00:00:30 It's been a pleasure tonight to officiate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal

00:00:59 which we now call Inorganic Chemistry, which is superior to all of us, in one respect or another.

00:01:06 We have some distinguished guests here tonight.

00:01:09 This is not our normal business meeting that you normally participate in, but tonight's pretty social.

00:01:17 And we have with us President and Mrs. George Pimentel, so we have higher management here.

00:01:26 We have a past president, Bob Perry, and we have past editors, Bob Perry and Ed King,

00:01:35 and we have past and present editorial board members out there, and we have some distinguished guests.

00:01:48 Two people have come to mind that should be here and who could not be here.

00:01:56 One is Henry Tawdy. Henry Tawdy had a vital role to play in the founding of this journal, as did John Baylor.

00:02:06 Neither of these gentlemen could be here with us tonight. I'm sorry about that.

00:02:13 While I'm up here, I wanted to also point out we have two award winners with us tonight.

00:02:19 Steve Whitburn has just been announced he is the winner of this year's Monsanto Award in Inorganic Chemistry,

00:02:30 and Doug Schreiber is the winner of the Distinguished Service in Inorganic Chemistry Award.

00:02:39 It's clear our editorial board also does good research and delight in doing that all along anyway.

00:02:55 Before we begin this evening, I think we ought to introduce three other people who are here

00:03:04 who play a very important role in the journal production and journal, just taking care of editors, basically.

00:03:15 I'd like them to stand up. I'd like Ria Reaver, my secretary, to stand up.

00:03:22 Ria sees all the manuscripts before anybody else. She opens all the envelopes and has all the heartaches.

00:03:35 We get envelopes from India that have no envelopes left.

00:03:39 She organized tonight's party from the personnel point of view.

00:03:50 Then also with us tonight is Joan Williams.

00:03:55 Where is she, Joan?

00:03:57 There she is.

00:03:59 Stand up.

00:04:01 Secretary.

00:04:11 Joan Case.

00:04:20 You can still stand.

00:04:31 Tonight, the way we like to do this, I'm not organized, as you all know.

00:04:38 We're going to have some short talks.

00:04:43 The first person I'd like to have come up and address us is Bob Perry.

00:04:49 Then we'll have Ed King.

00:04:51 Then, of course, Ken Mattel will talk to us.

00:04:54 Steve Lippert has to catch a plane, so we'll put him up here after that.

00:04:59 Then Gail Stuckey and Herb Case and Bruce Shriver, Ed Solomon, Mike Bowen,

00:05:06 and anybody else who, at that point, has the spirit and the certainty and conformity to address us.

00:05:15 It looks like we're out of spirits, though.

00:05:18 We'll have Ed comment on that.

00:05:21 Anyway, without further ado, I'd like Bob Perry to please come up.

00:05:27 Ed.

00:05:32 Tonight we're having a birthday party, and our celebrant is not a baby.

00:05:37 Not even an adolescent.

00:05:39 She's 25.

00:05:41 He or she, I don't know which.

00:05:43 She's 25, and I think a celebration's in order.

00:05:47 Fred has identified a number of distinguished people who are here tonight,

00:05:52 and there are two folks that I would like to call to your attention from an earlier era,

00:05:58 when I first appointed an editorial board.

00:06:01 One of them is Gene Brim, and the other one is Tracy Hall.

00:06:05 Will you guys stand up?

00:06:13 They have contributed as much, I think, to the economy of the country as any individual in the ACS.

00:06:20 Gene had his name on the original papers for Molecular Civ.

00:06:26 John Breck and Peter Thomas.

00:06:28 And as you well know, Molecular Civ. has made a lot of difference in refining petroleum over the years.

00:06:35 A lot of money.

00:06:37 A lot of money is right.

00:06:39 And Tracy Hall was the first man to make artificial diamonds, which is a pretty good inorganic goo.

00:06:46 And a lot of people make money on that, too.

00:06:52 I'd like to congratulate Fred and Herb and Steve and Ed and Jack

00:07:01 for doing a very good job on editing the journal today.

00:07:07 The job is done with integrity.

00:07:09 It's done with skill.

00:07:11 And it's done with a rare ability to keep both editors, referees, and authors, and readers happy.

00:07:20 And that's a hard culmination to do.

00:07:22 They've done a good job.

00:07:24 I think they ought to be commended.

00:07:26 But I've got to tell you a story about editors.

00:07:28 You know, they're kind of a strange lot.

