00:00:00 Students from the Borough of Brooklyn, we have quite a few of you from high schools, and let me just mention where they're from.

00:00:08 We have students from the Berkeley Carroll Street School. We're very pleased to have you.

00:00:14 Edward R. Murrow, 400.

00:00:21 Students from Nazareth Regional High School.

00:00:25 James Madison, Stan Shapiro teacher.

00:00:28 Where's James Madison? Okay, not as many as usual.

00:00:32 Siberian High School.

00:00:35 Ken Alwan here.

00:00:38 Okay, Mr. Alwan, their teacher is one of our chemistry alumni.

00:00:42 And last but not least, we have a few students from Midwood High School.

00:00:48 I'd like now to introduce the president of Brooklyn College, Dr. Robert Hess, who will say a word of greeting to you.

00:01:02 Thank you, Professor Williams.

00:01:04 Brooklyn College has a long tradition of excellence in preparing undergraduates for careers in sciences.

00:01:13 Of the 3,300 colleges and universities in the United States, a report issued last year indicated that Brooklyn College ranked 15th in the number of undergraduates who went on to earn PhDs in the sciences.

00:01:30 So that there are scientists across the nation in colleges and universities who began their education at the college level in the sciences on this campus.

00:01:42 That is due to the fact that we have an excellent curriculum and marvelous professors in chemistry and biology and physics and geology and mathematics and computer sciences.

00:01:57 The record, of course, says it all. I need not say anything else except welcome to Brooklyn College. Thank you very much.

00:02:10 I'd now like to introduce our chairman, Professor Leon Gortler, who will say a word or two.

00:02:17 I'm trying to get the third welcome, but where it's been, I'm afraid.

00:02:21 But Professor Talby and Dr. Hess and Dr. Freeman, but especially all of the young students who are here, our graduate students, our undergraduates, and all the high school students who have showed up today, I want to welcome you on behalf of the chemistry department.

00:02:46 To this third annual Martin Friedman lecture.

00:02:50 This series of lectures has been planned especially for the young people and for young budding scientists.

00:03:00 As Dr. Friedman was about 50 years ago here at Brooklyn College, we'll give you a little bit of the same kind of stimulus that thousands and thousands of your precursors have had over the years.

00:03:17 The last thing I want to say is please come back and visit us soon. I hope that we see a number of you high school students here in a few years who are still students.

00:03:26 But enjoy yourselves and enjoy.

00:03:34 Thank you, Dr. Gortler.

00:03:35 Now it's my great pleasure to introduce to you the man who has, by his generous support of the college, made this event possible.

00:03:45 As you know, the state system pays for the salaries of the teachers and so forth, but it does not pay for extra special things like the event that we have today.

00:03:55 Dr. Martin Friedman graduated from Brooklyn College in 1935 and he went from a graduate of the chemistry department to his parents' basement where he started making chemicals for metal polishes and other items.

00:04:11 And this gradually evolved into a chemical company.

00:04:15 Some 15 or 20 years later, he began to get more curious about chemistry and so he went then to Rutgers and took a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, a very unusual route to the Ph.D.

00:04:26 Normally you get it right after you go through college.

00:04:30 Dr. Friedman has, in addition to the support for this lecture, given us each year a prize for the best undergraduate research project in chemistry,

00:04:38 which is named after Professor Lewis Sackler, a very beloved teacher of organic chemistry here who influenced thousands of students.

00:04:46 So it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. H. Martin Friedman.

00:05:00 As a junior high and high school student living in Brooklyn, I was surprised at the way one substance could be changed to another which had completely different properties.

00:05:11 I didn't realize that there was a fancy name for this change and that it was called chemistry.

00:05:17 I started going to the public library and began reading all I could about this fascinating situation.

00:05:25 Why did it happen?

00:05:27 Calling it chemistry didn't change my hunger to learn more about it.

00:05:32 So I graduated from manual training high school many years ago, I understand it's called John Jay now,

00:05:38 and I came to a place called Brooklyn College to learn more about chemistry and other things.

00:05:46 I was pleasantly surprised to know that this was a place where I had professors who answered my questions.

00:05:53 They helped and encouraged me to ask more questions.

00:05:56 Perhaps the end result of four years at Brooklyn College as to what it did for me might be of interest.

00:06:05 The desires and dreams of a youngster were translated by the college education into the direction and purpose of a person

00:06:13 who could face the trials and challenges of life's opportunities as they were presented to him.

00:06:20 Perhaps this might also happen to you who aren't here.

00:06:25 We will all have the opportunity now to listen to Professor Henry Tauby as he gives us his insight and thoughts

00:06:33 as he discusses a career in chemistry.

00:06:36 And now for the introduction of Professor Tauby.

00:06:39 This is it.

00:06:42 Professor Richard Weiser, an inorganic chemist on our staff, will make the introduction for Professor Tauby.

00:06:55 It is my pleasure today to introduce Professor Henry Tauby of Stanford University.

00:07:01 It is my pleasure today to introduce Professor Henry Tauby of Stanford University.

00:07:06 One of the things that one typically does in an academic introduction is give some summary of the career of the speaker,

00:07:11 but since that happens to be the major topic of Professor Tauby's talk today, I will defer to his expertise in that area.

00:07:18 Other things that one talks about are one's professional associations with the speaker,

00:07:22 but unfortunately I have no direct professional associations with Professor Tauby.

00:07:27 I never had the pleasure, as many of his former graduate students and postdoctoral students describe it,

00:07:32 of working in Professor Tauby's laboratory.

00:07:35 However, a chemist, and especially an inorganic chemist,

00:07:38 can hardly be unaware of the major contributions that Professor Tauby has made to chemistry.

00:07:43 You read his papers, which are models of clarity and insight,

00:07:46 and if you are fortunate, occasionally you get to hear him deliver a lecture.

00:07:50 The last time I heard Professor Tauby speak was at the American Chemical Society meeting in Las Vegas in 1982,

00:07:56 almost exactly four years ago today.

00:07:59 He spoke in a symposium entitled,

00:08:02 Symposium on Inorganic Reaction Mechanisms, Perspectives and Progress.

00:08:06 It was a title that demanded abbreviation and casual conversation,

00:08:10 and it became known informally as the Tauby Symposium.

00:08:13 The first speech in that, the first paper presented,

00:08:16 was by J.P. Hunt, entitled, Henry Tauby in Chicago, 1946-1955.

00:08:21 I do know something in the career.

00:08:24 The second talk in that symposium was by Professor Tauby himself,

00:08:28 and it was entitled, Some Reaction Systems Revisited.

00:08:31 When Professor Tauby revisits a reaction system,

00:08:34 it is well worth accompanying him on the journey.

00:08:37 There were 20 or more papers which followed,

00:08:40 the vast majority of which were by colleagues and co-workers of Professor Tauby's over the years,

00:08:44 and the large number and very high quality of the presentations

00:08:48 were ample testimony to the regard and affection with which his colleagues and co-workers held him.

00:08:53 The following year, volume 30 of Progress in Inorganic Chemistry was published,

00:08:58 and it was titled, An Appreciation of Henry Tauby.

00:09:01 I would like to read from you a review of that book as it appeared, part of the review,

00:09:06 as it appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society the following year.

00:09:11 The review reads,

00:09:12 The publication of this volume could not have been better timed.

00:09:15 Devoting a volume of this series to show an appreciation of Henry Tauby's work

00:09:19 and influence on inorganic chemistry is in itself a great tribute to a great chemist.

00:09:24 But to have this volume appear at the same time as the announcement of Professor Tauby's selection

00:09:29 as the recipient of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is an outstanding coincidence.

00:09:34 The foundations for much of the work described by the nine reviews in this volume

00:09:38 were laid by Henry Tauby, and thus the volume shows clearly why he was so honored.

00:09:43 The review then summarizes briefly the contents of the book and concludes,

00:09:47 Each chapter is well written and each gives a clear, concise overview of the subject.

00:09:52 The volume, by its quality, shows the esteem that the authors hold for Professor Tauby.

