buy a polyethylene from a certain company and then spend a year on characterizing it to the last possible degree

00:11:14 because after a year, the company doesn't make this polyethylene anymore.

00:11:18 Well, today it's obvious.

00:11:22 That's what everybody does today.

00:11:25 But at that time, it had to be tried out whether it can be done.

00:11:31 One of the things that I've always admired about you is that decision that you had to make.

00:11:39 You didn't have to make and yet you had to make to get out and get out fast.

00:11:44 That was 37, wasn't it?

00:11:46 38.

00:11:47 38.

00:11:48 To take all of the things you'd worked for and you can always, and many people did unfortunately, talk themselves into not believing.

00:12:00 I've always admired you for that decision to get out and get out fast.

00:12:04 And I know it wasn't easy.

00:12:06 But you see, I had the great advantage that I had been in Germany.

00:12:10 I was in Germany for ten years, from 22 to 32.

00:12:16 And I had seen how that comes up and how that works.

00:12:21 And as soon as I saw that Austria would be in the same situation, in the same quadrant, I just left.

00:12:28 Now, I had a big advantage that I had an offer from Canada, from the Canadian International Paper Company.

00:12:35 The director, a Norwegian, he visited Europe quite frequently.

00:12:43 In 1937, he also visited my institute because he knew that we were working on cellulose.

00:12:49 And he told me, look here, we have a big research laboratory.

00:12:53 We call it research laboratory in Hawkesbury in Canada.

00:12:57 But now that I travel through Europe, I see that our laboratory is obsolete.

00:13:04 We would like to have somebody to come over, take that laboratory and modernize it.

00:13:09 So I said, well, for the time being, I can't get away so fast.

00:13:13 But one year later, I got away very fast.

00:13:17 And then I went to Canada with the family to Hawkesbury.

00:13:23 Big paper company, pulp and paper company.

00:13:27 A company which made most of the pulp which was used by the DuPont Company.

00:13:37 And the DuPont Company needed several types of pulp.

00:13:40 They needed one for cellulose acetate.

00:13:43 They needed one for tire cord.

00:13:46 And they needed one for standard rayon.

00:13:49 And we had to cook up these different pulps together with the DuPont paper.

00:13:57 Before we leave the University of Vienna, you, of course, had a number of students

00:14:02 who later became well-known in their own right.

00:14:07 Who would you classify in that group?

00:14:11 Well, there was Dr. Patat, Eirich, Simha, Süss, Vacek, Gross, Guth, and a few others.

00:14:29 That's an imposing list.

00:14:31 It's an imposing list of students that you trained and made their own impact.

00:14:38 Most of them in the States.

00:14:40 Many of them in the States.

00:14:41 Most of them eventually emigrated.

00:14:45 So then you stopped in England on your way over...

00:14:48 Kratki. I forgot Kratki.

00:14:50 Kratki.

00:14:53 Low angle x-ray scanner.

00:14:57 Even a good old organic chemist like me...

00:14:59 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:15:02 You didn't stay in England.

00:15:03 Parents. I forgot parents.

00:15:04 Parents?

00:15:05 Yeah, sure.

00:15:08 He was not only low angle x-ray, he got the Nobel Prize.

00:15:13 How long did you stay in England before you got to Huxbury?

00:15:16 A few months.

00:15:17 A few months.

00:15:21 Of course, those delightful Canadian winters were exhilarating.

00:15:26 Educational, yes.

00:15:30 That must have been quite a change to go to Huxbury,

00:15:36 and yet you didn't lose your enthusiasm and interest,

00:15:40 and their interaction with the DuPont Company soon had you in interaction with the DuPont Company.

00:15:45 Yes.

00:15:46 It all came about like this, that one of the directors of DuPont,

00:15:57 William F. Zimmerly...

00:15:59 I knew him, yeah.

00:16:01 He was on the board of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn,

00:16:08 and Dr. Benger, the director of the research division of the family department,

00:16:17 he came up to Canada quite a few times to discuss problems.

