00:00:00 Are we ready?

00:00:30 Don't ask him anything about what impact the depression you just had.

00:00:34 Oh, well, we could talk about that, too.

00:00:36 Is the tape rolling?

00:00:38 No? Okay. Just let us know when.

00:01:01 Your thesis research on the ultraviolet absorption or the absorption spectra of nitrogen tetraoxide

00:01:14 already seems to be a different kind of research than the chemistry that you were learning at Harvard just 10 or 12 years earlier.

00:01:20 Oh, yes.

00:01:21 Well, you see, actually, what happened to me in those days was that when you are unwelcome in any field,

00:01:32 you will try any particular line of investigation in order to broaden your experiences so that your availability will be more widespread.

00:01:45 Consequently, there was no relation between what I did on my doctorate with what I did on my master's degree

00:01:53 or, as a matter of fact, with what I did as an undergraduate.

00:01:57 But I was endeavoring to widen my expertise so that I could expect a wider availability for various jobs which might be possible.

00:02:14 At MIT, were there more new instruments than had been available?

00:02:17 Well, for example, I remember we used a Hilgis spectrograph.

00:02:21 We used a couple of Hilgis spectrographs and microphotometers,

00:02:26 and we had to develop a certain vacuum technique in preparing pure nitrogen tetraoxide, which is a very difficult thing.

00:02:40 We had to devise a method whereby it could be prepared at low temperatures

00:02:45 so that we wouldn't get any decomposition of the nitrogen dioxide into nitric oxide.

00:02:51 It had to be carried out in a system whereby we kept oxygen flowing through the system

00:03:02 and where we carried out the synthesis in yellow light because nitrogen dioxide absorbs in the visible

00:03:13 and breaks down into oxygen and nitric oxide.

00:03:17 So we wanted to get pure samples, and we had to build a vacuum system

00:03:25 so that we could clean it out and then set up for the preparation and storage of the nitrogen tetraoxide,

00:03:34 which we would use in our experiment.

00:03:37 We had to have a special type of door, a quartz door, which was rather expensive to make.

00:03:45 It had a quartz cell sealed into a quartz door so that we could carry out absorption measurements at low temperatures

00:03:56 and would have the optics there for carrying out the investigation in ultraviolet light.

00:04:05 It was a rather complicated technique, but it was rather interesting.

00:04:12 So MIT was really the first place that you had a sustained experience of doing chemical research.

00:04:17 That's right.

00:04:20 I carried out that research with a fellow named Gilbert King, who was an English fellow.

00:04:32 He was a graduate of Brown University, as a matter of fact.

00:04:36 But he was a very interesting fellow because he was a product of the English system.

00:04:41 Their background was quite an effective background as far as physical chemistry was concerned.

00:04:51 They'd done quite a bit of mathematics.

00:04:57 So after the experience at MIT, did you try to pursue your initial goal of finding a job in American industry?

00:05:13 Oh, yes. I thought that with a degree from the chemical engineering department at MIT might give me entree.

00:05:23 I looked through the papers to find out what jobs were being advertised in the field of chemistry and chemical engineering.

00:05:30 I applied for some of them.

00:05:34 One of them, I remember, I went to and the fellow seemed surprised to see me.

00:05:40 He said, in bated breath, are you colored?

00:05:45 Had I been a little more sophisticated, I would have told him no.

00:05:50 But having been taught always to be honest, I told him yes.

00:05:55 He said, well, don't call us. We'll call you.

00:05:59 Has he called?

00:06:00 Not yet.

00:06:09 Were the faculty any help in trying to suggest ways where you could find employment?

00:06:15 Well, to me, this was the way that jobs were gotten in those days.

00:06:18 But you see, no members of those faculties wanted to propose to Negro because they knew they didn't have a chance.

00:06:28 Consequently, they simply tolerated the presence of Negroes in the educational system,

00:06:38 knowing that they weren't going to do anything about making it possible for him to get a job.

00:06:45 Was your family able to help in any way?

00:06:47 Well, my father and mother were people who were largely self-educated.

00:06:58 My father was a high school graduate.

00:07:00 My mother was self-educated.

00:07:02 They were well read.

00:07:03 They knew what the world was all about.

00:07:05 And my father said to me, when I finished college, he said, well, he said, this is out of my realm now.

00:07:13 He said, I don't know what more I can do for you.