00:09:57 The only thing I would add to that is that many people who did not contribute to volume 30 of Progress in Inorganic Chemistry

00:10:03 also hold Professor Tauby in high esteem.

00:10:06 It is with great pleasure that I welcome Professor Henry Tauby to Brooklyn College

00:10:10 to present the third annual H. Martin Friedman Lecture.

00:10:13 Thank you.

00:10:43 Dr. Friedman, fellow students, and we've heard about Dr. Tauby.

00:11:12 I hope you will give a description, an introduction to the volume for the rest of the day.

00:11:18 I hear that by the time the hour is over, you will have learned more about him than you can know.

00:11:23 I think it implies an unnew level of conceit.

00:11:28 It suggests a concept that I hope you will take it in that light.

00:11:33 There are three reasons why I chose this topic.

00:11:37 One is that I knew that the audience here would be composed of people with diverse preparation in chemistry.

00:11:45 And I felt that if I chose a technical topic that may be interesting for the experts and possibly experts here,

00:11:52 I might lose a large part of the audience.

00:11:55 The other thing is that in the last two and a half years, as I give interviews quite frequently,

00:12:01 the kind of issues that I'm going to raise in the course of my talk have come up in these interviews.

00:12:07 Now, this has all been done for a piece of me.

00:12:10 I thought I'd take the opportunity on this occasion to give the whole talk.

00:12:15 I've never done this before.

00:12:17 The third very good reason, I think that if I look around the room,

00:12:21 I'm sure that I'm an expert in the topic that I've announced.

00:12:25 I'm probably a world expert.

00:12:27 As usual, I might not be a world expert on this particular topic.

00:12:33 What I want to do is to refer to some of the influences that have shaped my career.

00:12:41 And, of course, important among these influences would be teachers.

00:12:46 I'm going to devote quite a bit of time to talking about teachers.

00:12:51 I learned something about their personalities, their philosophy,

00:12:55 the interaction between human beings and teachers, for example.

00:13:00 But then also draw attention to the decision points in my career.

00:13:05 And as my detailed title suggests, the incidents that I didn't choose simply for alliteration

00:13:13 can often play a role in these decisions.

00:13:17 In other instances I've had, it's a radical choice.

00:13:21 I don't want to draw attention to the consequences.

00:13:24 These decisions have produced changes.

00:13:29 And I look back on my career and, for the most part,

00:13:33 even when changes were interesting to a lot of people,

00:13:37 I think they didn't put me through it.

00:13:39 I think every incident has helped me grow up.

00:13:43 I think I should start with some personal, at least one personal detail,

00:13:50 which is to give you the date of my birth.

00:13:53 Maybe it's in the pamphlet.

00:13:55 I was born in 1915.

00:13:57 As I've just said, my birthday is November.

00:14:01 The reason I mention this is because I'll be giving you dates

00:14:05 when you ask yourself how young you are, how old you are.

00:14:09 Excuse me.

00:14:15 Well, I won't dwell long on this.

00:14:20 Were you able to hear me?

00:14:24 I don't want to repeat what I said.

00:14:30 I'll just continue from this point.

00:14:33 Oh, Mr. President.

00:14:36 Well, if you didn't hear me, you didn't listen very much.

00:14:41 As I said, I'll pass very quickly over my early years.

00:14:46 But there are two circumstances that I want to draw attention to.

00:14:49 And I'm a little bit difficult about the first because it's a bit preachy.

00:14:55 But I think it's important to my career that I have a rural background.

00:15:00 I was raised on what is called a family farm.

00:15:03 I don't really know what it meant by family farm.

00:15:06 It can mean a farm that's passed down to a family.

00:15:10 In our local communities, it meant that every member in the family

00:15:14 was involved in rather hard labor.

00:15:17 This is back when, in our case at least, the farm was not mechanized.

00:15:24 In fact, there was no motor of any kind, electrical or gasoline motor,

00:15:30 during the entire time I lived at home.

00:15:32 And as I said already, there was a lot of manual labor.

00:15:36 Well, what I learned was I was able to work even when I didn't enjoy it.

00:15:41 There are jobs that have to be done.

00:15:43 But, of course, as things happen when you're a child,

00:15:46 if there's one thing that an adult is doing, then you can't do it yet.

00:15:50 You want to start it.

00:15:51 And, of course, as soon as I start it, I'm trapped, and I have to do it.

00:15:55 But the point is, job after job, I learned to do with a lot of physical exertion

00:16:01 and even though it wasn't fun,

00:16:03 I learned that there is a satisfaction to be gotten out of it

00:16:06 and one is the satisfaction at the end of the day

00:16:09 to realize that you've measured up to what's expected of you.

00:16:12 And, of course, at the end of the whole task itself,

00:16:16 there's a sense of accomplishment.

00:16:18 And that works just as much as having fun all the time.

00:16:22 Well, this stood me in very good stead throughout my life

00:16:25 because, well, if I look to later in my career,

00:16:30 perhaps the hardest work I ever did was when I worked for my Ph.D. degree,

00:16:35 but I was able to do whatever was required,

00:16:38 getting up at night, doing tedious experiments,

00:16:41 which weren't interesting in their own right

00:16:43 because I was interested in the outcome.

00:16:46 The other circumstance that I want to mention is that

00:16:50 I got my early education in a wandering school

00:16:53 and I don't think any better instrument of early education

00:16:57 than the wandering school.

00:17:00 There were about 20 or so students,

00:17:03 distinguished through eight grades,

00:17:06 and I was able then to not only do my own tasks,

00:17:12 involve a lot of writing, for example,

00:17:15 learning the spell, learning the multiplication table,

00:17:18 but I was able then to hear also the lessons

00:17:22 when grade four would be called up

00:17:25 and they would have to read or perhaps recite poetry.

00:17:28 And it was because it was a wandering school

00:17:32 that I was ready to enter the second year of high school when I was 12.

00:17:36 But I couldn't do this in our own community,

00:17:40 and when I was 12 I went to a place called Luther College

00:17:44 where I spent five years,

00:17:47 completing three years of high school.

00:17:50 I took the first year of university immediately after,

00:17:54 and then I spent a year, eventually just surviving,

00:17:57 waiting until I was old enough to enter the University of Saskatchewan in class for two.

00:18:03 There are a few things about Luther College that I want to mention.

00:18:07 There were important influences there.

00:18:10 One of them was the physics teacher, Professor Barrett,

00:18:14 and he gave absolutely fascinating lectures on poetry.

00:18:18 And I have always had an enormous interest in English literature.

00:18:23 I read everything that came my way.

00:18:26 And it was Professor Barrett that gave me the idea

00:18:30 that it would be interesting to have a career in literature.

00:18:34 And I thought possibly writing, and I thought even of writing poetry.

00:18:39 Now, I don't remember a single lecture

00:18:44 when he didn't leave physics very quickly and go to literature.

00:18:51 And, on the other hand, it's bad luck,

00:18:55 because I really haven't been as good in physics

00:18:58 as I should be considering what I finally chose as a career opportunity.

00:19:04 And it was at Luther College, too, that I first did a chapter in chemistry.

00:19:10 It wasn't a difficult subject for me.

00:19:13 I got very good grades, but I didn't find it particularly fascinating.

00:19:17 I did have a special relationship with the subject, however,

00:19:20 because I went to Luther College in 1928,

00:19:25 and then in 1929 there was the Great Depression.

00:19:31 And my dad lost whatever little money he had saved.

00:19:35 You might ask, how can a farmer lose his money?

00:19:38 He's got it in the bank.

00:19:40 Well, he didn't have it in the bank.

00:19:41 He did what a lot of farmers do.

00:19:42 He speculated in great futures.

00:19:45 But the result of that was that my parents agreed not to afford to send me to school.

00:19:51 But my teachers at Luther College were sufficiently impressed,

00:19:54 so they made a special arrangement for me.

00:19:56 And it was to appoint me as a helper in the high school laboratory

00:20:01 made up unknown for qualitative analysis.

