Herman Mark and Turner Alfrey
It can't be surprising that Herman Mark would have exerted a strong influence on my professional life. The direct student-professor relationship surely played a significant role in that, but there were many other ways. He only taught one (2 semester) graduate course, an Introduction to Polymer Chemistry. It was held in the evening in the largest lecture room of the Institute, which was filled with people from all over the New York area, few of them full time graduate students. His lectures were as good as they come. The one on polymerization kinetics was a real work of art. It included, just by the way, what amounted to an easy introduction to differential calculus. But the only scope for personal attention was through a term paper at the end of the course.
For the dissertation research, he left me wide latitude after the initial discussion, and we met almost only at my initiative; which meant not very often. I had been in awe of him since before I ever saw him and was reluctant to bother him, although he never refused to meet when I did come. That awe originated in an assignment in undergraduate school, which first made me decide to continue with graduate studies. So Mark's effect on my life had preceded our direct contact, and it also continued after formal study.
I had come to the US to study for a BS degree in "Chemistry and Dyeing" in Fall River, Massachusetts. It was to prepare me for a working life dyeing fabrics (a traditional, well respected Jewish occupation since ancient times that had helped make the world more colorful). Like other former textile mill towns in the state, such as New Bedford and Lowell, Fall River had a college grade textile school. These were expanded to general schools of technology as the textile mills moved from New England to the South in search of cheaper labor, and the number of students seeking college degrees rose sharply with the end of World War II and the GI Bill of Rights . Our chemistry department at "Durfee Tech" (later nucleus of Southwestern Mass. U) was of high quality, due especially to James Watters, the department head; but the dyeing courses did not seem to be on a comparable level of scientific understanding, important especially for the new fibers which were just emerging in mid century. In part it was due to a real lack of understanding of the underlying processes, but it probably bothered me more than other students. Then Dr. Watters, in a course on Chemical Literature made me report on a paper by Herman Mark (and the references he cited); which answered not only many of the questions that had bothered me, but others that hadn't occurred to me; i.e. it opened up a whole new horizon (and eventually led me to elucidate some of what had not been understood). That made me decide to go to graduate school (which evidently was Dr. Watters' intent), but also to forego immediate fellowships at other universities and instead go to Brooklyn without that. So Mark (along with Watters) was co-responsible for my spending my working life in reseaech rather than dyeing fabrics. Whether that was for the better only became questionable recently.
Regardless of whether it will turn out to have been preferable, Mark had much to do with it apart from that initial inspiration and the dissertation relation. Like the fellow students working with other professors as thesis advisors, I benefitted from his participation in seminars and his regular reports on recent developments in Europe and wherever else he had travelled. More fundamentally, he had put together this first academic Polymer Research Institute (PRI, of many to follow), assembling an outstanding research and teaching staff and creating the ambience of excitement of new science emerging or being made public right around you; with regular symposia, monographs being published and the first journals of polymer science (still the main ones) being founded. He himself later referred to this period as the high point of the PRI.
Turner Alfrey.
Turner Alfrey had been a professor at the Institute until some time before my start there. Even though I missed him then in person, he was present in constant recollections of more advanced students, as much for personal features like his large physical presence, high boots and beer drinking feats in informal sessions as with the formal academic ones. Those must have been substantial; like the course which led to the pioneering book on the Mechanical Behavior of High Polymers (probably still a classic in an important field). By the time I came, he had left for a position with Dow Chemical Company as Research Scientist. It gave him complete freedom to pick his own work. In practice he was also available for consultation to others in polymer research, mainly at the company HQ in Midland , Michigan.
As it turned out, I also took a research job with Dow after completing my studies. It was at a new fiber division the company was setting up in Williamsburg , Virginia; based on initial research done at the Western Division near San Francisco; where I started in 1957. I discussed things with Alfrey before publishing anything that involved a significant scientific departure from generally accepted theory, regardless of the degree of my own confidence in my conclusions. In that sense he probably served more as a post-doctoral professor than as a senior colleague.And since he had also been Herman Mark's (first American) docoral student, it could also be viewed as part of Mark's continuing effect on my professional life.