00:07:16 He said, this is a field that I know nothing about.

00:07:20 He said, but if you think of anything that you think I can do, just let me know and I'll be glad to do it.

00:07:28 There was family support there, but you see, in living and working in these professional areas,

00:07:36 you have to know something about how things are done.

00:07:40 And if there's no experience in those areas, you don't know how things are done,

00:07:45 and consequently you're left to your own devices.

00:07:48 There was no tradition in the family of acquiring a job for someone who had become a professional scientist.

00:07:55 So therefore, very little assistance could be given.

00:07:59 That's right.

00:08:00 During these years, did you ever go back to New Bedford High School to talk to your high school teachers about job situations?

00:08:09 No, I never went back there to talk to them.

00:08:11 My brother went back once and he gave some kind of address to his class, but I never went back.

00:08:22 But after you finished your Ph.D. at MIT, you were part of one network at least.

00:08:27 You'd been at Johnson C. Smith for a while.

00:08:29 That's right.

00:08:30 And you did go back next to Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina.

00:08:35 Yes, I went down there, you see.

00:08:40 I knew of what teaching jobs were available, and one went to those jobs which one thought to be the most promising.

00:08:51 North Carolina was not one of the worst southern states in those days,

00:08:57 so I chose A&T because it had the reputation of being a rather liberal state,

00:09:04 and I thought that there might be chances for me to stay current professionally

00:09:10 by going to meetings at the University of North Carolina or Duke University or places like that.

00:09:16 So I went to A&T, and I had an assistant at A&T, Harry Green.

00:09:23 He had a bachelor's degree from Ohio State,

00:09:30 and he later went on to MIT and got a master's degree and then to Ohio State to get a Ph.D.

00:09:37 But we taught chemistry there, and they gave us a room which we could rebuild.

00:09:46 We rebuilt a room for laboratory work,

00:09:52 but the environment was still not a very fertile one for intellectual growth and professional growth.

00:10:00 So we stayed there for a while, and ultimately we got the opportunity to go to Talladega College.

00:10:08 Talladega College was one of the few liberal arts colleges for Negroes in the United States.

00:10:15 It had a great tradition, and we went there.

00:10:18 There was a fellow named Buell G. Gallagher who was the president of that school then,

00:10:25 and the students there, and the students today on the team were bright,

00:10:31 but they had different interests in professional chemistry.

00:10:40 At Talladega, I found students who were interested in professional chemistry and chemistry as a profession.

00:10:47 As a matter of fact, I had a student do an undergraduate dissertation

00:10:57 which was published in the American Chemical Society while I was there,

00:11:03 a fellow named Nathaniel Burbage.

00:11:07 He was a very able student.

00:11:09 He went on to get a medical degree and to do graduate work in pharmacology

00:11:18 and ended up as a member of the teaching staff at Berkeley University of California in the field of pharmacology.

00:11:28 But we did a little experiment there on a vapor phase esterification

00:11:34 in which we devised a static system for measuring the equilibrium constant

00:11:41 of the esterification of acetic acid by ethyl alcohol over zirconium oxide as a catalyst.

00:11:51 We carried these things out, I think, at about 200 degrees, 150 degrees centigrade

00:11:58 and worked out the free energies and the heats of reactions of this reaction,

00:12:05 and it was published.

00:12:08 These were the types of students that you had during those days.

00:12:13 They were ambitious, they were hardworking, they were imaginative, and they were dedicated.

00:12:21 I remember, even though their preparation might not have been what it should be,

00:12:28 I remember a young fellow there whose father was a physician.

00:12:34 He was from Asheville, North Carolina.

00:12:37 He had taken a couple of courses with me and failed both of them.

00:12:42 He came to me one day and asked me if I thought he could really be a physician.

00:12:48 I said, you know, I'm having a hard time.

00:12:51 He said, you know, I went through a school system which advanced me because my father was a doctor.

00:12:59 He said I didn't have to do anything and I'm now unprepared

00:13:03 and I find myself wanting to be a doctor but I have doubts about whether I can succeed.

00:13:09 And he said the desire for me to be a doctor is so strong that I've contemplated suicide.

00:13:16 You see, this is what an inefficient educational system does to a young lad.

00:13:22 And I'm, that is, I wasn't an old wise man in those days.

00:13:29 I was just a young fellow.