00:20:03 And in that way, I was able to support myself for the rest of my stay at Luther College.

00:20:08 I have to acknowledge their special friendship and help of Dr. Mystery Self-Action,

00:20:14 who was a chemistry teacher.

00:20:16 But it's true to say that I wasn't really turned on by chemistry,

00:20:21 even though it was a livelihood for me early in my career.

00:20:25 Well, then in 1933, I left Luther College to go to the University of Saskatchewan.

00:20:33 And I mentioned earlier that I was rather widely read.

00:20:37 And it was my wish to take a sort of a general course, but majoring in English literature.

00:20:48 And I went there with rather firm plans to do this.

00:20:53 But as things turned out, I registered in chemistry.

00:20:59 And for a reason that you might regard as trivial.

00:21:02 Well, the University of Saskatchewan then had about 2,000 students.

00:21:07 I'd never seen so many people massed together in one place before.

00:21:12 And I couldn't figure out how to register.

00:21:14 I clearly was bewildered.

00:21:16 And I saw a friend of mine there.

00:21:24 I remember his name.

00:21:25 And he was sort of watching what was happening.

00:21:28 And I finally left the queue and talked to my friend, Mr. Young.

00:21:33 And he said, have you registered?

00:21:35 And I said, yes.

00:21:36 What did you register?

00:21:37 He said, chemistry.

00:21:38 I said, show me.

00:21:39 And I registered in chemistry.

00:21:43 Now, this is a true story.

00:21:45 And I feel as if I were inventing this.

00:21:49 But also, last evening, we heard the story of how H.C. Brown became a moron chemist.

00:21:55 And it was a circumstantial, trivial myth.

00:21:58 And then also, in a recent copy of our university magazine, I read an article about my friend, Robert Hofstadter,

00:22:08 a very notable physicist, who entered physics.

00:22:14 He won the Nobel Prize in physics sometime.

00:22:18 And the story of how he chose physics.

00:22:22 And these are Robert's words.

00:22:25 CCNY in those days must have had one of the best student bodies in the U.S.

00:22:30 And I remember how it was deflated almost immediately by the intellectual abilities of my fellow students.

00:22:36 I was further deflated by my progress in the English course.

00:22:41 Because the essays I wrote for my professor in my best, and I must now say, turgid style, received in different grades,

00:22:49 I finished my course with a C, and that also finished my career as a writer.

00:22:54 At the same time, I received a lot of encouragement from my physics teacher, Professor Irwin Fuller.

00:23:00 And the rest, of course, is history.

00:23:05 Now, I want to say something, then, about my career at Saskatchewan.

00:23:11 My interest in English literature did not stop.

00:23:16 Any spare moment I had, I spent in the library reading minor English poets, novelists of all kinds.

00:23:24 I wonder how many in this audience know the name James Ransdell.

00:23:29 He has a very extensive mind-eye.

00:23:33 Well, he has about 20 volumes of literature.

00:23:38 I might follow through with that, from one to the other.

00:23:41 He was, I'd say, well-known in his time, a very polished writer.

00:23:47 He also became somewhat notorious.

00:23:51 He had the good fortune to have one of his books banned in Boston.

00:23:55 Now, all of you who want to go to the library now, look up George.

00:23:58 That was a particular book that was banned.

00:24:01 But, among the many authors that I read.

00:24:04 As to what I learned from lectures, I must have learned something,

00:24:09 but I don't have any particular recollections of the lectures,

00:24:13 except those given by Professor Gerhard Hertzberg,

00:24:17 who was at Saskatchewan.

00:24:20 He had come from Germany. He was a refugee.

00:24:24 These two courses I took from him were, by far, the best I've ever heard.

00:24:30 He is a man whose absolute clarity is taught in the way he thinks of art,

00:24:36 and in the way he presents it.

00:24:38 I do have a slide of Dr. Hertzberg here, so I'll introduce you to him.

00:24:45 I won't say much more about him.

00:24:47 I guess I did something.

00:24:51 This one.

00:24:54 I should have shown that earlier.

00:24:56 Yes, that's the campus of Saskatoon when I came there.

00:25:04 It looks like a brewery.

00:25:06 I didn't show it on that account.

00:25:08 I guess I wanted to remind a little bit where I started my research career.

00:25:13 This was in the building.

00:25:16 This particular building was the Kennedy Building.

00:25:20 Now, don't take it from this that there's no beauty in Saskatchewan.

00:25:26 You see, it's a very flat most of it.

00:25:28 You have to get certainly off the plane, even off the bus.

00:25:32 But I had the unusual experience of being raised on a farm that was virtually prairie,

00:25:42 and I've seen literally acres of wildflowers that just walk through,

00:25:51 like the shoes you get there.

00:25:53 I've seen an acre of peregrines that walk up at the same time,

00:25:57 or a meadow, just bloom with tension.

00:26:00 It is really quite a beautiful country, but it's hard for it to change

00:26:03 and for it to start up and turn it over.

00:26:05 But anyway, it was to give you an impression of wildflowers.

00:26:10 Thank you very much.

00:26:13 And that's Kenneth.

00:26:16 After 10 years in Saskatchewan, he went to the University of Chicago,

00:26:21 and he overlapped there, as a matter of fact.

00:26:24 And after a number of years there, he went to the National Research Council in Canada,

00:26:30 and he was a recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1972 and 1973.

00:26:35 That's the first slide.

00:26:46 So I'll move on to graduate study, which I began in 1935.

00:26:54 And Saskatchewan only offered a master's degree, not a PhD degree,

00:26:59 so I thought I'd continue there.

00:27:02 And among the choices that were offered, there was Professor Thorvaldsen,

00:27:07 who was the chairman, who was doing some very practical research,

00:27:11 some very important research.

00:27:13 He was interested in the physical chemistry of cement,

00:27:15 but more than that, he also devised compositions which would resist

00:27:19 certain alkali salts or certain salts that had a lot of chemistry in them,

00:27:24 which was important work.

00:27:26 And there was Professor Armour, who was doing serial chemistry,

00:27:29 and in fact, I get sort of homesick every day,

00:27:35 because he ran a little baking laboratory,

00:27:38 and there'd be the smell of freshly baked bread every afternoon.

00:27:43 It was really delicious, but as I say, it was awful.

00:27:47 And I did get homesick.

00:27:49 And then there was Professor Staples, who I chose to work with,

00:27:52 a PhD in the sport of chemistry.

00:27:54 Now I had a number of courses from Professor Staples,

00:27:59 and he really didn't like me very well,

00:28:01 and there was no evidence that he liked me any better than I liked him.

00:28:05 You might wonder, why did I choose to work with someone

00:28:09 that I was more comfortable with?

00:28:12 And I wondered about that, and the reason must fundamentally be

00:28:17 that I was more interested in the subject he was offering.

00:28:21 It was not a practical subject.

00:28:23 It was a problem in sport chemistry,

00:28:26 and I think that I was fascinated by the idea of stimulating a chemical reaction

00:28:31 by applying a tremendous amount of energy to it.

00:28:35 But be that as it may, I made that choice,

00:28:39 and it was a difficult one to live with, as I'm saying, presently.

00:28:43 But I want to say something now about John Staples.

00:28:47 He was bright, hard-working, and strongly motivated.

00:28:51 He was socially very odd and very ill at ease.

00:28:56 Remember, but don't remember, but I'll tell you, though,

00:28:59 there was a good reason for it.

00:29:01 He really was a boy gene.

00:29:03 His first academic job was a PhD at 22,

00:29:08 when he came to the University of Jackson.

00:29:10 He was from Cambridge, incidentally.

00:29:12 He was only 27 when I became his graduate student,

00:29:17 so he really didn't have much experience in how to deal with other studies.

00:29:24 I remember one occasion when there was a reception,

00:29:28 which both he and I were invited to,

00:29:31 and it was a big room, and we were the only ones in that room.

00:29:34 And he couldn't think of anything to say to me,

00:29:36 and I couldn't think of anything to say to him,

00:29:39 even though we had worked together for almost a year.