00:07:31 They look very broken here.

00:07:35 It so happens that a couple of fellows were up in the Napa Valley.

00:07:41 They got involved in one of these balloon rides, you know.

00:07:44 And a pretty stiff breeze came in from the west and put them a whale away from the chase crew.

00:07:49 So pretty soon they were lost, sailing around up there.

00:07:52 They looked down and they couldn't see anything that they recognized, but they saw a guy walking along the road.

00:07:59 So they turned down their burner and went down to sort of hover around this guy on the road.

00:08:05 They yelled out to him and said,

00:08:07 Where are we?

00:08:09 Well, the guy looked around like this.

00:08:11 He didn't see anybody.

00:08:13 And they yelled again,

00:08:14 Where are we?

00:08:15 He looked up.

00:08:16 Oh, you're up in the balloon.

00:08:20 And the scientist who was in the balloon turned to the attorney who was in the living room.

00:08:25 He said,

00:08:26 You know, that guy's an editor.

00:08:30 How in the world can you say that?

00:08:32 You don't know he's an editor.

00:08:33 He says,

00:08:34 It's absolutely clear.

00:08:35 The information he gave us was 100% accurate, but totally useless.

00:08:44 I'm going to tell you a little bit about Genesis tonight.

00:08:47 This is, you know, the Bible starts out, for those of you who missed Sunday School last year,

00:08:55 It starts out as,

00:08:57 In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

00:09:02 Our story starts a little different.

00:09:04 In the beginning, John Boehler managed to talk the ACS board into creating a journal for the purpose of presenting inorganic chemistry.

00:09:15 Now, how he did this is as big a mystery to me as it is how God created the universe.

00:09:22 But that's another story.

00:09:26 Dick Belknap, or Albert Emory, was given the job of implementing this ACS recommendation.

00:09:35 I was in Ann Arbor, received a telephone call from Dr. Emory who said,

00:09:41 We would like you to come down to Washington.

00:09:46 That's Disneyland East on the Potomac.

00:09:49 Talk with us about what an inorganic journal should have in it.

00:09:56 Well, you know, he said it would be a small group of people, and we think this would be a good thing to do.

00:10:02 Well, I was a very naive fellow, and I swallowed the line all the way down.

00:10:09 And got down there, and Albert Emory said to me,

00:10:15 You know, this small group is what? That's you.

00:10:19 And the thing we would like to have you do is to edit this journal of inorganic chemistry.

00:10:26 Well, I was quite impressed with being down there, I guess, and I agreed to try to do it,

00:10:33 even though I didn't have the foggiest idea of what you're doing when you start a journal,

00:10:37 or even how you run it after you've been started.

00:10:40 But there was a young man on the staff at the time named Dick Velland, and Dick helped me a great deal.

00:10:48 Making the cover was one of the chores that he handed me right off.

00:10:56 He said to me, What do you want for a cover?

00:11:00 You know, I don't go around with five or six different covers in my pocket.

00:11:05 So I said to him, I would like to have something which is bright, light, and simple.

00:11:12 Well, okay, bright, light, simple.

00:11:15 He says, You know, you really ought to be a politician.

00:11:17 You can give an answer which is absolutely meaningless.

00:11:22 So he had a number of people draw up some model covers.

00:11:27 One of them is the one that you are very familiar with today, except it had one important difference.

00:11:33 It had a small i and a small c.

00:11:37 A small i for interchemical chemistry and a small c.

00:11:40 Well, since the editor wasn't E.E. Cummings, I objected to this rather promptly.

00:11:45 I thought we ought to change this to a large i and a large c.

00:11:49 There was quite a lot of argument about it, but ultimately the change was made.

00:11:54 One of the things that surprised me when I started this job was that there was considerable objection and considerable resistance from the journalists.

00:12:06 I'm mentioning this to you largely because I think it is something which is at least one fairly serious note that any board has to recognize.

00:12:16 That is, one of the questions we were asked was, Are you folks as inorganic chemists getting your work promptly published in JCS?

00:12:27 It's a good journal. I shouldn't even talk about that.

00:12:29 And to be quite honest, the answer was yes.

00:12:31 Most inorganic chemistry was being published promptly and effectively in JCS.

00:12:36 So, why do you need a new journal?

00:12:40 Well, John Boehner was, I think, perceptive enough to see that JCS was under considerable pressure,

00:12:46 page pressure at that time, and he could see that there was going to come a time when it would be all uneasy.

