(This is a continuation of Dr. Hart's memoirs from the last Alumni Newsletter.)
[Editors Note: From Page 7-12 "Department of Chemistry Newsletter for Alumni and Friends," September 1993]
I enjoyed teaching general chemistry, especially when the opportunity came for me to select a new text. I chose the newly published book by Linus Pauling (1948). It was handsomely illustrated with drawings by Roger Hayward, and represented a spectacular change from previous general chemistry books because it was the first beginning text to emphasize the importance of molecular structure in chemistry. The problems were not easy and the text was challenging, though clearly and beautifully written. Both the students and I learned a great deal from it.
It is amazing how many areas of chemistry Linus Pauling touched and today, at 92, he is still going strong. In my short organic text (whose origin I will describe next) I included portraits of a number of important chemists, including Victor Grignard, Emil Fischer, Robert Burns Woodward and Linus Pauling. Later, my publishers thought that these portraits made the text look somewhat dated, and asked that they be removed. Gradually, through various editions, they have been excised, all except that of Pauling, which is still there, in the 1991 (8th) edition. This reminds me to tell you how that text came to be written.
The first organic chemistry course I had the opportunity to teach, and I jumped at the chance, was Chemistry 103 (now Chem 143), a one quarter three-credit course usually taken after two quarters of general chemistry by students from agriculture, home economics and nursing. It included lectures and a lab, and later a recitation section. The text that had been in use was by Garrard. It had the virtue of being short, but otherwise was dullsville itself, devoid of material that would interest the students, all of whom were non-chemists, and after a couple of quarters I switched to a short text by Wertheim. Although his book was a short version of a futtyear text by the same author, and therefore again contained material that was mainly for chemistry majors, the writing style was better and the pages were not so dense with text, so my students were not turned off by it (indeed, I recruited quite a few chemistry majors from that course). I turned my attention to the laboratory part of the course. The labs were short, only two hours once a week, and not well coordinated with the lectures. Since most of the experiments were taken from existing manuals for the full-year chemistry majors course, they were too long and it was always rush, rush, rush. So I designed a number of experiments that seemed more suitable to the clientele of the course, some original but most adapted from other lab manuals, reduced in scope so that they could be completed in the lab time available. I had them mimeographed (no Xerox or computers in those days) and distributed to the students without charge. They were not copyrighted. At about this time, Bob Schuetz joined the organic faculty and he, too, occasionally taught Chem 103 which, in those days, was offered all four quarters.
One day Fred Dutton came into my office (by then I had moved to an office/lab of my own on the second floor of Kedzie, on the west side of the hall, opposite the storeroom and near the men's room, whose toilets I heard flush for a decade or more; Max Rogers remained on the first floor). Fred told me that Bob Schuetz was about to join with a Northwestern buddy of his, Ernie Campaigne, then teaching at Indiana University in Bloomington, to publish a lab manual for the short organic course. Campaigne had been teaching a similar course at Indiana and had also prepared a set of experiments (I still have a copy), which were to be combined with the ones I had written. I immediately went to see Bob and suggested that all three names appear on the manual, which is what happened. We signed with Wm. C. Brown and Company, Dubuque, Iowa to publish "Laboratory Manual of Elementary Organic Chemistry" by, in atphabetic order, Campaigne, Hart and Schuetz (1950). The first printing was for 2,500 copies; Brown and Co. kept the receipts for the first 1,700 or so copies, to cover their costs, after which the receipts for the remaining copies were distributed as royalties equally among the three authors. The same was true of the second printing.
If I remember correctly, it was sometime in 1951 when Bob Schuetz suggested that we write a short organic text to go with the lab manual. Campaigne was not interested, so it would be just the two of us. We prepared a rough outline, I took the first half and Bob the second. I wrote evenings and weekends. It turned out that our writing styles were extremely different; to make the style consistent throughout, I revised and/or rewrote all the chapters that Bob had prepared. He was better than me at drawing, and did most of the drawings that were eventually supplied to the publisher's art department. And Bob did the first draft of the questions at the end of each chapter; I rewrote them for style. The entire job was completed in nine months (a full term pregnancy). Every subsequent edition took longer than that to prepare, despite the many technological improvements in book publishing.