00:29:43 Well, he overcame his shyness.

00:29:46 He became university president about 15 years or so after I left the university.

00:29:52 He played a big role in war research in Canada, really, at that time.

00:29:59 And also his choice of research problems underwent an important change.

00:30:06 Shortly after arriving at Saskatchewan,

00:30:11 he saw the need to do something practical,

00:30:14 and indeed he succeeded.

00:30:16 He really deserves a lot of credit for doing a lot of first applications of isotopes in agriculture.

00:30:24 I'll give you the titles of some of his diverse papers.

00:30:29 I might mention that he has publications in 40 different journals.

00:30:34 One is Aromatics in Turner Valley Foods,

00:30:38 Determination of the Fate of Prosperous in the Late End,

00:30:42 A Method of Tagging Prairie Mosquitoes with Radiophosphorus,

00:30:46 Laptime Motion Picture Studies of Soil Burrowing Insects.

00:30:51 This particular piece of work actually led to quite a bit of publicity for him

00:30:57 during an ACS meeting in New York City, where I saw it for the first time after 20 years.

00:31:04 And what he had done was to tag the insects with radioisotopes,

00:31:10 and then he would take pictures,

00:31:12 where he could watch the creatures moving through the soil.

00:31:15 And the one on green cheese research.

00:31:18 I'm going to look that up sometime.

00:31:22 In fact, I don't think that's a ship.

00:31:24 I'm not sure that's a literal title.

00:31:26 Green cheese may have some special hidden agony in it.

00:31:31 Now, I worked very hard in my research.

00:31:36 I can't really say that I enjoyed it very much,

00:31:39 but I had one period of problem,

00:31:43 which I've prepared you for,

00:31:46 which was the following.

00:31:48 Because of my background in the farm,

00:31:51 I, of course, was very well acquainted with the practical matters.

00:31:56 And what started to bother me was the point that the research that I was doing

00:32:01 had no conceivable practical use.

00:32:05 And even though I chose the farm because of its obvious interest,

00:32:11 later on, I thought to myself,

00:32:13 I really should be doing something that people could get some good out of soon.

00:32:19 And this feeling was aggravated because I was supported by a National Research Council person

00:32:28 during my two years at the University of Saskatchewan.

00:32:32 And I wondered really what the taxpayer was getting back for his investment in my efforts.

00:32:39 Well, this problem of basic versus practical research or time research,

00:32:47 I never really have resolved.

00:32:50 But I'll tell you how I evaded it for a while.

00:32:54 I became so interested in chemistry at the next stage of my service,

00:32:59 which was at the University of California,

00:33:01 that I simply put the problem aside.

00:33:04 So I don't have to return to the scene again.

00:33:07 I'll mention now, toward the end of my career,

00:33:10 I have taken up an appointment with a local chemical company,

00:33:15 Catalytic Associates, near the University.

00:33:19 And in fact, I report at the time that I was there

00:33:23 because I'd like to do something that's useful,

00:33:27 where I can see the applications,

00:33:30 sometimes shortly after I become interested in the problem.

00:33:34 And this is not true of any of the other work that I've done,

00:33:37 nor of the work that was recognized by the Nobel Prize.

00:33:41 I think this issue is one that troubles a lot of people,

00:33:46 and I don't think I've given you any special insight into it,

00:33:50 unless somehow dealt with it or handled it.

00:33:54 Well, I finished my work then after two years,

00:33:58 and there was a question of choice of graduate school.

00:34:01 There was an important event during my time at the University,

00:34:09 a particularly important event during my time at the University of Detroit.

00:34:14 I had to give a seminar to the entire department,

00:34:17 and I elected to read on the subject of acid catalysis of chemical reactions.

00:34:24 This is a topic in physical organic chemistry.

00:34:27 In 1934 it hadn't advanced very far,

00:34:30 but I became very interested in this kind of chemistry,

00:34:34 and in particular became interested in Louis Camelot, then at Columbia,

00:34:39 as a possible mentor for my continuing studies.

00:34:43 So I applied to the University of Columbia to be admitted as a graduate student.

00:34:49 I don't remember actually ever hearing from him,

00:34:53 and I still wonder why.

00:34:57 It might be that because my writing is very bad,

00:35:02 I might not have been able to read my application.

00:35:05 That's a possibility.

00:35:08 I was, however, accepted at the University of California in Berkeley

00:35:15 without having applied there, and that's a true story.

00:35:20 I'll show you that space.

00:35:27 I could have talked for an hour about space,

00:35:30 because he had a biography,

00:35:32 and this is the cover of his book, Lace of Grass,

00:35:37 which refers actually to his contribution as President of the University of California.

00:35:43 This, then, is Professor Thompson, who was the Chairman of Chemistry.

00:35:48 What happened was that as I was busy in my laboratory on an afternoon,

00:35:55 Professor Thompson's secretary came down and said,

00:35:59 Professor Thompson wants to see you,

00:36:01 and I had no idea what this would be about.

00:36:04 I went there with a feeling of trepidation,

00:36:07 as you might suppose to be,

00:36:09 and he said,

00:36:16 I heard from Ian Lewis at Berkeley,

00:36:19 and you're going to Berkeley.

00:36:22 The way this came about was the following.

00:36:27 Thompson and Ian Lewis, who was the Dean of the College of Chemistry at Berkeley,

00:36:33 were good friends.

00:36:35 They had known each other when they were both in the East.

00:36:38 Ian Lewis and Thompson kept up a correspondence,

00:36:42 and Ian Lewis said that he would pick up any student that he strongly recommended.

00:36:50 So, as a result of that, I went on to the University of California.

00:36:57 Now, I want to say something about that.

00:36:59 I'd like to say something about my teachers there.

00:37:10 I arrived in the state of California in summer,

00:37:15 and was totally unimpressed by the geography,

00:37:18 because, as you know, California is rather brown in the summer,

00:37:21 and I thought it would be weird.

00:37:23 I've read all of these things about California,

00:37:26 but I want to get on to the department itself.

00:37:30 And after I got off the train, I appeared in the department,

00:37:36 and was astonished that I was immediately ushered in

00:37:40 to be interviewed by the great G. M. Lewis,

00:37:46 who was an extraordinary man.

00:37:48 He was not the chairman of the department.

00:37:51 He was the dean of the College of Chemistry.

00:37:54 The College of Chemistry, going through his leadership,

00:37:57 had the same status as the School of Humanities.

00:38:01 He was the leading physical chemist of his time,

00:38:04 certainly in the United States,

00:38:06 possibly also in the world.

00:38:08 And his stature and personality were such that they dominated the entire department.

00:38:15 I want to say something about Lewis and the department itself.

00:38:22 I won't use my own words, because those written by a colleague of his,

00:38:30 Hildebrand, in the memoirs of the National Academies of Science,

00:38:38 say it much better than I do.

00:38:40 Talking about Lewis,

00:38:43 he recruited a group of young men who,

00:38:46 under his stimulating leadership,

00:38:48 established the center of intense scientific activity.

00:38:51 All were named instructors or professors of chemistry,

00:38:55 not of its subdivisions.

00:38:57 No one was in a position to reserve a field

00:39:02 or propose as the authority in their interest.

00:39:05 There were no divisions within the department,

00:39:08 in either organization or spirit.

00:39:11 All met together to discuss chemistry,

00:39:13 organic, inorganic, or physical alike.

00:39:17 The utmost freedom in discussion was the room.

00:39:20 The writer recalls one of the first research conferences,

00:39:24 which he attended,

00:39:25 when Lewis made a deliberately challenging statement,

00:39:28 having a lot to do,

00:39:29 taking boys who liked to shock the conservative prejudice,

00:39:33 whereupon a particular and brilliant graduate student interrupted,

00:39:37 No, that isn't so.

00:39:39 I was aghast at his canary.

00:39:41 Such a remark at Cherokee institutions would have been dangerous,

00:39:45 but Lewis turned to him with interest, saying,

00:39:47 No, why not?