00:12:53 The physical chemists had journal of physical chemistry, the journal of chemical physics, the organic chemists had JOC,

00:13:01 and the analytical chemists had analytical chemistry, and we had nothing.

00:13:06 And John's argument was quite persuasive.

00:13:11 But there's a deeper question involved here, and that is, how much can you subdivide your subject matter and still maintain a viable journal?

00:13:22 There isn't any easy answer.

00:13:24 What you have to do is you have to have a wise editorial board, a wise group of editors,

00:13:30 who know the area enough to tell you when you divide it past the point of no return.

00:13:36 And I think we passed the first test when organometallic chemistry was proposed.

00:13:42 I think the inorganic EMP decided that this could be handled, and they wisely went along.

00:13:48 I think the time has been exceeded that judgment.

00:13:51 How much more you can subdivide will have to be answered as the question comes up.

00:13:56 It doesn't mean you have to always say no.

00:13:58 If you say no, then private publishers move in.

00:14:03 One of the things that I found was it was necessary to recruit papers.

00:14:07 I wrote to a lot of physical chemists, a lot of inorganic chemists, and said,

00:14:11 send us your best papers, and the community responded wonderfully.

00:14:15 I think we were all indebted to those people who helped do that.

00:14:20 But there are a lot of things that I tried that didn't work.

00:14:22 I'm going to finish in just a minute here, but there are a lot of things that I tried that didn't work.

00:14:26 One of them is the area of no return.

00:14:32 During the development of the Navy project on high-energy fuels,

00:14:39 the carboranes were discovered in a couple of industrial labs,

00:14:46 and the papers were sent in and publicly accepted.

00:14:49 And I thought I would really be a very clever editor

00:14:52 and have the nomenclature for this series of compounds laid out by IUPAC committees

00:15:01 and have the whole thing ready to go.

00:15:03 So I sent the descriptions of papers to some members of the IUPAC committee on nomenclature

00:15:10 and said, write me an article.

00:15:13 I'll put that article in front of the papers, the carborane papers.

00:15:17 Then we'll have the nomenclature business all cleared up.

00:15:21 There won't be anything like Elvis Unplot and so on, whatever the names are at the end.

00:15:27 And there won't be questions such as the arguments about numbers, periodic table, all that kind of thing, you know.

00:15:36 We'll have it all laid out in advance. Everybody will agree to it.

00:15:41 So that was all done. I was congratulating myself.

00:15:45 Then there was a young fellow down at the University of California at Riverside

00:15:50 who was rapidly becoming Mr. Carborane.

00:15:54 This guy was really a very bright guy, a very productive guy, a very likable guy,

00:16:01 a guy who really was dedicated to his proposition that the IUPAC rules were no good.

00:16:09 And he put the point, you know, if you use those IUPAC rules, I can't name these compounds after old shoes,

00:16:19 after tennis rackets, after spiders, after baskets, after jugs, all this kind of thing.

00:16:28 So he said, you can't do this to me because it's going to stifle my creativity.

00:16:36 But, you know, I didn't expect this kind of thing. It sort of overpowered me all of a sudden.

00:16:41 So we retreated. Today we have some patides and the olides, some astides, and that's all.

00:16:51 How about that, Fred?

00:16:54 That's all you have.

00:16:57 Those are all Spanish.

00:17:01 The IUPAC didn't have a proper Spanish representative.

00:17:07 Well, it didn't take me long to decide that the editorship needed to change.

00:17:15 And I told Dick Belaf that I wanted to get out of this thing.

00:17:21 And Dick said, well, we can't get out until you help us find a replacement.

00:17:26 So I gave him three names. One of them popped.

00:17:31 The first name I gave him was a fellow named Ed King.

00:17:34 And I gave him quite a lot of propaganda about what a fine fellow Ed was.

00:17:40 He's a very good writer. He's a top-line scientist.

00:17:43 And so it didn't take very long until they called me up and said,

00:17:48 Well, we want you to invite this man over to Ann Arbor to see what it's like to be an editor.

00:17:57 It has to be done in a territorial area.

00:18:00 So I called Ed up. He came over. We had a pleasant day.

00:18:04 And then that evening, my wife and I took Ed out to dinner.

00:18:08 After that, he pulled on the way home.

00:18:11 Marge looked at me and she said, he's such a nice man.

00:18:15 Does he know what you're trying to do to him?

00:18:18 I think you've got to answer that question.