00:13:31 But I'm faced with this kind of problem.

00:13:33 So I said to him, I said, well now, this fellow had a beautiful tone of voice.

00:13:38 I said, well look, you're here to find out what area is best for you to build a career in.

00:13:45 I said, I think that a fellow can be anything he wants to be if he works hard enough.

00:13:51 And I said, you can become a singer.

00:13:54 There may be other fields in which you can find sufficient interest to develop your talents.

00:14:02 Well, he wanted to be a doctor and he went on to study, studied hard.

00:14:07 And when, they used to give medical aptitude tests in those days.

00:14:11 And when they gave that medical aptitude test, he was the best one in the group.

00:14:16 I heard from him about six years later.

00:14:21 And he was professor of anatomy at Meharry Medical College.

00:14:28 That is, even with these handicaps, these youngsters can win.

00:14:33 If they want to win, they can win.

00:14:39 And Talladega had many students like that.

00:14:42 Oh yes, Talladega had many students like that.

00:14:46 It was a purely liberal arts college.

00:14:51 And actually, sons and daughters of the graduates of that institution were sent there.

00:15:04 They had a very intellectual, very able clientele to draw from.

00:15:12 Talladega is located, what, near Sylacauga?

00:15:16 Oh yes, yes.

00:15:19 At one time you told me a rather humorous incident related to finding directions to Sylacauga by one of your colleagues.

00:15:31 Clarence Harvey Mills, wasn't it?

00:15:34 Well, there was a fellow named Clarence Harvey Mills.

00:15:37 Clarence Harvey Mills was a very dark fellow, but very cultured and very well trained.

00:15:44 He was a very brilliant fellow.

00:15:46 He was a Phi Beta Kappa man from Dartmouth.

00:15:49 He got a master's degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in philology.

00:15:56 He had been embittered by his experiences and he didn't tolerate the indignities to which he was frequently submitted.

00:16:06 These made him very angry.

00:16:08 And when he became very angry, he lost his culture.

00:16:16 So he was walking down Battle Street in Talladega one day and thinking about I don't know what.

00:16:23 But his attention was attracted by some white fellows in a truck who shouted at him and said,

00:16:34 Say Charlie, what's the way to Sylacauga?

00:16:39 And he was awakened from his thoughts, but he was very angry to be called by his first name because he's a man who prized his dignity.

00:16:48 It was the custom in the South to address all blacks by their first name.

00:16:55 So he gathered his strength and walked over to the curb and said to these fellows in the most cultured term,

00:17:03 Pardon me, but how did you know my name was Charlie?

00:17:09 And they said, Oh, we guessed it.

00:17:11 He said, Well, God damn it, guess your way to Sylacauga.

00:17:21 Now this was his response and this was his reaction to these kind of indignities.

00:17:26 You're talking about the year around what, 1936, 37?

00:17:31 This was around 1940.

00:17:33 Oh, 40.

00:17:36 What kind of salaries were derived from being a college professor?

00:17:43 Well, the salaries there were between $3,000 and $4,000, $3,000 and $4,000.

00:17:50 As a matter of fact, my salary at Talladega was $4,000 a year.

00:17:54 Were there opportunities for, say, summer employment somewhere or did you just take summers?

00:17:59 No, there were no opportunities.

00:18:01 They didn't have any money for summer employment.

00:18:04 Actually, summer employment was given to those people who were interested in teachers who wanted to improve their standing

00:18:14 or get advances in their certification, and those were largely courses in education.

00:18:21 No one would come to summer school to take chemistry.

00:18:27 And by this time you were supporting a family on that salary, weren't you?

00:18:31 Oh, yes, yes, and one widowed mother, as a matter of fact.

00:18:36 That was along with my brothers and sisters.

00:18:39 We had the support of my mother and we also had, I had a daughter at that time.

00:18:49 You had gotten married when you were in graduate school at MIT.

00:18:53 That's right, that's right, yes.

00:18:55 And was your wife from the North as well?

00:18:58 No, she was from Richmond, Virginia.

00:19:00 She was a student at Harvard when I was there.

00:19:02 She was a student in the art department.

00:19:10 Was Buell Gallagher at Talladega as, well, you mentioned earlier that the minister who was head of Johnson C. Smith

00:19:21 expected everyone to go to Sunday school and was trying to inculcate moral values

00:19:27 in the faculty as well as the students.