00:39:49 There followed a lively discussion.

00:39:52 Facts and logic alone determined the outcome.

00:39:55 On another occasion,

00:39:57 when a student criticized one of his assertions,

00:40:00 Lewis remarked,

00:40:01 That is an impertinent remark,

00:40:03 but it is also pertinent.

00:40:06 The members of the department became like the Athenians,

00:40:10 who, according to the Apostle Paul,

00:40:13 spent their time in nothing else

00:40:15 but either to tell or to hear some new thing.

00:40:19 Anyone who thought he had a bright idea

00:40:21 rushed to try out on a colleague.

00:40:24 Groups of two or more could be seen every day in offices,

00:40:27 before a blackboard, or even in a corridor,

00:40:30 arguing vehemently about these brave thoughts.

00:40:33 It is doubtful whether any paper ever emerged for publication

00:40:38 that had not run the gauntlet of such criticism.

00:40:43 The whole department thus became far greater

00:40:46 than the sum of its individual members.

00:40:48 I think this captures very much the spirit of the department.

00:40:51 It's the very best place I could have gone

00:40:54 for a continuation of my career,

00:40:57 and I was still caught up in that spirit,

00:41:00 and stopped worrying about whether a particular problem

00:41:03 had immediate applications or not.

00:41:05 There's another quote in which Lewis had,

00:41:08 which I don't know how I'm doing on time.

00:41:11 When did I start?

00:41:15 About 15, 20 more minutes?

00:41:20 Lewis was really, I think, a very good writer.

00:41:25 This is from the preface of the book

00:41:29 Servant of Amity by Lewis and Ranny.

00:41:33 There are ancient cathedrals which,

00:41:35 apart from their consecrated purposes,

00:41:38 inspire solemnity and awe.

00:41:40 Even the curious visitor speaks of serious things with hushed voice.

00:41:46 So, that's here.

00:41:53 And this is our home.

00:41:59 Thank you.

00:42:21 Hello, everybody in.

00:42:29 The labor of generations of architects and artisans

00:42:33 has been forgotten.

00:42:35 The scaffolding erected for their toil

00:42:37 has long since been removed.

00:42:39 Their mistakes have been erased

00:42:41 or have become hidden by the dust of centuries.

00:42:44 Being only the perfection of the completed whole,

00:42:47 we are impressed as by some superhuman agency.

00:42:51 But sometimes we enter such an edifice

00:42:54 that is still partly under construction.

00:42:56 Then the sound of hammers, the reek of tobacco,

00:42:59 the trivial jests banging from workman to workman

00:43:02 enable us to realize that these great structures

00:43:05 are but the result of giving to ordinary human effort

00:43:09 a direction and a purpose.

00:43:11 Science has its cathedrals

00:43:14 built by the efforts of a few architects

00:43:16 and of many workers.

00:43:18 In these loftier monuments of scientific thought,

00:43:21 a tradition has arisen

00:43:23 whereby the friendly usages of colloquial speech

00:43:26 give way to a certain severity and formality.

00:43:29 While this may sometimes promote precise thinking,

00:43:32 it is more often, yet more often results

00:43:36 in the intimidation of the neophyte.

00:43:39 Therefore, we have attempted,

00:43:41 while conducting the readers through the classic edifice

00:43:43 of Sir William Manning,

00:43:45 into the workshops where construction is now in progress

00:43:48 to temper the customary severity of the science

00:43:52 insofar as it is compatible with clarity of thought.

00:43:55 But since it is improbable that we have been successful

00:43:58 in this endeavor to more than a limited extent,

00:44:01 we shall take this opportunity of conversing

00:44:03 very informally with the reader

00:44:05 concerning our book and its purpose.

00:44:07 Then he goes on to instruct you

00:44:09 in how to read the book.

00:44:14 And I'll show a slide of Lewis,

00:44:18 who is also not a Paul Manning,

00:44:21 but this is a classic pose,

00:44:25 and it could be a picture taken at a seminar.

00:44:30 There was a weekly seminar,

00:44:32 and each of us,

00:44:34 even an incoming graduate student,

00:44:36 in his first quarter,

00:44:38 was obliged to give a seminar to the Holy Father.

00:44:41 And it was a terrifying experience for the first time.

00:44:46 Imagine this to be a table,

00:44:49 and the platform surrounding it,

00:44:51 and there are chairs on the platform.

00:44:54 The faculty would sit around the table,

00:44:57 the graduate students,

00:44:58 and lesser members of the department

00:45:00 would be on the platform.

00:45:02 Lewis would sit there,

00:45:03 the blackboard would be there,

00:45:05 and the candidate,

00:45:06 and then the person that was speaking

00:45:07 would be sitting over there,

00:45:09 behind Lewis.

00:45:10 And that Lewis,

00:45:11 after everybody has settled down,

00:45:14 he takes out a cigar,

00:45:16 he takes off the paper,

00:45:18 he's done the same way every time,

00:45:19 he cleans it,

00:45:20 and then there's a hush in the room at that point,

00:45:23 and then he sniffs off the end of the cigar,

00:45:28 lights it,

00:45:29 and then without looking at the candidate,

00:45:33 let's call him,

00:45:34 he says,

00:45:35 shall we begin?

00:45:36 And I remember one occasion

00:45:39 when a graduate student,

00:45:41 fortunately it wasn't I,

00:45:43 when his voice cracked in the first sentence.

00:45:47 Well, anyway,

00:45:49 Lewis was a great man,

00:45:50 and there are many who wonder why

00:45:52 he wasn't honored by the Nobel Prize.

00:45:55 It's the point that there aren't enough to go around.

00:46:00 Well, I want to say something now

00:46:02 about my research mentor,

00:46:04 Professor William Bray,

00:46:07 and why I chose to work with him.

00:46:10 I had known about William Joke

00:46:13 before I came to Berkeley,

00:46:16 and I had thought possibly

00:46:18 that I would work for Professor Joke,

00:46:20 but in interviewing him,

00:46:22 I learned that if I were to work for him,

00:46:25 I would have to first of all

00:46:26 build a complicated apparatus

00:46:28 involving a lot of electrical connections,

00:46:30 which I was no good at,

00:46:32 and that I wouldn't be doing any

00:46:34 what I would call chemistry

00:46:35 until very, perhaps after two years or so.

00:46:39 It was not really to my taste,

00:46:42 and I interviewed several other people.

00:46:45 I finally elected to work with Professor Bray,

00:46:48 and again it was a situation

00:46:50 where I was not attracted by the personality.

00:46:53 I hope you don't get from this the idea

00:46:57 that I can't get along with people

00:46:59 that are trying to teach me.

00:47:01 I did finally learn a lot

00:47:04 and respect Professor Bray,

00:47:06 but he was difficult to get to know,

00:47:09 and I'll read again something

00:47:11 written by somebody else

00:47:13 that does a rather good job of introducing him.

00:47:16 Bray was a singularly modest,

00:47:19 unself-seeking man.

00:47:21 He made little effort

00:47:22 to attract graduate students

00:47:24 to do research under his direction,

00:47:26 but rather emphasized to them

00:47:28 the difficulties and discouragement involved.

00:47:31 Some of his colleagues have to offset this

00:47:33 by pointing out to students

00:47:35 the rare privilege opened to them

00:47:37 of working under one of the great masters

00:47:39 of the organic chemistry.

00:47:41 I lived in a number where a dozen of them

00:47:43 had taken graduate degrees,

00:47:45 and as a result,

00:47:46 the average quality of the men

00:47:48 who worked with him had been very high.

00:47:50 Well, the point was

00:47:52 that despite some beginnings

00:47:54 that I had,

00:47:55 because of Bray's rather formal manner,

00:47:58 which again was the result of his silence,

00:48:01 I chose to work with him

00:48:03 because I think by now

00:48:05 I had already developed a well-defined taste

00:48:07 for chemical reactions,

00:48:09 trying to understand what numbers range.