00:18:29 I suspect the five years I was editor wasn't very much the journal was sort of getting rolling.

00:18:38 The five years I was editor of the journal published five issues a year each year.

00:18:46 And the number of pages went from 1,800 to 2,700.

00:18:52 Right now, last year, the journal published 4,800 pages.

00:18:57 Bob Taylor, who was the associate editor with Bob Perry, helped out during the transition period for several months.

00:19:12 But there was a period, last half of 64 and 6,500, there wasn't an associate editor.

00:19:25 And it was sometime during this period that Piper, Darren Piper,

00:19:34 whether it was over the phone, I didn't think it was over the phone,

00:19:38 whether it was on the phone or he wrote me a letter,

00:19:40 he sent me a lot of paper and he said, your editorial staff can handle this.

00:19:47 The editorial staff was me.

00:19:51 It was a long, long journal. I was mostly Paul.

00:20:02 I'm not seeking sympathy.

00:20:05 I kind of build up to how Fred got in the end.

00:20:12 Fred must have come to Boulder in the middle of the winter in 65, 66.

00:20:21 And I recall he came back to the airport.

00:20:24 And it was on that ride to the airport that I asked him if he'd like to be an associate editor.

00:20:29 I assume I had gotten the approval from Victor Bellman.

00:20:33 Not that Fred was going to turn in the group to handle Piper.

00:20:39 But in any case, I refresh my memory by looking at the mastheads.

00:20:44 And we had a period of the masthead in April of 66.

00:20:50 And then January of 67, Jim Ivers appeared in the masthead.

00:20:56 And I think that in fact the journal has a good reputation for publishing high quality,

00:21:05 histographic, and face-to-face.

00:21:08 And Jim, was Jim Ivers a nice guy?

00:21:12 Well, and Jim passed off on a good foot.

00:21:16 And that tradition I guess has prevailed.

00:21:21 Now, by the time I stepped out, the journal did in fact have four associate editors.

00:21:32 They still have.

00:21:34 And I think this period of Fred being an associate editor led to him being an editor.

00:21:42 And it was terrific.

00:21:46 Bob had the job two years.

00:21:48 I had the job five years.

00:21:50 Fred had the job 18 years.

00:21:53 What kind of an equation?

00:21:56 Yes.

00:21:59 Well, I have to tell you a very simple equation.

00:22:03 Now, do you want to take notes?

00:22:09 n raised to the nth power plus 1.

00:22:14 For n equal 1, it's equal to 2.

00:22:17 For n equal 2, it's equal to 5.

00:22:19 And for n equal to 3, it's 28.

00:22:23 Fred, you have 20 years.

00:22:31 Those in the ACS office have to handle n equal 4.

00:22:34 It's 257.

00:22:40 Fred, that's all I have to say.

00:22:49 Five more years.

00:22:53 Anyway, our next speaker is the boss, the president of the American Chemical Society, Dr. Jordan.

00:23:07 I want to say first how much I am pleased to be here tonight to share this celebration with you.

00:23:16 But at that point, I have to say that I'm sorry to tell you that I bring lots of problems to speak tonight.

00:23:26 I was asked by Ed, or maybe by Fred, maybe told is a better way to say that I should not be serious in my comments this evening.

00:23:37 But I have a serious matter on my mind that I want to bring before you.

00:23:43 That's one of the unpleasant things I want to mention.

00:23:47 And that has to do with the periodic table.

00:23:56 The periodic table, of course, deals with carbon and the rest of the elements.

00:24:00 The rest of the elements are inorganic.

00:24:02 And so I feel that this group is a very important group in considering the proposed new periodic table.

00:24:11 And so even though this is a serious topic, I feel obliged to bring it up tonight.

00:24:18 My second problem is a matter of credentials.

00:24:23 You can imagine that I feel a little uncomfortable here, particularly at this podium.

00:24:30 Many of you don't realize that I'm an organic chemist.

00:24:34 So I feel obliged to spend some time first establishing my credentials,

00:24:40 so that then you will be willing to pay attention when I get to the real business of my talk, which is the periodic table.

00:24:48 Even mentioning the periodic table gives me a bit of a problem.

00:24:53 I always used to use interest in the periodic table as a senility test.

00:25:04 Unfortunately, I find myself perhaps not passing that test.

00:25:12 In any event, now I have to go back to my early days to show you why I know that I have to realize this,

00:25:19 as I'm an inorganic chemist, and most of you don't.