00:19:29 That's right.

00:19:30 What was Gallagher like at Talladega?

00:19:32 Well, Buell Gallagher was, for public purposes, he was a teetotaler,

00:19:40 and he abhorred the presence of alcoholic beverages on the campus.

00:19:48 And living in an environment like Talladega, one, in order to survive,

00:19:53 had to have a little alcoholic beverage around.

00:19:56 This was essential to one's survival.

00:19:59 And this was a dry county, and people, the young people on the faculty,

00:20:07 used to go to Birmingham to replace their stock, but they didn't have any place to put it.

00:20:17 And I, being an amenable colleague, told them they could store it in my house.

00:20:23 And so they had in my clothes closet a whole shelf full of whiskey bottles with names on them.

00:20:31 And people on the faculty would come by my house for their sustenance.

00:20:40 And Gallagher would come by frequently.

00:20:42 Well, he was a heel fellow, well, he liked to be one of the boys,

00:20:46 and he would come in and take off his coat and open the closet door to hang it up.

00:20:50 And he would see all these whiskey bottles, some empty, some full, some half-empty.

00:20:57 So, I don't know, he may have concluded that I was a bootlegger on the campus.

00:21:03 But anyway, this disturbed him very much.

00:21:07 Did he ever challenge you about...

00:21:10 Well, for example, there was a time when some students on their way home in the spring of the year

00:21:18 had gotten drunk on a train going somewhere.

00:21:26 And they arrested them and they called him.

00:21:30 And when he found that liquor was involved,

00:21:33 he thought that this might be attributable to the drinking ways of the members of his faculty.

00:21:39 So he came back and issued the edict that anybody with liquor on their premises,

00:21:46 in their rooms, would be summarily dismissed.

00:21:50 What was your response?

00:21:52 Well, we had to go to one of the sage old men on the campus,

00:21:57 a fellow named Fletcher, who understood the situation.

00:22:05 And we had him intercede for us with the president.

00:22:11 And the president would listen to an older head rather than a younger head,

00:22:14 so nothing came of that.

00:22:21 Were you able to do research, have senior projects for your students at Talladega?

00:22:27 Well, we didn't have any equipment.

00:22:29 That was the one thing that we did.

00:22:31 We did with beverage and we had to build the equipment.

00:22:37 But we did get some recognition.

00:22:40 Some organization of learned societies wanted to evaluate these institutions

00:22:48 as far as their scientific program was concerned.

00:22:52 And our students came out pretty well.

00:22:54 We sent a fellow down there to interview us,

00:22:59 and this fellow was willing to advance us money for research.

00:23:06 But it was about that time that the war broke out and I left Talladega.

00:23:12 Our students on those examinations did better than anybody else,

00:23:16 and this attracted their attention.

00:23:20 You not only taught but was a student during the Depression years.

00:23:29 What is your remembrance of those days as a student and as a teacher?

00:23:35 Well, I was at that moment during those days.

00:23:39 Those were tough days.

00:23:43 Actually, the money was very difficult to get your hands on.

00:23:52 As a matter of fact, a lot of the banks were closing.

00:23:57 I remember there was a black bank in Atlanta, Georgia,

00:24:05 which was run by a fellow named Warren Milton.

00:24:11 Warren Milton ran this bank,

00:24:15 but he filled his cages up with greenbacks and bills of all sizes, all denominations,

00:24:24 and people would come in there and see the money stacked up in there and going out.

00:24:32 The commissioner of banking had to call him up and tell him to close his bank

00:24:37 because he was calling a run on all the other banks in the state of Georgia.

00:24:42 That's the only thing I can remember about that Depression.

00:24:48 Money was short, they closed the banks, and Roosevelt was just coming into power.

00:24:54 Actually, financially, those were very difficult times for everybody

00:24:58 because money was withdrawn and people were being paid by script in those days.

00:25:09 Were students finding it difficult to find jobs when they graduated in those years?

00:25:14 Well, in those years, there was difficulty.

00:25:20 This was before the war.

00:25:22 There was always difficulty, but some of them were determined.

00:25:29 I remember a young fellow from Alabama whose parents said he'd better teach school

00:25:39 because he would have a job rather than try to get a job as a chemist, but he wanted to be a chemist.