00:48:12 It was the other point that I realized

00:48:14 I could go into the laboratory

00:48:16 and find progress

00:48:18 after only a short preparation.

00:48:20 But at any rate,

00:48:22 it turned out to be an altogether

00:48:24 good choice on my part.

00:48:26 Bray was kind,

00:48:28 wise,

00:48:29 fair,

00:48:30 and considerate.

00:48:32 And this is a

00:48:34 handsome sketch of Professor Bray.

00:48:36 I can certainly read all these qualities

00:48:38 into that photograph.

00:48:40 To illustrate his wisdom,

00:48:42 I have a quotation

00:48:44 from a letter that I got from him

00:48:46 after I had accepted my first academic job

00:48:49 at Cornell.

00:48:50 And we did correspond,

00:48:52 not frequently,

00:48:53 but we did exchange letters,

00:48:54 and I would share my research

00:48:56 progress with him.

00:48:58 And in a letter,

00:48:59 he has this paragraph.

00:49:01 My advice...

00:49:03 We still retained formal relations.

00:49:05 He always called me,

00:49:07 or the letter was always,

00:49:09 Dr. Klaus.

00:49:11 My advice is to prepare an article

00:49:13 for publication as soon as possible.

00:49:15 It need not survey the whole field,

00:49:18 but you should take time off

00:49:20 to do a few more simple experiments.

00:49:22 If the results will greatly improve

00:49:24 the limited article,

00:49:26 you are right.

00:49:27 But do not worry

00:49:28 if you cannot answer all the questions

00:49:30 that occur to you

00:49:31 when you are writing the first article,

00:49:33 which I think is wise.

00:49:35 Fairness...

00:49:37 When I went and talked to him,

00:49:40 if I made any comment or suggestion

00:49:44 that had some sense to it,

00:49:46 he would take out a little notebook

00:49:48 and then he would record the date

00:49:50 and what I had said.

00:49:52 And the other thing was

00:49:53 he didn't remember why he had written that.

00:49:55 So if he had occasion to refer to the point,

00:49:58 he would give credit to the person

00:50:00 that had made it to him originally.

00:50:02 Not many will take that much trouble.

00:50:05 Consideration...

00:50:07 He gave me a great deal of independence in my work.

00:50:10 He didn't come to see me.

00:50:12 He waited until I came to see him.

00:50:14 And I did really appreciate that a great deal.

00:50:18 Bravery as a teacher...

00:50:20 I think I have indicated

00:50:22 some of the qualities that made him

00:50:24 a very good teacher for graduate students.

00:50:27 But how about bravery as a teacher in formal courses?

00:50:32 Well, he was very formal.

00:50:36 He made no effort to negotiate himself,

00:50:38 as has already been said.

00:50:40 And in fact, his philosophy of teaching was,

00:50:43 when he annunciated it to me,

00:50:45 rather startled me.

00:50:47 He knew the kind of impression

00:50:49 that he had on students,

00:50:51 which was to make them uncomfortable,

00:50:54 to irritate them.

00:50:57 I had an explosion during my research

00:51:01 at Berkeley,

00:51:04 due to carelessness.

00:51:06 And I was hospitalized.

00:51:08 And during that time,

00:51:10 Ray took over my course.

00:51:13 And after I came back,

00:51:16 he had all the students classified

00:51:19 into A, B, C,

00:51:21 and indicated to me,

00:51:23 these are the A students.

00:51:25 Oh, good, they don't really need you.

00:51:27 These are the students that

00:51:29 probably you can't do anything with,

00:51:31 no matter how hard you try.

00:51:33 These are students in the middle

00:51:35 that you may be able to help.

00:51:38 Well, he had learned a great deal

00:51:40 about my students,

00:51:42 and I think he had actually classified them

00:51:44 rather accurately.

00:51:46 He took teaching very seriously.

00:51:48 Well, the thing I'm trying to do,

00:51:50 at the end of that,

00:51:53 he explained to me what he had learned

00:51:55 about my class.

00:51:57 He also said,

00:51:59 Mr. Conley, you have a colleague

00:52:01 that I envy,

00:52:03 your students like him.

00:52:05 And he said, I irritate them in the learning.

00:52:08 And in fact,

00:52:11 I think this is the way it works,

00:52:13 but every student that he had,

00:52:16 sometimes after a period of several years,

00:52:19 realized that they had had

00:52:21 a great experience.

00:52:23 He had an incisive mind,

00:52:25 he had an orderly mind,

00:52:27 and his influence was not exerted

00:52:29 only through graduate students.

00:52:31 I think his outlook on chemistry

00:52:33 pervaded the whole department.

00:52:35 And I want to develop this

00:52:39 by reading something about

00:52:43 a book by Bray and Latimer,

00:52:46 which was a laboratory text

00:52:48 for the undergraduate introductory course.

00:52:59 In the laboratory, the effort

00:53:01 is made constantly to throw the student

00:53:03 upon his own responsibility,

00:53:05 especially in observing accurately

00:53:07 and in drawing conclusions

00:53:09 from his experiments.

00:53:11 He is often called upon to predict

00:53:13 results of unkind experiments.

00:53:15 Numerous questions and problems

00:53:17 are introduced to draw attention

00:53:18 to essential points,

00:53:20 which the inexperienced

00:53:21 or the careless student

00:53:22 might pass over.

00:53:24 The problem of keeping

00:53:25 a gifted student busy

00:53:26 at his level of achievement

00:53:28 may be partly solved

00:53:29 by allowing him to work

00:53:30 slightly ahead of the rest

00:53:31 of the class,

00:53:32 for he welcomes the opportunity

00:53:34 of overcoming the difficulties

00:53:35 by his own efforts,

00:53:37 even though this involves more work

00:53:39 than if he had waited

00:53:40 for class discussions.

00:53:44 I was kept on at Berkeley

00:53:46 for one year

00:53:47 after finishing my Ph.D. work

00:53:49 in 1940,

00:53:51 because I had received

00:53:53 no responses

00:53:55 to applications I had made

00:53:57 to every,

00:53:58 no favorable responses

00:54:00 to applications I had made

00:54:01 to every university in Canada.

00:54:03 There simply was no place for me.

00:54:05 Remember, the Depression

00:54:06 was not yet over.

00:54:09 I want to say something,

00:54:11 give you an item of statistics,

00:54:13 which tells you something

00:54:15 about the quality of the department.

00:54:17 In 1940, there were,

00:54:19 as constructors in the department,

00:54:21 Calvin, Libby,

00:54:23 Pitzer, Seaborg,

00:54:25 and Talby.

00:54:26 I was there on this

00:54:27 one-year interim appointment.

00:54:29 Of these five,

00:54:30 all four of the five

00:54:32 have won Nobel Prizes,

00:54:33 and many feel that Pitzer

00:54:36 should also have received a prize.

00:54:40 Well, I did get a job

00:54:41 then after the first year,

00:54:43 and again,

00:54:44 this was a case

00:54:46 where I didn't apply for the job,

00:54:47 but the application was

00:54:49 on my behalf.

00:54:50 Lewis knew

00:54:52 Professor Debye of Cornell,

00:54:54 a very famous

00:54:57 physical chemist,

00:54:58 and this was in the days

00:55:00 when horse-trading was still allowed,

00:55:02 and in a sense,

00:55:03 the appointment was arranged for me,

00:55:05 and I learned about it

00:55:07 to my delightful surprise.

00:55:10 I want to make just a few statements

00:55:12 about my years at Cornell,

00:55:14 and then pass on to the University of Chicago

00:55:17 where perhaps my career

00:55:19 probably began,

00:55:20 and I will end here with that,

00:55:21 and not page it painfully

00:55:23 until the present moment.

00:55:26 I was at Cornell for five years.

00:55:30 They were rather hard years.

00:55:31 I had heavy teaching load.

00:55:35 It was during the war,

00:55:37 and I was teaching

00:55:39 in the so-called

00:55:40 Army Specialized Training Program.

00:55:42 It was very difficult,

00:55:43 very hard on me.