00:25:22 It began, really, in an undergraduate course at UCLA.

00:25:26 And this really is probably where my interest in the periodic table began.

00:25:32 Because we had an assignment that each person had to pick an element that was, you know,

00:25:39 any one out of the 92 elements and write a report on how the atomic weight, which was now accepted, had been measured.

00:25:49 Well, at that particular time as an undergraduate, the course that was giving me most trouble was German.

00:25:57 So I decided I'm going to pick a blasted element where I will be reading English.

00:26:02 And so I looked at the old periodic table, and I picked Columbium.

00:26:07 I figured, well, Columbium, that's going to be me.

00:26:11 The first paper I read that had anything to do with atomic weight indicated that Columbium was also called Niobium.

00:26:20 Niobium was a German name, and all of the atomic weights were different.

00:26:26 I felt that was, that indicated there were problems with Columbium.

00:26:33 So I talked to the essence of this problem well before I, in fact, noticed it.

00:26:40 In any event, I didn't do well in math.

00:26:42 I wasn't doing well in lots of things, as a matter of fact.

00:26:45 The organikers could tell I was not good material for organics.

00:26:48 I just didn't have a good enough memory.

00:26:50 I remember one time Bill Young, who was the instructor in one of my undergraduate courses, said,

00:26:56 Women's Health, the trouble with you is you think too much.

00:26:59 Don't you ever smell the compound?

00:27:07 Nevertheless, I did establish myself with some, what I like to think is quite outstanding work.

00:27:14 In organic chemistry.

00:27:16 I worked as an undergraduate research student for Professor Kroll, Bill Kroll.

00:27:21 And he was interested in Osmium tetraoxide, and was doing chromous titration with Osmium tetraoxide.

00:27:30 So it was my job to do accurate, precise titrations with chromous.

00:27:37 And my work there, I'm not a devotee of citation index and that sort of thing.

00:27:42 So I can't really say, but my guess is that if you looked at citation index,

00:27:47 you would find that my notebook is quoted there more often than anyone else,

00:27:51 showing that oxygen leaks through heavy wall rubber tubing.

00:27:58 You cannot keep chromous titrate constant.

00:28:02 That was my major accomplishment there.

00:28:04 Another bit of my reputation as an organic chemist was associated with a test I took in quantitative analysis.

00:28:16 And I had done research as well in freshman chemistry.

00:28:21 And this particular test I neglected to do any study for.

00:28:25 And Professor Kroll asked in the test group,

00:28:29 give us an equation which involved I3 minus.

00:28:33 And I just crossed his arms and said, no second time.

00:28:41 That's not well received.

00:28:47 These things came back to haunt me.

00:28:50 It turned out that my first job was to go up north and work on the Manhattan Project,

00:28:58 which I did for a year where I met Ed King.

00:29:01 And I worked for Bob Conant.

00:29:04 And I suppose his credentials would be acceptable to you.

00:29:08 And one of the problems he put me on was a problem that was very troublesome at the time.

00:29:14 Of course, the whole business of the project was to figure out how to get plutonium

00:29:19 out of that mess of all those fission problems across the whole periodic table.

00:29:26 And it turned out that under certain circumstances, precipitates would maliciously appear.

00:29:34 And they didn't seem to do anything very sensible or reproducible.

00:29:39 But the problem was the precipitate would carry along all the plutonium.

00:29:44 And so Conant indicated we were going to look into this.

00:29:48 And it turned out to be neobium pentoxide.

00:29:52 It was actually a gas.

00:29:58 Well, it turned out to be a kind of a humorous thing.

00:30:03 Because, in fact, that was my first publication.

00:30:07 Oh, I should say right now that one of my prides is that I've never had a manuscript rejected by the Journal of Inorganic Chemistry.

00:30:15 Go publish.

00:30:21 In any event, as it turned out, we discovered that neobium pentoxide was indeed a very good way to scavenge plutonium from a solution.

00:30:34 And we got so good at it that it turned out that it was happening as a possible way of purifying plutonium.

00:30:43 And so my first publication is on the purification or extraction of plutonium with neobium pentoxide purification.

00:30:53 Again, my guess is that many of you haven't read this.

00:30:59 Perhaps it's part because it was secret for about 15 years.

00:31:04 So no one ever used this process, but it was secret for a long, long time.

00:31:09 Well, then I3 minus came back to me.

00:31:13 I never quite could accept that there really was an I3 minus and I got zero on that equation.