00:25:45 He came to me with this problem, and the only honest thing I could tell him was that,

00:25:50 well, you're going to starve to death teaching school in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

00:25:54 You'll probably starve to death trying to be a chemist,

00:25:57 but you'd better starve to death doing something that you like to do

00:26:02 rather than starve to death doing something that you don't like to do.

00:26:06 He went on to continue his work.

00:26:09 I think he got a Ph.D. from Chicago and also an M.D.

00:26:15 and currently, if he's not retired, he's a member of the faculty at Illinois Medical College.

00:26:22 Was that Professor Sherrard?

00:26:24 That's Sherrard, yes.

00:26:26 It was interesting.

00:26:28 One day, Lou Islands of Eastman Kodak wrote me a note.

00:26:35 He'd come back from a visit to Illinois, and he wrote me a note

00:26:40 saying that he had just had lunch with Dr. Sherrard,

00:26:44 who was one of my former students and wanted to be remembered to me.

00:26:48 This reflects the kind of dedication those young men had in those days,

00:26:53 the abilities that they had, their willingness to pay the price for what they wanted to do.

00:27:02 Well, you said that you stayed at Talladega until the war came.

00:27:08 What did you decide to do when the war broke out?

00:27:12 Well, when the war broke out, I had a daughter,

00:27:17 and I didn't think that I was the arms-bearing type,

00:27:23 so I offered my services through the facilities in Talladega to the federal government.

00:27:31 They were a little surprised and referred me to the governor,

00:27:35 and I called the governor's office, and whoever was the governor's representative

00:27:42 told me that he was happy to receive my communication, but he would let me know.

00:27:48 I never heard from him.

00:27:50 In the meantime, I had written to MIT, and they put me in contact with Columbia University,

00:27:56 and I got a wire from Columbia asking me to come there for an interview.

00:28:01 I went there, and this is where and when I met Dr. Libby.

00:28:14 He looked over my credentials and said,

00:28:19 Well, I think that you can help us here.

00:28:23 He said, Can you be back in two weeks?

00:28:25 I said, I certainly can.

00:28:28 You see, it was not the civil rights movement that opened up things for black chemists and chemical engineers.

00:28:36 It was actually the war, and opportunities became available.

00:28:41 I returned to New York City, and I went to work on the Manhattan Project.

00:28:48 We were interested in trying to find what metals would have to be used

00:28:55 and set aside for the development of the atomic bomb.

00:29:00 There were corrosion studies to be carried out.

00:29:04 We had to find out how to stabilize the metal which would be used in the diffusion process.

00:29:12 It had to be stabilized against the process gas, which was uranium hexafluoride.

00:29:18 Our problem was to find out how to stabilize the gas, how to stabilize the metal,

00:29:27 and how to measure the consumption of process gas after the metal had been stabilized.

00:29:35 We had to use fluorine to do this, and this was a fascinating area of research

00:29:42 because fluorine was a very uncommon chemical at that time.

00:29:47 No one knew exactly how to handle it, so we had to develop the techniques of handling fluorine.

00:29:55 It was a very fascinating, very demanding, but very exciting period of my life.

00:30:04 It was during this period that I first became aware of the opportunity

00:30:13 of what it was like to be in an active scientific community.

00:30:18 It was a very thrilling experience for me because it was the first chance I'd ever had

00:30:24 to work in that kind of community.

00:30:26 Even as a student, I never had this opportunity of working in this kind of community.

00:30:33 I worked hard at this.

00:30:38 There was a fellow named Walter J. Moore who was head of the corrosion section at that time.

00:30:49 He left, and he went to take a job, I think, at Roman Haas or some other place,

00:30:57 and this left his position vacant.

00:31:01 He left it vacant for a couple of months during that period.

00:31:08 He asked me to write a report, and I did it.

00:31:13 After two months had gone, he called me in and asked me if I would take charge of that section.

00:31:19 There were about a dozen people in the section, all whites except myself.

00:31:25 I said, yes, I would, so he called the people into his office, and he said,

00:31:31 as of today, Dr. Knox will be the head of the corrosion section,

00:31:35 and I want you all to give him your fullest cooperation.

00:31:39 That is all.

00:31:42 That was it.

00:31:44 This is an interesting thing because this was purely based upon merit.

00:31:50 There was no paternalism in this.

00:31:54 This impressed me greatly.

00:31:57 There was no paternalism in this.