00:16:27 Then some day, they probably went to Dr. Rogers

00:16:34 and told him, look here, we have the feeling that this fellow would like to come to the States.

00:16:41 Why don't you offer him at least an adjunct professorship?

00:16:46 So with Dr. Kirk and Dr. Rogers, they did that at the instigation

00:16:53 or maybe at the suggestion of the DuPont people.

00:16:58 Now, up in Huxbury, of course, my director wasn't very happy about it,

00:17:03 but he couldn't say very much because DuPont was his best customer,

00:17:07 so he didn't want to antagonize DuPont.

00:17:09 He got a very good successor from me anyhow.

00:17:13 Then in 1940, I came down to Brooklyn.

00:17:18 Well, that's another period of your life that I have great admiration for you

00:17:23 because while the spirit was there, the Ph.D. program was there,

00:17:29 the facilities were other than magnificent.

00:17:33 It didn't bother you at all.

00:17:35 You simply waited in.

00:17:38 It is to, I think, Harry Rogers and Ray Kirk's everlasting credit to go ahead

00:17:46 because their backgrounds and personalities and traditional education in the States

00:17:55 were completely different than yours,

00:17:57 and yet they had enough vision to understand that this was the way the Polytechnic could go.

00:18:03 And as I look back on that, that was a great thing.

00:18:10 Of course, then I know some of the chapter, having participated in it since 1947.

00:18:22 You might mention a few things about the war years

00:18:25 and that interim period where there were no regular students to speak of,

00:18:36 or at least not very many.

00:18:43 There were students that came, an onrush of students then, about 1946.

00:18:51 I don't know if you want to say anything about those early days at the Polytechnic

00:18:59 in that interim period before we had the growth of the Institute exponentially right after the war.

00:19:10 Well, you see, the great advantage for me was that the word polymer was unknown in the United States.

00:19:18 The only man who had worked on, well, there were two people who had worked on polymers.

00:19:23 One was Carothers in an industrial laboratory who published wonderful papers which nobody read,

00:19:31 and the other one was Speed Marble in an organic chemical department at the University of Illinois

00:19:36 who published wonderful papers which nobody read.

00:19:39 So there was a chance to use them both or cooperate with them both as much as possible.

00:19:47 With Carothers, you couldn't cooperate anymore because he was dead.

00:19:52 And then what my feeling was that one would have to set up some kind of literature in the field

00:20:00 because if a field is supposed to develop, it can only develop on the basis of books

00:20:06 and eventually of journals.

00:20:09 That's the reason why Proskauer and Decker and I, we published the Carothers book first.

00:20:15 First of all, just to have a firm background.

00:20:19 And then Marbury joined this group, and from then on we started to publish these various books.

00:20:28 So it was really an additional element was now literature.

00:20:36 And then, as you pointed out, during the war things were very irregular.

00:20:42 I still remember we had kind of crazy assignments for the army, the weasel and the habercook and the duck.

00:20:55 Those were the days when General Alfred first appeared at the institute and made his impact

00:21:01 as being completely in the fatigue and doing everything excellently and fast.

00:21:10 And then you came, and so we had the organic ant in our hands.

00:21:19 And you came from MIT, where you just had repeated as the first human being,

00:21:25 the old synthesis of cyclooctatetraene, and meanwhile Reppi had made it in Germany.

00:21:31 And then you repeated the Reppi synthesis, I think, in the shaft of an elevator.

00:21:37 That's correct.

00:21:38 At the bottom of a shaft of an elevator.

00:21:41 And the reason was that there was always a certain probability it would blow up.

00:21:46 So we said, well, if it blows up in the shaft of an elevator not used anymore, at least that's it.

00:21:52 But anyway, you got it, you see.

00:21:54 And then Frank Huchen and I, we determined the structure.

00:21:58 As a matter of fact, that was an interesting aspect of things,

00:22:03 because the control room for that bomb and so on was partially outdoors

00:22:09 and was a lavatory that was outdoors.