In those days publishers did not scramble for manuscripts to the extent that they do today. They did not offer hefty royalty advances, especially to two unknowns. Indeed, we did not seek a publisher until the manuscript was completed. Then we sent it to three textbook publishers, Macmillan, Prentice-Hall and Houghton Mifflin (I don't recall why we selected these three). Macmillan responded by asking us to write a lab manual to accompany their full year text by Conant and Blatt. We declined. Prentice-Hall rejected the manuscript outright as being too rigorous and too innovative--a decision that they were soon to regret. We signed a contract with the Houghton Mifflin Company (Boston), and the first edition appeared in 1953. The book was an immediate success. I remember stepping into a hotel elevator at the Spring 1953 ACS meeting. Someone already on board saw my name tag and asked , "Are you the author of a short organic text that was just published?" I said yes, and he said, "Well, I just sent my review of it to the Journal of Chemical Education." That is how I met Joe Bunnett, then at the University of N. Carolina and later at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Joe told me that he was surprised when he opened the book and saw pictures of a kitten playing with its reflection in a mirror (to illustrate Tollens' silver mirror test) and a pretty model chatting on a telephone (wearing, as the text explained, a cellulose acetate blouse), but that in spite of the glamour he found the text rigorous and well written (for his review, see J. Chem Educ. 1953, 30, 375). Just a few months after its publication, our publishers were pressuring us to write a full year text. Perhaps it was an error that we didn't, but I resisted because I felt that, unlike the short course field, there were many excellent texts for the full year course, then and now.
Bob and I did four editions together, over 20+ years. In 1975, about a year before Bob died, I took over as sole author. The 8th edition appeared in 1991, with my son David doing the Study Guide and daughter Leslie revising the Lab Manual. In the future, they will take over the entire package. The text has also been translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese and several other languages, and is used world-wide. I have received many nice letters from students here and abroad who feel that they have benefitted from the book, and to me they are just as satisfying as the roya!ty checks. Copies of the first and eighth editions were recently deposited with the National Foundation for History of Chemistry.
Let me get away from personal matters to those of more general interest. By the end of the 1950's, it became clear that the department had plateaued and that a change in leadership was necessary. Larry Quill became Director of the newly established Institute for Water Research on campus, and Max Rogers became acting chairman (in '60, I believe). Max was like a breath of fresh air at faculty meetings, where his marvelous sense of humor set the tone. But the split between old and new guard was close to the critical 50-50 point and it seemed necessary to look outside the department for a chairman. Alex Popov joined us, and his title as chairman rather than head, with a definite term of office, reflected the growing desire for a less autocratic and more democratic way of handling faculty affairs, not only in chemistry but throughout the University.
Equipment and service personnel were, as I have recounted, almost non-existent when I joined the department in 1946. Max Rogers built the first NMR machine in the mid 50's, a 40 MHz and very temperamental instrument with, by today's standards, a rather unstable magnet that needed constant shimming. Nevertheless it was great to have, and we were able to record some of the first carbocation spectra on it. The first commercial instrument, a Varian A60, came in the very early 1960's. It was paid for partly with University funds and partly with funds from my ACS-PRF grant and from Mike Karabatsos' NSF grant. When the ACS first set up the Petroleum Research Fund, I applied for a grant, with a proposal to study the AIC13 - catalyzed acylation of cyclopropanes. This was fundamental research and I was afraid that it didn't sound enough like petroleum chemistry (the policies for awarding PRF grants had not yet been set) so I added a rather far-fetched section on the practical applications of the research to petroleum chemistry. The proposal was rejected. The grounds? Too practical. I had really misjudged how the proposals would be evaluated, so I started to re-write the proposal, eliminating the petroleum sections. One day, while I was working on it, the phone rang with a call from PRF that they had just established a new (and it turned out, relatively short-lived) category called 'Unsolicited' awards, and that I was to be the first recipient ($50,000). How nice! That was a lot of money in those days, and part of it went to pay for the A60, which was used mainly by Mike Karabatsos and myself. Nowadays we have quite a few NMR machines with the staff to maintain them, and that facility is appropriately named for Max Rogers. Max was always in the game very early as each new type of instrumentation came along (NMR, ESR, NQR and others); with typical wisdom, he foresaw the tremendous impact that NMR would have on biology and medicine.
