Professional Documents
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Engineering
By Nicholas A. Peppas
Creating a Curriculum
Despite the developments in German universities and industry, education in chemistry and
chemical engineering had not been formalized. Students obtained at best superficial
knowledge about the new industrial chemical processes in their chemistry courses. The
operation of distillation columns, filtration units, and the like was taught in so-called
technical schools, not in universities. The Technical University of Braunschweig, for
instance, soon offered “industrial” courses, but in the eyes of Liebig’s academic
descendants at Göttingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin, it was not to be considered a university.
By the end of the 19th century, competition among Great Britain, Germany, and the United
States for industrial chemicals had become rather fierce, and chemical engineering
expertise was in high demand. The first course in chemical engineering was offered by an
unknown industrial prospector from Manchester, England, named George E. Davis, who
decided to transfer his vast knowledge from years of inspecting chemical plants in the
industrial regions of England to the classroom. In fall 1887 he gave a series of 12 lectures
that were later published in Chemical Trade Journal. The next year Lewis M. Norton
(1855–1893) of the chemistry department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) offered a new course in chemical engineering. The course material was taken
predominantly from Norton’s notes on industrial practice in Germany, which at that time
had probably the most advanced chemical process industry in the world.
When Norton died in 1893, Frank H. Thorpe (1864 – 1932), an MIT graduate who had
earned a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg that same year, took responsibility for
Norton’s course. Five years later he published what may be considered the first textbook on
chemical engineering, entitled Outlines of Industrial Chemistry. This textbook made
mention of the chemical treatment of biological by-products, a very faint indication of early
biotechnology processes.
Although Norton and Thorpe pioneered the teaching of chemical engineering in the United
States, it was Arthur A. Noyes (1866–1936) and later William H. Walker (1869–1934) who
helped bring to the discipline the respect it would eventually enjoy within the engineering
curriculum. Noyes established the Research Laboratory of Physical Chemistry at MIT in
1903 before making his mark in 1913 by transforming what was then Throop College into
the California Institute of Technology. Walker, who had received his doctorate in 1892 at
the University of Göttingen with future Nobel laureate Otto Wallach, was hired as an
instructor at MIT in 1902. Under Walker’s leadership, MIT’s Division of Applied
Chemistry (as it was then known) flourished, and the establishment of its Research
Laboratory of Applied Chemistry followed in 1908. In his institution-building work Walker
was assisted by Warren K. Lewis (1882–1975), for whom the prestigious AIChE teaching
and education award is named. He left a deep impact not only through his series of
industrial consultancies and attempts at profession building, but also through his emphasis
on practical teaching.