00:22:15 And we had all these controls on it.

00:22:21 Well, before we leave also, I've often thought to myself,

00:22:31 is it just your own individual idea that there are certain periods of time in science,

00:22:40 not necessarily one discipline alone, that are more exciting than others?

00:22:48 And it's easy to fall into the trap of personalizing.

00:22:55 But I can't help think that that period, in Germany particularly,

00:23:04 from 1920 to 1938-40, if you look at all chemistry and physics,

00:23:18 there was an enormous number of things which emerged.

00:23:22 Not just the polymer alone, but there were an enormous number of things.

00:23:27 Quantum mechanics emerged at that time.

00:23:30 Really, quantum mechanics emerged, polymers emerged, and semiconductors emerged at that time.

00:23:36 Those were the three fundamental things.

00:23:40 And of course, a lot of biochemistry.

00:23:42 I mean, the enzyme work of Wilstetter and the hormone work of Wieland and of Hans Fischer.

00:23:48 That was really the background of all the things which go on now in the biofields.

00:23:55 What would you like to say then about the Palmer Research Institute

00:24:02 at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn as you established it

00:24:07 and as it grew from 1946 particularly?

00:24:11 Well, as I said, I think one element to be added to research and teaching was literature.

00:24:20 Yes.

00:24:21 And with the good help of Decker and most of all of Proskauer, that was done.

00:24:27 And they really risked their necks.

00:24:31 Because when they started this series, they had no money.

00:24:35 When they started the journal, they had even less money.

00:24:38 And they just did it.

00:24:40 And you remember how we sweated out the first volumes of the journal.

00:24:43 We never had enough papers.

00:24:45 And now it's the other way around.

00:24:47 It's polymerized.

00:24:49 And then, you see, of course, then it was felt, I think, Kirk said that first,

00:24:57 well, why don't we give a name to what we have anyway?

00:25:03 Namely, a polymer research institute.

00:25:05 And that was, so to speak, the official, the day when the name was made official

00:25:10 and came under the stationery.

00:25:15 And then I felt, after the war, the next important step for me

00:25:22 and for all my collaborators would be international connections.

00:25:28 And such an institute, if it remains restricted to the United States and Brooklyn, would die.

00:25:37 So let's go out, use all our international connections and see.

00:25:43 And that was then the beginning really of EUPAC.

00:25:48 And all the beginning of, and you went to Amsterdam, where I don't know,

00:25:57 and Mays went to Groningen, and Turner went to Liege, and Tobolsk.

00:26:08 So we had half a dozen of spies all over the world.

00:26:13 Imogud went to Sweden.

00:26:16 And that paid off tremendously.

00:26:20 I agree with you.

00:26:21 That paid off tremendously.

00:26:23 The contacts which you set up and then the younger people did were just tremendous.

00:26:28 Yeah, and then the others came, no?

00:26:30 They came and they cooked.

00:26:32 And Kaczalski, both Kaczalskis came.

00:26:35 And almost everybody came and stayed a while at the institute and then went back again.

00:26:41 And now we have a dense cross-linked network all over the world.

00:26:49 And then you see when we are now in the 60s or so,

00:26:53 the best proof of the pudding is to eat it.

00:27:01 And the best proof of the usefulness of our institute in Brooklyn

00:27:07 was that so many other universities did the same thing.

00:27:12 We certainly triggered some much more interest in academic life.

00:27:19 And those people who left Brooklyn, like you, they started it.

00:27:23 Orlando, he started it in Cleveland.

00:27:25 Well, he didn't really start it, but Stein, he started it,

00:27:29 or at least laid the foundation in Amherst.

00:27:33 If I must personalize for a moment,

00:27:35 I can remember when I obtained the offer to be an assistant professor

00:27:40 at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.

00:27:42 And, of course, I called up Speed Marvel and said,

00:27:47 What do you think?