As to technicians who would greatly facilitate the department's research effort, there was almost nothing while we were still in Kedzie--only modest beginnings in the late 50's and early 60's. The lion's share of credit for the marvelous support staff that we now enjoy must go to Jack Kinsinger and the NSF "Centers of Excellence" grant that the department obtained after we moved to the present building. Technical positions for the electronics, glass and machine shops, the instrument designer and others were set up and initially financed under that grant, with the gradual take-over of financial support for each position by the University.
There have been six presidents, seven chemistry department chairmen and five deans of the College of Natura1 Sciences (or formerly, Arts and Sciences) at Michigan State since I came in 1946. I won't comment any further on the chemistry chairmen except to say that each, in his way, helped raise the department to its present high level. And I won't comment on the deans, since they administer many departments and hence have a relatively minor impact on any particular one. But I would like to say something about the presidents, because they set the tone for the entire university. In my view, three of the six presidents displayed the exceptional capacity to put the interests of Michigan State foremost, and their own professional and pecuniary advancement secondary. John Hannah was one of these. One might say that he lived for the university, that he was thoroughly devoted to it. He was a great builder of buildings, and at the same time he sought to improve the quality of the faculty. He was, however, an autocrat, a benevolent dictator who ran the university with a strong hand. He was, I think, a little surprised and hurt when he found that the new faculty did not always agree with his policies, and sought a more democratic way of conducting faculty affairs. Here is one example.
During one summer in the late 40's or early 50's, the State News (the student newspaper) published an editorial that attacked Boy's State, a summer program sponsored by the American Legion that brought young boys to the campus to promote their interest in state government. In particular, the editorial referred to the Legion as a pseudoFascist organization (certainly, it was politica11y right-wing). The editorial naturally brought angry responses from American Legion chapters throughout the state, with threats to withdraw the program and to pressure the legislature to cut university funding. John Hannah responded by immediately firing the student editor and shutting down the newspaper for the rest of the summer. I joined a group of five or six faculty (I don't recall all the names, but I believe that Walter Adams and Bob Repas were there) who made an appointment with Hannah to remind him about such things as the Bill of Rights and freedom of the press. Hannah was outraged that we would challenge his decision and authority, and essentially threw us out of his office. He was not about to allow the first amendment of the U.S. constitution to interfere with his protection of the university against the possible loss of an important constituency, the Legion. Despite such lapses, Hannah undoubtedly had a greater influence on the development of this university than any other president. And he did get to know individual faculty, and remember their names. Once someone asked Hannah if he knew me. "Hart," he said, "Oh yes, he's that contentious young man in chemistry." I considered it a compliment.
Walter Adams and Edgar Harden are the other two presidents who always put the university's interests above their own. Adams was tremendously effective in dealing sympathetically but firmly with student unrest during a difficult period. Harden sought and obtained legislative good will and strong financial support for the university.
In this final section, I want to say a few things about the famous Kedzie fire that resulted in one unfortunate death and was one of several factors that led to a new home for the chemistry department. But first I have to describe a situation peculiar to the organic division of the department. I think every person who joins a chemistry department faculty looks forward to having his/her own laboratory, where he/she can work closely with students, develop group spirit and rapport, and assemble and maintain equipment that is peculiar to the particular research program. In Kedzie, this was not always possible, because most of the research labs were originally teaching laboratories and in general, too large for a single research group. Nevertheless an effort was made in the non-organic divisions to create individual research group labs, either with partitions or by having no more than two groups share a lab. This was not true for organic chemistry. Professor Herbst, who was the senior organic faculty member, strongly opposed the idea of assigning labs to particular research groups; indeed, he (and not individual research preceptors) assumed the responsibility for assigning a lab bench to each new organic graduate student, and whenever possible two students working with the same preceptor were not assigned to adjacent benches. I suppose the idea was to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas and to discourage cliques, and undoubtedly a case can be made for this view, though I feel that this arrangement diffuses the responsibility for laboratory maintenance. In any event, my efforts to change this situation were always thwarted, and it was not until we moved to the present chemistry building that members of the organic group had their individual research laboratories (by that time Professor Herbst, who was approaching retirement, took an office on the sccond floor near the teaching labs, and devoted his main attention to undergraduate teaching, though he was a skillful experimentalist and continued to work in the lab himself right up to retirement).