00:32:00 It was a man who, I think, just made judgments on the basis of competence.

00:32:09 I think this was really the characteristic of a really great man, a really great scientist.

00:32:17 So Willard F. Libby had provided you with an opportunity to compete.

00:32:22 That's right.

00:32:24 That is all that you asked for and wanted.

00:32:27 That's right.

00:32:29 All you can expect.

00:32:33 During the course of this project, he said, as time went on,

00:32:44 and the project was about to come to a close, he said,

00:32:48 now if you will stay with me, he was talking to the whole group.

00:32:53 We had a whole group meeting.

00:32:55 He said, if you will stay with me until the project ends.

00:33:00 He said, I will do my best to see that you are placed in positions which you would like to be placed in.

00:33:06 And I simply, on the basis of what I had seen, I simply took him at his word.

00:33:13 I said, this man really means what he is saying.

00:33:18 And I waited, and about a month before the project ended, he called me in.

00:33:24 And he said, Bill, he said, you remember I promised two months ago

00:33:30 that if you stayed with me until the end of this project,

00:33:33 I would try to get you placed in a position that you would like to have.

00:33:37 He said, I'm calling you in today to make good on that promise.

00:33:42 And as a result, I went to Eastman Kodak Company.

00:33:46 Before we start talking about Kodak,

00:33:48 I wonder if you'd tell us a little bit about who your other colleagues were at Columbia.

00:33:52 You mentioned Walter Moore, who is probably best known for his textbook of physical chemistry,

00:33:57 among many other things he's done.

00:33:59 Well, it's a little difficult for me.

00:34:01 That is, there are only one or two people whom I can recall.

00:34:05 For example, I can recall Leonard Nash, who was a thermodynamicist at Harvard.

00:34:12 I don't know if he's still at Harvard now.

00:34:15 But he had just gotten his doctorate, and he came there to work on this project.

00:34:20 He had just married, and he came to work in the section on corrosion.

00:34:26 He is one fellow that I remember.

00:34:30 I can't recall the names.

00:34:33 I can see their faces, but I can't recall their names.

00:34:37 But there were several of them, and I got very excellent cooperation from them.

00:34:44 As a matter of fact, when I left that project,

00:34:47 they gave me a little farewell party, which did a great deal for my ego.

00:34:57 You had the colleagues at Columbia University, but in the New York community itself,

00:35:04 was there any stimulation provided by people whom you saw and socialized with after the workday?

00:35:14 As a matter of fact, the workdays never ended.

00:35:19 Actually, I didn't have much time.

00:35:22 I used to go with my colleagues to some restaurants in Harlem,

00:35:30 because Columbia is not very far away from Harlem.

00:35:35 I used to see in those restaurants occasionally an old friend of mine

00:35:42 who had been radicalized by the poor treatment that he had received at the hands of Americans,

00:35:49 and he had joined the Communist Party.

00:35:51 I was a little worried about this, because in these restaurants with my colleagues on the Manhattan Project,

00:35:56 he would greet me like a long-lost friend.

00:36:00 This had bad implications as far as the project was concerned.

00:36:04 But nothing ever happened.

00:36:07 His name was Benjamin J. Davis,

00:36:10 and he was an Amherst graduate who got his graduate law from Harvard.

00:36:17 His father was an old Georgia-American politician,

00:36:24 and he had joined the Communist Party.

00:36:28 This is what happens to the deprivation as far as need was concerned of opportunities to live and grow.

00:36:39 They simply look for a way out, and those ways out were on the extreme left,

00:36:46 and this is where they went.

00:36:50 Actually, I think he was one of the chief officers of the Communist Party during those years.

00:37:02 How about personalities like Kenneth Clark, who later became a regent in New York State?

00:37:09 Kenneth Clark used to teach at City College,

00:37:16 and I met him through Hyland Lewis.

00:37:21 Hyland Lewis was a sociologist whom I worked with at Talladega,

00:37:26 and we used to, with Kenneth Clark, get together once a week to solve all the problems of the world.

00:37:37 It was a very stimulating environment to be in,

00:37:41 because these fellows knew much more about sociology than I.

00:37:44 I learned a lot from them, and we had some very interesting and stimulating talks.

00:37:52 When Libby called you in to make good on his promise to help find a place,

00:37:59 did he arrange an interview for you at Kodak, or he just said Kodak's the place?