I had been working for 3-4 years in Williamsburg before I first went to Midland to give a talk and to talk to Alfrey. It concerned what still looks like my foremost scientific contribution. I was suggesting, and providing strond and varied evidence for a new mechanism by which dye molecules move from the surface of a fiber (in contact with the dyebath) toward it center; by utilizing the motion of segments of the long chain fiber molecules. That motion was known to become available above the glass transition temperature (below which rubbery polymers become brittle glasses, hence the Challenger accident, as Mark was shown explaining on TV); and the simplest supporting evidence was that dye uptake by fibers practically ceases, below the glass transition, where that motion ceases. Not only could known things be explained , but others also predicted. The theory that had prevailed for decades in dozens of scientific papers and reviews was that fibers are criss-crossed by "pores" through which the dye liquor can flow and deposit dye molecules on the pore walls. No evidence or predictive power, but a simple static fiber picture and complex, ingenious calculations, some by outstanding British mathematicians, that showed that it is geometrically (almost) possible.
There had been a specific reason for consulting with Alfrey before publishing such a diffusion model based on segmental motion. Were such polymer segments (that could move by cooperative rotation around single bonds) of a length adequate to thus make way for a dye molecule (which can be about 10-20 Angstrom units long)? The closest to a discussion of that had been in the book on mechanical behavior mentioned. And in a way Mark had played some early pioneering role toward that, too; but I shouldn't overdo those connections.
After my return to the Western Division , where I worked on membrane permeation and where Alfrey came periodically, we used to meet in the evening at his motel room, well stoccked with beer. He was never negative, but not always as supportive as for the above. I aso still view it as my most significant scientific contribution (though not nearly as important as my later work on solar power, which in normal current parlance would also be classified as science).
The last time we met after I had switched from Dow to the USDA. We went to eat at Chez Margherite, then a(n almost) new little place in San Francisco. He was seriously worried about imminent mass starvation. If he talked that way so as to persuade me to work on that , now that I was in an agricultural lab, rather than on protein fibers, he did not succeed then. But I certainly did remember it later when obstacles arose to our solar energy project.
For the dissertation research, he left me wide latitude after the initial discussion, and we met almost only at my initiative; which meant not very often. I had been in awe of him since before I ever saw him and was reluctant to bother him, although he never refused to meet when I did come. That awe originated in an assignment in undergraduate school, which first made me decide to continue with graduate studies. So Mark's effect on my life had preceded our direct contact, and it also continued after formal study.
I had come to the US to study for a BS degree in "Chemistry and Dyeing" in Fall River, Massachusetts. It was to prepare me for a working life dyeing fabrics (a traditional, well respected Jewish occupation since ancient times that had helped make the world more colorful). Like other former textile mill towns in the state, such as New Bedford and Lowell, Fall River had a college grade textile school. These were expanded to general schools of technology as the textile mills moved from New England to the South in search of cheaper labor, and the number of students seeking college degrees rose sharply with the end of World War II and the GI Bill of Rights . Our chemistry department at "Durfee Tech" (later nucleus of Southwestern Mass. U) was of high quality, due especially to James Watters, the department head; but the dyeing courses did not seem to be on a comparable level of scientific understanding, important especially for the new fibers which were just emerging in mid century. In part it was due to a real lack of understanding of the underlying processes, but it probably bothered me more than other students. Then Dr. Watters, in a course on Chemical Literature made me report on a paper by Herman Mark (and the references he cited); which answered not only many of the questions that had bothered me, but others that hadn't occurred to me; i.e. it opened up a whole new horizon (and eventually led me to elucidate some of what had not been understood). That made me decide to go to graduate school (which evidently was Dr. Watters' intent), but also to forego immediate fellowships at other universities and instead go to Brooklyn without that. So Mark (along with Watters) was co-responsible for my spending my working life in reseaech rather than dyeing fabrics. Whether that was for the better only became questionable recently.