00:31:21 And I didn't feel that was quite fair.

00:31:24 And so I decided that there must be something wrong with Poland.

00:31:35 It caused me to say there is no I3 minus.

00:31:38 So that got my interest into a molecular orbital.

00:31:42 I wasn't doing well in organic chemistry.

00:31:45 I wasn't doing well in inorganic.

00:31:47 So I became a theoretician.

00:31:50 So I decided I'd look into the molecular orbital understanding of I3 minus and HF2 minus.

00:31:59 And I found that this was a very comfortable way to describe both of those species.

00:32:05 And so I decided to write a paper about this.

00:32:09 And I wrote a paper in 1951.

00:32:13 I'm sorry to say in the Journal of Chemical Physics.

00:32:16 And before I sent it in, I tried it out on Bob Connick.

00:32:21 Now, Bob Connick and I were playing squash once a week.

00:32:25 And it was all the way down to the gym that I told him about this paper.

00:32:31 And those of you who know Bob probably know his answer.

00:32:34 He said, look, if this theory is any good, make some predictions.

00:32:38 Now, think about it.

00:32:39 I'm 5'8".

00:32:40 He's 6'5".

00:32:41 9 inches taller.

00:32:42 And when he tells me to do something, I do it.

00:32:46 After the game, I went back to my office.

00:32:48 And I thought, well, what am I going to predict?

00:32:52 I came to the unpleasant conclusion that I had to predict that there were inert gas compounds.

00:32:59 And that they would have the structures of the polyhalogen and the polyhalide.

00:33:06 And so I put that into the paper.

00:33:08 And it was published in 1951.

00:33:10 And my guess is it's read as much as my notebook about the universe.

00:33:17 Rubber tubing.

00:33:18 In any event, that represents what I can lay before you as my credentials as an organic chemist.

00:33:24 And now I want to turn to the periodic table.

00:33:27 My guess is that here I'll antagonize some of you.

00:33:32 Because I'm not really for the periodic table.

00:33:37 I'm actually neutral as the president of the society.

00:33:41 I must be.

00:33:42 But nevertheless, I confide in you that I feel that one doesn't change the periodic table very often.

00:33:54 And that if you're going to do it, you should do it right.

00:33:57 That is, go all the way.

00:33:59 Now, I thought of one approach, for instance.

00:34:05 You know the naming of the transuranics?

00:34:08 I think Bob calls it the Honequot notation.

00:34:12 I think that might have been considered for the entire periodic table.

00:34:16 Why shouldn't we be completely logical about that?

00:34:20 It, of course, is developed from the number of the element.

00:34:24 If you try to pronounce some of those names, you realize that you can say those names without opening your mouth.

00:34:33 It's a personal hygiene element.

00:34:39 But that's not really the proposal I want to lay before you.

00:34:44 I don't do this as an advocate, but merely to indicate that there are other things that haven't been considered yet.

00:34:51 And this is my proposal.

00:34:54 When you come right down to it, the proposal is to change the numbering of the columns, you know?

00:35:03 My proposal is that we identify the elements in succession by letters of the alphabet.

00:35:10 So hydrogen would be A. Helium would be B. Lithium would be C.

00:35:20 And, now this is the real genius of that proposal.

00:35:24 When you get to 26, then double A, double B.

00:35:29 I thought of that, yes.

00:35:32 Okay.

00:35:35 Then the names would be directly connected to the sum.

00:35:39 You see, think how simple that would be.

00:35:41 A, Asium.

00:35:43 B, Desium.

00:35:47 C, Csium.

00:35:50 That's Lithium.

00:35:53 D, Desium.

00:35:54 E, Esium.

00:35:56 Now, I realize this is an international problem.

00:35:59 We would say Asium.

00:36:01 Europeans would say Osium.

00:36:04 I propose Asium.

00:36:08 Everybody will agree.

00:36:10 Now, I just want to try a couple of names on you to show you this is really quite a practical system.

00:36:15 Calcium Chloride.

00:36:17 That comes out as Tesium Decusa.

00:36:26 Phosphorus.

00:36:32 Phosphorus Pentoxide.

00:36:34 Diozium Benhide.

00:36:38 Magnesium Fluoride.

00:36:40 Enium Isode.

00:36:42 Now, you can see that this really should have been thought about.

00:36:48 What I am seriously going to do is to appoint an ad hoc committee to reopen the question of the IUPAC notation.