00:38:04 I think it was through him that an interview was arranged,

00:38:08 and I came to Rochester.

00:38:13 As a matter of fact, I really took the first job that was offered to me.

00:38:17 I found out later that this was not necessary,

00:38:20 but you see, a fellow in my position, having never been able to get a job anywhere,

00:38:25 was not so sure that there would be any other office.

00:38:30 So I came to Rochester, and I was interviewed by Kenneth Meese.

00:38:39 He said to his subordinates,

00:38:45 he said, take Dr. Knox around his laboratory and find out where he wants to work.

00:38:54 So there was no question after the interview that he was going to offer you a job.

00:38:58 I'm the director from the top.

00:39:02 That's interesting.

00:39:05 Who else did you meet on that trip and just after you started working at Kodak?

00:39:09 Well, I met James LaValle.

00:39:14 James LaValle was perhaps the only Negro in the research department there at that particular time.

00:39:24 I met, of course, William Kenyon, who was the head of the chemistry department,

00:39:33 and some of the members of his staff.

00:39:38 When I came back, when I went to work with W.O. Kenyon,

00:39:46 who was in charge of the chemistry department,

00:39:49 his agenda was to solve a variety of chemical problems

00:39:55 which arose in the production and manufacture of photographic films and paper.

00:40:02 One of them was the replacement of saponin,

00:40:09 which was derived from, which was an extract of colea bark,

00:40:16 which was grown in Chile.

00:40:19 The problem that they had with saponin was that the batches of saponin

00:40:24 that they got from various shipments from Chile were not consistent.

00:40:30 They wanted to find a replacement for saponin,

00:40:35 which would enable them to control the purity of the material

00:40:39 which they were going to use as a coating aid,

00:40:42 and this would ease their saponin problem

00:40:46 because sometimes they had to go through a variety of samples of saponin

00:40:53 in order to get those which would give them satisfactory results.

00:40:58 So I was put on this problem immediately.

00:41:04 A fellow named Carl Tong was working on this problem while I was there,

00:41:08 and they moved Carl Tong to let him off the hook

00:41:13 and put me on this program, which was a rather difficult program

00:41:17 because here you were trying to replace in the photographic emulsion

00:41:23 a substance around which the photographic emulsion had been built

00:41:27 and to take it out without changing anything else

00:41:30 and putting in something else that would have exactly the same properties

00:41:34 photographically and physically as saponin

00:41:38 was a very difficult problem imposed upon.

00:41:45 That was the fact that it was difficult to get any idea

00:41:48 as to what the composition of the emulsion was

00:41:51 because everything is so compartmentalized,

00:41:54 at least from Kodak Company,

00:41:56 that that information is not available to you.

00:41:59 That was referred to, as I recall, as the silver curtain.

00:42:02 That's right.

00:42:03 Emulsion information was kept behind the silver curtain.

00:42:06 So we had to work in the dark and we worked around this

00:42:12 and actually we made friends with people in production

00:42:16 so that we could get certain information that might be useful to us.

00:42:20 We got this information on the basis of our promise

00:42:24 never to tell anybody where we got the information from.

00:42:28 You had to be very resourceful.

00:42:31 But we got it and it was sometimes difficult

00:42:35 to have our samples tested for photographic properties

00:42:39 so we devised the method of sending an atrocious number of samples to be tested

00:42:46 and the people doing the testing would throw up their hands

00:42:49 and say, we can't test all of these things

00:42:51 and we would say, well, can't you just test two or three

00:42:55 and pick out the two or three we were interested in

00:42:58 and tell them to throw the others away.

00:43:00 So we got our test made and we were able eventually

00:43:05 to find substitutes for our sapton.

00:43:09 I think this resulted in, we had about 21 or 22 patents

00:43:16 for surfactants which were useful in the application

00:43:20 of photographic emulsions to film-based paper

00:43:26 and these proved satisfactory on the basis of their photographic properties

00:43:31 as far as the emulsion was concerned.

00:43:35 Their physical properties, one of the great problems they had

00:43:38 was static in the unwinding of film.

00:43:41 If you got static, why it wouldn't mar the film?

00:43:44 These coatings made with these surfactants had to be static-free.

00:43:49 That means they had to have a certain roughness of surface

00:43:52 and they also, of course, had to be rewettable

00:43:55 and they had to be compatible with gelatin.