All this by the way of explaining the situation in the ten-person organic research lab that was the scene of the fire, and why there would be students there from several research groups. The lab, which was on the third floor of Kedzie, on the north side of the southeast wing of the building, was occupied by members of several research groups. The lab benches ran north-south, there was only one aisle that ran east-west along the hoods, which also ran east-west along the lab's south wall. There was only one door to the lab, in its southwest corner. The student at whose bench the fire started worked, as I recall, at the fifth bench from the door. He was a masters' student working with Prof. Schuetz. He was distilling a reaction mixture on a fairly substantial scale (perhaps 100-200 g, not uncommon in those days). He continued to heat the flask after the solvent was removed, and the pot residue, which probably contained peroxides, became overheated and either ignited or exploded; nearby solvents were ignited and the room instantly became black with soot, decreasing visibility to nearly zero. The student who was performing the distillation ducked and was able to get out of the lab with relatively minor burns and injuries. Students working closer to the door were able to escape. Two students, however, were working beyond the bench where the fire started, and were trapped. They had to run through the flames to get out, and their clothes caught fire. One of them was Harlo Mork, also working with Professor Schuetz. He ran past the students who were outside the lab door and all the way down to the first floor and out the front door of Kedzie, with his clothes on fire, before he was ultimately stopped so that the flames could be extinguished. As a consequence he was too severely burned to survive, and died in a hospital about two weeks later. The other student was Fillmore Freeman, a member of my research group. His clothing was also aflame, but fortunately he was caught just outside the laboratory door (3rd floor) and the flames were extinguished by wrapping him in a fire blanket. He was severely burned and spent about 8 months in the hospital. Fillmore had just started graduate school a few months before the fire occurred, and a lesser person would have quit chemistry after that experience. But Fillmore returned to the lab after he recovered, completed his Ph.D. in 1962, and became the first black Ph.D. to be hired by the California Research Corporation (Standard Oil of California). Later, Fillmore did postdoctoral work with Ken Wiberg at Yale, taught for some years at the California State College at Long Beach, and then joined the faculty at the University of California at Irvine, where he has had a distinguished career and earned an international reputation for his research.
The tragic consequences of that fire naturally prompted an effort to
improve laboratory safety in Kedzie. Almost all the labs had only one door, and their
occupants were at risk. The department wanted fire escapes to be installed, but university
officials felt that these would be unsightly (an unbelievable decision, in my view).
Eventually some rope ladders were installed adjacent to several windows. But the fire, and
the pressing needs of the department for additional space, not only for research but for
undergraduate teaching laboratories, most of which were by then not in Kedzie but in
Quonset huts at the other end of campus, led to a decision to construct a new building for
the department (other plans were considered, such as building an addition to Kedzie, but
were rejected). Bob Schuetz had the major responsibility for coordinating departmental
space needs, and for working with the architects and builders. He deserves much credit for
the serviceability of the present building, which has met our needs exceptionally well as
the department continued to grow over the past 28 years.
I have only one major regret about the building. The original plans called for separate sets of freight and passenger elevators, but to save money these plans were scaled down to the present two elevators, serving both functions. I hate to think how many person-hours have been wasted waiting for those damned elevators, certainly at far greater financial cost over the years than was saved. Aside from that, the building has been a pleasant and reasonably safe place in which to work. And every laboratory has at least two doors. No one is likely to get trapped again.
If I have misstated the way things were, please remember that what I have written is just one person's view. I invite comments and corrections, and I do hope that others will be prompted by this essay to record their own experiences during the Kedzie years and beyond.
* * *
Gold medal donated by Dr. Herbert S. Eleuterio to the Department on May 14, 1992 in honor
of Professor Hart's 70th birthday. Dr. Eleuterio who obtained his Ph.D. with Hart in 1953
had a distinguished career with DuPont. He received this DuPont Fellows Technical
Excellence Award (the likeness on the medal is that of Nobel Laureate Charles J. Pedersen)
for his work on olefin metathesis and on perfluoropropylene oxide. Dr. Eleuterio retired
from DuPont recently and is teaching at National University of Singapore where he is also
working on several technical projects with the science and engineering faculty there.
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