00:37:01 I shall, of course, submit my suggestions of other alternatives and see whether we can't at least put in a little more time to think about this before it becomes a crazy stone.

00:37:15 What I want to remind you of is some of the advantages.

00:37:19 You realize the problem of the notational thing.

00:37:22 That there is one system used in Europe and another system used in the United States.

00:37:28 And if we use their system, we are disadvantaged.

00:37:31 If we use our system, they are disadvantaged.

00:37:34 I have proposed here tonight to you a system that advantages no one.

00:37:39 I think it deserves your seriousness.

00:37:51 Our next speaker is an associate editor in chemistry.

00:37:58 Tom, there would be proud of you if you said that.

00:38:02 Leave it to a physical chemist to find a way to justify it.

00:38:05 Leave it to a physical chemist to find a way to justify the equation A plus B equals C.

00:38:13 Anyway, I have very brief remarks. I am already about five minutes late for my ride to the airport.

00:38:19 I just want to give a few anecdotes about what inorganic chemistry as a journal means to me.

00:38:24 I began graduate school in 1962 and the journal began in 1961.

00:38:30 I realized that it was particularly appropriate that I had the opportunity to be able to read every paper that was ever published.

00:38:37 The journal was the thing in my field, inorganic chemistry.

00:38:41 I must admit, I don't actually own the first volume of that volume.

00:38:49 Jim Ivers was mentioned as the crystallographic editor.

00:38:52 As a young faculty member, I was led through crystallography by Jim.

00:38:58 I remember one of the comments he wrote me along with referees' reports.

00:39:05 The editor's role was to keep authors from making fools of themselves.

00:39:09 He was not sure that he hadn't already exceeded his limits on my behalf in that regard.

00:39:17 I too remember Jim.

00:39:20 But it's true, he actually did a lot for us.

00:39:24 Inorganic chemistry is an international symbol of recognition.

00:39:28 Bob talked about the cover.

00:39:30 I'm sure that there are many of you who have said,

00:39:33 well, I'll be at the airport at such and such a time and if you carry a yellow journal in your hand,

00:39:39 you'll be sure to be recognized by me or vice versa.

00:39:42 I will carry the journal with you.

00:39:44 I don't think many other fields can claim that.

00:39:46 Probably not many other journals.

00:39:52 I'm actually very proud to be part of the editorial team here.

00:39:58 I was first solicited, I think, by Herb Kay at the Gordon Conference.

00:40:02 We had discussions about my joining the editorial advisory board then.

00:40:07 There came a time when it was quite a serious question about what one would do about bioinorganic chemistry,

00:40:13 whether we would have a journal in that field or not.

00:40:16 And it was about the time when the Organometallic Journal was forming and sort of splitting off its part.

00:40:23 And the editorial board decided, particularly at the urgings of myself, Harry Gray, and Ken Raymond at that meeting,

00:40:32 I remember that it was important to have a sub-area of bioinorganic chemistry.

00:40:36 I had forethought either Harry or Ken would do the associate editorship.

00:40:41 They probably thought one of the other two would do it and ultimately it fell on me.

00:40:47 So we made a modest beginning and I tried to focus attention to bioinorganic chemistry through the journal.

00:40:55 I think we're making some progress.

00:40:57 We've doubled the number of papers in the past couple of years.

00:41:00 We're not at the point where we're going to split off yet, but I think it's made some progress.

00:41:06 So I really do have to go to the airport and that's really the few comments I wanted to say.

00:41:10 I think that Fred, 18 years, I didn't realize it was that long.

00:41:14 He's done a wonderful job.

00:41:16 It's been a great pleasure.

00:41:18 It's almost a new kid.

00:41:20 I think Ed is the new kid on the block.

00:41:22 In working with the staff at ACF, they've been very supportive.

00:41:27 Celia McFarland was supportive and understanding of me as an author and has even been more so than editor.

00:41:33 And I'm sorry that my wife Judy couldn't be here tonight, but we're still recovering from various travels.

00:41:40 That's really all I want to say in my few moments.

00:41:43 And excuse me as I have to try to catch my breath.

00:41:56 Our next speaker is a former associate editor.

00:42:01 That's Gail Stuckey.

00:42:03 Gail is our traveling associate editor.

00:42:10 She's back in the office.

00:42:13 Where is she?

00:42:15 She's in the box.

00:42:17 Corrugated cardboard box.

00:42:20 I'm kidding.