Regardless of whether it will turn out to have been preferable, Mark had much to do with it apart from that initial inspiration and the dissertation relation. Like the fellow students working with other professors as thesis advisors, I benefitted from his participation in seminars and his regular reports on recent developments in Europe and wherever else he had travelled. More fundamentally, he had put together this first academic Polymer Research Institute (PRI, of many to follow), assembling an outstanding research and teaching staff and creating the ambience of excitement of new science emerging or being made public right around you; with regular symposia, monographs being published and the first journals of polymer science (still the main ones) being founded. He himself later referred to this period as the high point of the PRI.
Turner Alfrey.
Turner Alfrey had been a professor at the Institute until some time before my start there. Even though I missed him then in person, he was present in constant recollections of more advanced students, as much for personal features like his large physical presence, high boots and beer drinking feats in informal sessions as with the formal academic ones. Those must have been substantial; like the course which led to the pioneering book on the Mechanical Behavior of High Polymers (probably still a classic in an important field). By the time I came, he had left for a position with Dow Chemical Company as Research Scientist. It gave him complete freedom to pick his own work. In practice he was also available for consultation to others in polymer research, mainly at the company HQ in Midland , Michigan.
As it turned out, I also took a research job with Dow after completing my studies. It was at a new fiber division the company was setting up in Williamsburg , Virginia; based on initial research done at the Western Division near San Francisco; where I started in 1957. I discussed things with Alfrey before publishing anything that involved a significant scientific departure from generally accepted theory, regardless of the degree of my own confidence in my conclusions. In that sense he probably served more as a post-doctoral professor than as a senior colleague.And since he had also been Herman Mark's (first American) docoral student, it could also be viewed as part of Mark's continuing effect on my professional life.
I had been working for 3-4 years in Williamsburg before I first went to Midland to give a talk and to talk to Alfrey. It concerned what still looks like my foremost scientific contribution. I was suggesting, and providing strond and varied evidence for a new mechanism by which dye molecules move from the surface of a fiber (in contact with the dyebath) toward it center; by utilizing the motion of segments of the long chain fiber molecules. That motion was known to become available above the glass transition temperature (below which rubbery polymers become brittle glasses, hence the Challenger accident, as Mark was shown explaining on TV); and the simplest supporting evidence was that dye uptake by fibers practically ceases, below the glass transition, where that motion ceases. Not only could known things be explained , but others also predicted. The theory that had prevailed for decades in dozens of scientific papers and reviews was that fibers are criss-crossed by "pores" through which the dye liquor can flow and deposit dye molecules on the pore walls. No evidence or predictive power, but a simple static fiber picture and complex, ingenious calculations, some by outstanding British mathematicians, that showed that it is geometrically (almost) possible.
There had been a specific reason for consulting with Alfrey before publishing such a diffusion model based on segmental motion. Were such polymer segments (that could move by cooperative rotation around single bonds) of a length adequate to thus make way for a dye molecule (which can be about 10-20 Angstrom units long)? The closest to a discussion of that had been in the book on mechanical behavior mentioned. And in a way Mark had played some early pioneering role toward that, too; but I shouldn't overdo those connections.
After my return to the Western Division , where I worked on membrane permeation and where Alfrey came periodically, we used to meet in the evening at his motel room, well stoccked with beer. He was never negative, but not always as supportive as for the above. I aso still view it as my most significant scientific contribution (though not nearly as important as my later work on solar power, which in normal current parlance would also be classified as science).
The last time we met after I had switched from Dow to the USDA. We went to eat at Chez Margherite, then a(n almost) new little place in San Francisco. He was seriously worried about imminent mass starvation. If he talked that way so as to persuade me to work on that , now that I was in an agricultural lab, rather than on protein fibers, he did not succeed then. But I certainly did remember it later when obstacles arose to our solar energy project.
posted by solar_sol | 10:04 PM
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