00:27:50 And he said in characteristic fashion,

00:27:52 Do you want to do research in polymers?

00:27:55 I said, Yes.

00:27:56 And he said, You better take it.

00:28:01 Which was a straightforward common sense.

00:28:05 Because I doubt if I could have done it in the same way anyplace else.

00:28:11 Of course, the other thing which, to me, will always be there,

00:28:17 the excitement of a period there,

00:28:22 when we had all of these young people around, and you,

00:28:26 not that you weren't young, don't misunderstand me,

00:28:29 but it was tremendous.

00:28:31 My own scientific life was kind of molded in 20 years of research there.

00:28:37 It was a free and easy exchange of ideas.

00:28:40 It was a wonderful time.

00:28:43 And it wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for

00:28:48 your own interest, personality, and driving force.

00:28:52 And Kirk.

00:28:53 And Kirk.

00:28:54 Well, Rogers didn't live very long, but Kirk.

00:28:58 He integrated it, and he did it in a nice way.

00:29:02 Yeah, Kirk was absolutely unique.

00:29:07 If necessary, he was very firm,

00:29:10 but he had an excellent understanding for starting off new things.

00:29:17 Now, maybe we are nearing the end of our conversation.

00:29:23 Let's talk about what should our institute do next.

00:29:28 I mean, where should they move next?

00:29:33 Now, with Eli Pierce, and with Dona Ruma,

00:29:37 and with Bernie Balkin, with Eirich and Moravec,

00:29:42 and thanks God we have now six very good young professors.

00:29:47 Organic chemists, x-ray, laser chemistry, everything.

00:29:51 And if we get Keller and Atkins, we are really a very powerful group.

00:29:58 Well, there is no question that there has been a resurgence of activity again.

00:30:02 Yes, yes.

00:30:04 And an understanding from the administration there that

00:30:09 they almost lost something, and they better work at it to

00:30:13 retain what they have and improve it.

00:30:15 And I, of course, can't emphasize that that's the way the institute must go.

00:30:24 Now, you see, some institutes are strongly inclined to move into the bio field,

00:30:32 biopolymers and everything, bioengineering and such things.

00:30:38 This is nothing for us.

00:30:40 I mean, all the people that are doing that, they do it very well.

00:30:43 What I think we should do is to refine methods for the detailed characterization

00:30:52 of polymeric materials, such as fluorescence.

00:30:58 The method exists, but it can be tremendously refined

00:31:04 with relatively little expenses.

00:31:09 All you have to know is how to make a polymer

00:31:13 which has these fluorescent or quenching units in a certain place.

00:31:19 In other words, again, you need a man who can make a polymer

00:31:22 absolutely according to specification.

00:31:26 And then have an improved, have a short-time equipment

00:31:33 like George Porter has at the Royal Institution.

00:31:38 This doesn't cost very much.

00:31:40 I think this is one area.

00:31:45 In other words, I think we should carry on refinements of existing methods

00:31:52 for the characterization of polymeric materials.

00:31:55 Well, it is certainly an important aspect.

00:31:59 And we can do that.

00:32:01 It doesn't cost too much.

00:32:03 It doesn't cost too much.

00:32:06 Of course, the Institute has always had a reputation

00:32:10 of developing new instrumental methods.

00:32:13 Yeah, with light scattering.

00:32:15 This is another area that you have always been interested in and pushed.

00:32:21 Well, I want to thank you very much for taking the time and trouble

00:32:25 to discuss the history of polymer chemistry,

00:32:30 which is the history of Herman Mark.

00:32:34 And it's a pleasure to have this opportunity to chat with you

00:32:39 and get this recorded for posterity for the American Chemical Society.

00:32:47 And I, as always, Herman, wish you the very best.

00:32:51 Well, I thank you very much.

00:32:53 It wasn't trouble for me at all.

00:32:55 It was a real great pleasure.

00:32:57 And I thank you, and I thank the American Chemical Society.