00:55:44 There were 300 to lecture to,

00:55:46 and the students, of course,

00:55:48 were not terribly interested in chemistry.

00:55:50 Many of them were drafted into the program.

00:55:53 They did not all appear to be there,

00:55:55 sort of under-directed,

00:55:57 but I suppose the experience

00:55:59 sort of put iron into my backbone.

00:56:04 I worked without graduate students

00:56:07 except toward the very end.

00:56:09 I did manage to get a lot of work done.

00:56:12 My work was extremely hard.

00:56:14 It's a personal note

00:56:15 that perhaps it should be mentioned.

00:56:17 My first marriage is all that partly

00:56:21 as a result of

00:56:24 putting too much into research.

00:56:28 And I think the hardest thing for me

00:56:30 was that there was very little interest

00:56:32 in my work on the part of my colleagues.

00:56:35 An exception was Thor Rubin,

00:56:38 who had been a friend of mine in Berkeley,

00:56:40 who joined the department

00:56:42 and we were together for two years.

00:56:44 And we together ran a seminar

00:56:46 in physical organic chemistry.

00:56:49 Even though we didn't have graduate students,

00:56:51 graduate students from other people came in,

00:56:54 and we had a lot of fun and we learned a lot.

00:56:56 And this informal seminar

00:56:58 was very important for the course

00:57:00 that I took when I left Cornell

00:57:03 to go to the University of Chicago.

00:57:06 And in 1945,

00:57:08 many departments were looking to improve themselves.

00:57:12 A lot of people were leaving the war work.

00:57:14 And I was given offers,

00:57:17 three different offers,

00:57:18 one to Columbia,

00:57:19 one to Chicago,

00:57:21 and one to a very good Midwest university.

00:57:24 And I was, for personal reasons,

00:57:26 I was attracted to Columbia,

00:57:28 but I had the wit to call

00:57:31 Professor Kirkwood,

00:57:33 who knew the department

00:57:35 and what was happening there,

00:57:37 the department at Chicago.

00:57:38 And he said,

00:57:39 Henry, don't even think about it,

00:57:40 go to Chicago.

00:57:42 And I did.

00:57:43 And this is probably the most important move

00:57:47 or the move that was really important

00:57:49 to the further development of my career.

00:57:52 It was an extraordinarily good department.

00:57:55 As those indigenous to it,

00:57:58 there were people such as Karrasch,

00:58:01 Harkins,

00:58:02 those who were at the end of his career,

00:58:04 Schlesinger,

00:58:05 Westheimer was beginning to show

00:58:07 what he was able to do.

00:58:09 And another Brown, W.G. Brown,

00:58:12 also involved in boron chemistry.

00:58:14 And I think that W.G. Brown

00:58:15 was perhaps the first

00:58:17 to show the utility

00:58:19 of the borohydrides

00:58:22 as specific reagents in organic chemistry.

00:58:27 But then they added a lot of

00:58:29 very distinguished people

00:58:32 who left their original institutions

00:58:34 and then came to the University of Chicago.

00:58:36 Among them were Urey,

00:58:38 Mayer,

00:58:39 maybe you might have mentioned him already,

00:58:41 and then a large number of people

00:58:43 about my own age.

00:58:45 And it was a very exciting environment.

00:58:48 Physics had Franck,

00:58:50 Fermi,

00:58:51 Hertzberg and Yerkes,

00:58:52 Allison,

00:58:53 Keller was there for a time,

00:58:55 and Mulligan.

00:58:59 The graduate students were extraordinary.

00:59:01 Many of them were well advanced

00:59:03 because many of them

00:59:04 had been doing war research.

00:59:06 And another point

00:59:09 which I think

00:59:12 may be particularly important,

00:59:14 a lot of them were interested

00:59:15 in what I was trying to do.

00:59:17 And the reason was

00:59:18 that a lot of the war research

00:59:20 converted to physical chemistry

00:59:22 into inorganic chemistry.

00:59:24 So immediately after coming to Chicago,

00:59:26 I got good graduate students

00:59:29 and I was able to do some of the things

00:59:31 that I had thought about at Cornell

00:59:33 but didn't have the resources

00:59:35 either in manpower or in equipment

00:59:37 to command.

00:59:39 And then the most important thing

00:59:41 was the interest,

00:59:42 which my colleagues showed in my work.

00:59:44 It was something quite new in my experience.

00:59:47 It was a democratically run department.

00:59:50 I remember arriving there,

00:59:52 the chairman called me in

00:59:54 and said,

00:59:55 Henry, we'd like you to teach

00:59:59 something in advanced inorganic chemistry.

01:00:03 Teaching loads were tight

01:00:06 and people actually competed

01:00:08 for the opportunity to teach

01:00:10 because we had the institute

01:00:13 in addition to the department

01:00:15 and the institute people

01:00:16 also wanted to have a share

01:00:18 in graduate, certainly in graduate,

01:00:20 but also undergraduate instruction.

01:00:24 And in accepting this assignment,

01:00:26 I did what I think

01:00:28 most inexperienced young people will do

01:00:30 when they're given a new assignment.

01:00:32 Even though I was an inorganic chemist,

01:00:34 I became fascinated by

01:00:37 some of the general underlying bonding theory.

01:00:42 And of course I didn't really understand

01:00:44 quantum mechanics,

01:00:45 but I apparently kept a little bit ahead of students.

01:00:48 Talk about bonding, you think,

01:00:50 the analogy you would talk about

01:00:51 molecular orbital theory,

01:00:53 it would still be bonding.

01:00:55 But after two attempts of this kind,

01:00:58 I realized that the students

01:01:00 weren't learning any chemistry,

01:01:02 no distinctive chemistry.

01:01:04 And then perhaps the pendulum

01:01:06 swung too far in the other direction

01:01:08 because what I did then was,

01:01:11 I said, I'm going to learn something

01:01:13 about a field that's called coordination chemistry.

01:01:16 That's the chemistry of metal ions

01:01:18 interacting with metal ions.

01:01:20 They're in a complex, I guess they were called.

01:01:23 And I had really been bored by this field

01:01:27 as it was written up in review articles.

01:01:30 So I did something which is a little bit unusual.

01:01:33 Instead of using review articles,

01:01:35 I in a sense used the original literature.

01:01:38 I chose the main reference book

01:01:40 on inorganic chemistry,

01:01:41 which is full of facts,

01:01:43 no theory, no interpretation.

01:01:45 And I learned an awful lot

01:01:48 as that course developed.

01:01:50 And it was the things that I learned

01:01:52 in the course of developing those lectures

01:01:55 that put me on the path

01:01:57 that finally led to recognition

01:01:59 which has brought me here.

01:02:02 I want to say just a little bit about that

01:02:04 and then I will, I guess, leave

01:02:08 and let you go on to more important business.

01:02:16 I appreciated that an important difference

01:02:19 between inorganic chemistry

01:02:21 and organic chemistry is the following.

01:02:24 In the field of organic chemistry,

01:02:26 molecules tend to stay put

01:02:29 when you make them.

01:02:31 It takes a while before

01:02:33 bond rearrangements take place.

01:02:35 To give you a commonplace example,

01:02:38 imagine carbon tetrachloride in water.

01:02:41 In inorganic chemistry,

01:02:44 carbon tetrachloride can be regarded

01:02:47 as a complex of chloride ion

01:02:49 with carbon 4+.

01:02:51 It is unstable with respect to

01:02:54 carbon dioxide and hydrochloric acid

01:02:57 with an equilibrium quotient

01:02:59 of 10 to the 65th,

01:03:01 not 10 to the first,

01:03:03 but 10 to the 65th.

01:03:05 Despite this enormous driving force,

01:03:09 nobody expects carbon tetrachloride

01:03:11 to fizz when you put it into water.

01:03:14 It's stable almost indefinitely.

01:03:17 Contrast that with silicon tetrachloride

01:03:20 just below it in the periodic table.

01:03:22 There you would see a violent response.

01:03:25 The reaction is downhill.

01:03:27 Now it takes place rapidly.