00:44:00 Since gelatin was the principal component of the emulsion system

00:44:05 and the only one thing that we could find out for certain was in the emulsion,

00:44:10 we engaged in some investigative studies of the reaction of surfactants

00:44:16 with gelatin in order to try to find out to what extent

00:44:20 they might be associated with static,

00:44:23 to what extent they might be associated with rewettability

00:44:27 and whether or not their interaction with gelatin

00:44:32 inhibited or enhanced these effects.

00:44:35 So as a result, we studied through surface tension measurements

00:44:45 the system of surfactants in gelatin

00:44:49 and we did several papers.

00:44:53 Yes, we did about three papers,

00:44:56 one below the isoelectric point,

00:45:00 the other two above the isoelectric point.

00:45:03 Those above the isoelectric point we studied

00:45:06 through surface tension measurements.

00:45:09 Below the isoelectric point we studied through precipitation

00:45:13 analysis of the supertate liquid for both gelatin and for the surfactant present

00:45:20 and we compared those results with non-ionic surfactants

00:45:24 which would not interact with gelatin

00:45:27 and we were able to get some insight into how these anionic surfactants,

00:45:32 some of them, reacted with gelatin.

00:45:35 To what extent did your work overlap

00:45:38 or was different from that of Pade in our European laboratories?

00:45:45 Pade was a very peculiar fellow

00:45:49 and he was interested in theory

00:45:56 and he used to theorize quite a bit

00:46:02 and would come up with some answers which were impossible

00:46:08 as far as the photographic industry was concerned

00:46:11 and what they would do would be to take our results

00:46:16 rather than continue their efforts to carry on the same work.

00:46:25 I was interested to see that some of the first materials you did get patents on

00:46:29 for these new compositions were polymeric materials, polyethylene.

00:46:35 That's right. Polyethylene oxide is a very interesting material.

00:46:40 One difficulty was that they had a tendency to fog the emulsion

00:46:45 and there were only certain ones which would work

00:46:48 and it was difficult to find out why they fogged the emulsion,

00:46:52 why some fogged the emulsion and why some didn't.

00:46:55 Actually, sometimes we would use a polyethylene oxide derivative

00:46:59 which we would sulfonate on the alcohol end of the polyethylene oxide

00:47:08 and this would give us some good results.

00:47:11 It appeared at first that the fewer the polyethylene oxide groups there were

00:47:16 in the molecule, the less tendency you would have to get fogging.

00:47:23 But the most promising materials were the polyglycerols.

00:47:32 The polyglycerols were very valuable.

00:47:36 They wouldn't cause fogging and actually they were compatible with gelatin.

00:47:41 Those polyethylene oxides were interesting,

00:47:45 but above certain temperatures they would be rendered insoluble

00:47:48 because the heat would knock the water groups off the oxide groups

00:47:54 and the thing would precipitate and they couldn't be used

00:48:00 only under very special conditions.

00:48:03 Of course, we had patents which involved taurines and thiocyanates

00:48:10 and it was difficult to find cationic surfactants

00:48:16 which were useful because they also tended to fog the emulsion.

00:48:21 Then, of course, we had the problem of synergism.

00:48:26 We were interested in finding whether or not we could get

00:48:30 any synergistic effects from combinations of surfactants.

00:48:34 The application of surfactants is more an art than it is a science

00:48:44 because these materials are very seldom pure.

00:48:47 They're very difficult to purify, as a matter of fact.

00:48:50 It's very difficult to find out what really is responsible

00:48:56 for the surface activity that you get.

00:48:58 All you know is that they give it and you hope that they will give it

00:49:02 the desired effect in the system that you have

00:49:06 without doing any other harm to the system that you're working with.

00:49:11 This area of research for Kodak really did have important implications

00:49:16 for a large part of the company's business, didn't it?

00:49:19 Yes.

00:49:20 I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

00:49:22 Well, please.

00:49:23 Whoops.

00:49:24 Okay.

00:49:25 Okay.

00:49:26 Sorry.

00:49:27 I was getting at the, you know, by increasing the efficiency of coating,

00:49:30 it's miles and miles of paper were coated all the time.

00:49:33 That's right.

00:49:34 Coating speeds.

00:49:35 That's right.

00:49:36 That's right.

00:49:37 Yes.