01:03:29 Now, the inorganic systems

01:03:32 are of two kinds.

01:03:34 They are of molecules which undergo

01:03:37 these substitution reactions so slowly

01:03:39 that they're just like organic molecules.

01:03:41 And I realized there was an opportunity here

01:03:44 for me to answer the kind of question

01:03:47 that the organic chemist was answering

01:03:50 in studying the substitution reactions

01:03:53 of organic molecules.

01:03:54 I would begin to do this for inorganic molecules,

01:03:57 which is apparently a rather novel idea

01:04:00 at that time.

01:04:01 But the other point is the following.

01:04:04 Well, on the other hand,

01:04:06 one has molecules such as silicon tetrachloride

01:04:08 which go apart very rapidly.

01:04:10 So we have the whole gamut of chemical behavior.

01:04:13 And I realized, too,

01:04:15 that the inorganic systems provide

01:04:17 a much better opportunity to understand

01:04:21 how oxidation-reduction reactions take place

01:04:25 in the simplest form.

01:04:26 They're called electromagnetic reactions.

01:04:28 And so this then started me

01:04:31 in a somewhat new direction

01:04:33 in my work.

01:04:36 And this is about the organic chemistry

01:04:38 that I'm going to introduce in my lecture.

01:04:41 I find this to be rather interesting.

01:04:45 Take hexaquacronatine,

01:04:51 and we're looking at the half-life

01:04:53 of a particular water molecule.

01:04:55 Each bound to the molecule,

01:04:57 how long do you have to wait

01:04:59 for half of the labeled water

01:05:02 on chromium 3N water

01:05:04 to exchange with salt?

01:05:06 A figure of the order of 10 to the 6th.

01:05:09 Life is decided in the periodic table.

01:05:12 Yes, it's already decided.

01:05:14 Yes, vanadium.

01:05:16 Oh, yeah, vanadium 3.

01:05:18 A very short half-life, 10 to the minus 3rd.

01:05:21 And I said, also, I've gone to the other side

01:05:24 and introduced manganese 3,

01:05:26 and there it's even less than 10 to the minus 3rd.

01:05:29 It's something like 10 to the minus 5th or so.

01:05:32 Here is this extraordinary change in chemical behavior

01:05:36 with rather modest changes,

01:05:38 one would say in electronic structure.

01:05:40 And in the course of giving the first lecture

01:05:44 in coordination chemistry,

01:05:46 I understood or I saw a connection

01:05:49 between electronic structure

01:05:51 and rate of substitution,

01:05:53 which then resulted in an article in chemical reviews.

01:05:58 And as I've said already,

01:06:01 in much of the work that I did shortly following that insight,

01:06:05 I have exploited these ideas of substitutional ability.

01:06:10 And the last thing that I want to do

01:06:13 is to introduce an experiment

01:06:17 which actually I did personally in about 1954,

01:06:22 which was the beginning of the work

01:06:25 which eventually led to the recognition in Stockholm in 1983.

01:06:30 I'm not sure that I'll be able to do it from this slide

01:06:33 in any way that will make sense to anybody

01:06:36 but who knows the answer already.

01:06:39 But we were trying to understand

01:06:43 how electrons move from one complex to another.

01:06:50 And we realized that there was a class of reactions

01:06:53 where the molecules remain intact,

01:06:55 they don't break their bonds,

01:06:57 and the electrons somehow find their way

01:06:59 from the reducing agent to the oxidizing agent.

01:07:02 It was always conceived as a possibility

01:07:06 that there would be another way

01:07:08 for oxidation reduction to take place,

01:07:11 namely in the way that you ordinarily encounter it

01:07:14 in organic chemistry.

01:07:16 A methyl radical comes along

01:07:18 and plucks a chlorine atom off a chlorine-containing molecule.

01:07:23 And I saw an opportunity to test

01:07:26 what to test whether this kind of mechanism

01:07:29 is realized also with the inorganic compounds.

01:07:33 And we were able to do it because we exploited

01:07:37 the fact that this particular complex

01:07:40 is like an organic molecule,

01:07:42 it sticks together for long periods of time.

01:07:45 I realized that chromium 2

01:07:48 would undergo substitution very rapidly.

01:07:51 In other words, the chromium 2 had the capacity

01:07:54 to lose a water molecule on the time scale

01:07:57 of 10 to the minus 9 seconds

01:07:59 and make a direct bond to the chlorine.

01:08:02 Now, if electron transfer were to take place then

01:08:06 in this configuration,

01:08:09 the chromium would be converted to a 3 plus ion,

01:08:13 and I knew from the correlation

01:08:15 that the chromium 3 plus would keep the chlorine captive.

01:08:20 It wouldn't be released into the solution.

01:08:22 I could take my time,

01:08:24 and I would simply do a stoichiometric experiment.

01:08:27 I would learn whether in this reaction

01:08:30 a 4-O complex is formed

01:08:32 or whether one simply got the hex-octo complex.

01:08:35 If you got the hex-octo complex,

01:08:37 you could be sure that the electron

01:08:39 would be transferred over considerable distances.

01:08:42 I still rather like this experiment

01:08:44 because the first time it was done

01:08:46 it was literally done with a test.

01:08:48 You just mixed the solutions and looked at them.

01:08:51 This experiment, though it seemed in retrospect trivial,

01:08:56 did have an enormous impact

01:08:59 in the field of trying to understand

01:09:01 oxidation-reduction reactions

01:09:03 because in a sense it added another dimension to the field.

01:09:08 Here was a concrete statement

01:09:10 about something that could happen in intergalactic chemistry,

01:09:13 and people became curious then

01:09:15 in other industries.

01:09:16 How does a reaction take place?

01:09:18 Do the electrons transfer through intact coordination spheres?

01:09:22 Or is there something special like this taking place?

01:09:25 Well, I don't think that I want to

01:09:28 take you any further through my career.

01:09:32 I think that I've accomplished what I set out to do,

01:09:36 which is to give you some impression

01:09:38 of what sorts of considerations

01:09:41 have governed the choices that I've made.

01:09:44 But before I sit down,

01:09:46 I do want to make some acknowledgements.

01:09:48 And I think very important among these are my parents

01:09:52 and my brothers.

01:09:54 My parents were totally without education.

01:09:58 They came to Canada

01:10:03 essentially because my father was a laborer

01:10:06 in Winnipeg, digging ditches.

01:10:09 Eventually he was able to rent a farm.

01:10:12 Despite the fact that they had no formal education,

01:10:16 I'm, of course, grateful and proud

01:10:20 that they saw the benefits of an education

01:10:24 and had great sacrifice to themselves.

01:10:26 And of course, my brothers also had sacrifices on my behalf.

01:10:30 I've acknowledged some of my other teachers.

01:10:34 Of course, I've learned from colleagues

01:10:37 and also from students.

01:10:39 And I, of course, have to acknowledge my co-workers.

01:10:42 I think on the whole we've had cordial relations.

01:10:46 I've certainly enjoyed the associations.

01:10:48 And I should also acknowledge

01:10:51 the support that I've received from government agencies,

01:10:54 ONR, Office of Naval Research,

01:10:57 Atomic Energy Commission,

01:10:59 National Science Foundation,

01:11:01 and the National Institutes of Health.

01:11:04 And I think I also want to express my appreciation

01:11:07 to Dr. Friedman,

01:11:09 who's made this visit finally possible.

01:11:11 Thank you very much.

01:11:13 Thank you.

01:11:15 Thank you.

01:11:40 If you have any questions,

01:11:42 I'm going to ask Professor Taube to pass the lecture,

01:11:44 so I know any of you have to leave.

01:11:48 Anybody who wants to assume any of those duties,

01:11:50 you have to ask him to leave.

01:12:12 Thank you.

01:12:43 Oh, my goodness, this is going to really be impressive.

01:12:55 Is it recording?

01:13:02 Fifteen minutes.

01:13:12 That's fantastic.

01:13:43 Fantastic.

01:13:49 Now, this fits into whatever...