00:42:21 You did a great job.

00:42:24 Now...

00:42:28 Now tell us about it.

00:42:30 I'm going to talk primarily and very briefly on behalf of the Inorganic Division.

00:42:41 In a few years, we're going to have another anniversary,

00:42:45 which will be the anniversary of the 50th anniversary of the Inorganic Division,

00:42:50 which will be celebrated.

00:42:52 Of course, the Inorganic Division has been in bed,

00:42:56 or at least it's apparent, of course, in Organic Chemistry's journal.

00:43:00 And it's benefited greatly from that relationship.

00:43:04 We now have at the ACS meeting something like,

00:43:08 I think it's about 100 more papers than the Inorganic Division,

00:43:12 which happens to be Organic Chemistry.

00:43:15 Maybe that's because they smell more than they think.

00:43:19 I don't know.

00:43:25 But the division is growing very rapidly.

00:43:27 Keeping a patrol of such division and what it produces in the way of publications

00:43:31 is really quite a challenge as far as the area.

00:43:34 We'd like someone to keep it like the people growing in the Inorganic Division.

00:43:37 That would be a treat.

00:43:39 There are many branches going out,

00:43:41 and keeping these in mind, as King pointed out, is quite a job.

00:43:46 Certainly, Fred has done a tremendous job in this respect.

00:43:49 And I'd also like to say thank you to them and to the ACS

00:43:53 for their assistance and their cooperation and collaboration

00:43:57 while I was associate editor.

00:44:00 Thank you again.

00:44:06 Now our next speaker is a close colleague,

00:44:11 Walter Ego, UCLA.

00:44:14 We eat lunch together frequently.

00:44:18 We share a number of common opinions.

00:44:22 No one else sits with us.

00:44:30 With that, I am now referring to my good friend, Herb Cates,

00:44:34 who will tell us something very serious about the job.

00:44:39 This is the badge that he's wearing.

00:44:48 When Fred said he'd like to volunteer to say something

00:44:53 about our 21st anniversary,

00:44:55 I volunteered to talk about the influx of manuscripts

00:44:59 that are published by foreign authors.

00:45:02 So thanks to the R&D Department of Books and Journals,

00:45:06 you know these guys exist,

00:45:08 but they have computerized the entire journal operation.

00:45:11 They have a computerized peer review and computerized files.

00:45:14 And it is rather easy, once we go back on the database,

00:45:17 to get these kind of numbers.

00:45:19 Carl Carson is here with us,

00:45:21 and it's the department that is responsible for this.

00:45:24 Now, we were not computerized in 1962,

00:45:26 so I actually had to go to a journal

00:45:29 and look article by article

00:45:32 where the foreign papers came from.

00:45:34 We had 6 foreign manuscripts

00:45:36 out of something like 191 total manuscripts published.

00:45:40 That's 3% of the journal.

00:45:42 I don't know how many foreign manuscripts Bob rejected.

00:45:45 That's not available in published literature,

00:45:48 so maybe you can remember about that.

00:45:50 But to take it a little more forward now,

00:45:53 starting in 1983,

00:45:55 which is where the database really came into play,

00:45:58 Fred is getting approximately

00:46:01 1,200 and 1,300 manuscripts per annum.

00:46:04 That's about 100 manuscripts a month.

00:46:07 40% of those are from foreign authors,

00:46:11 and I'm about to give you some of the statistics

00:46:15 of how they fare as far as rejections or acceptance.

00:46:19 These numbers, I guess, are classified,

00:46:22 and these tapes should not be revealed

00:46:24 until maybe 50 years from now.

00:46:28 Now, it turns out that our domestic manuscripts,

00:46:34 we only have something like 12% rejection.

00:46:38 1983, 12% of domestic papers were rejected.

00:46:41 1984, only 10% were rejected,

00:46:44 and 1985, around 11% were rejected.

00:46:47 So it looks like we're doing pretty well.

00:46:50 Our domestic authors can read our journal.

00:46:52 They can see what the standards are,

00:46:54 and if they think the paper doesn't meet up to it,

00:46:56 they do their own selection,

00:46:57 and they send it to other journals,

00:46:59 like the Journal of Inorganic and Nuclear Chemistry,

00:47:02 and its successors are our other competitors.

00:47:06 My apologies to them.

00:47:10 Maybe you can do better now than predecessors.

00:47:13 But people do preselect.

00:47:15 People do preselect,

00:47:16 and we don't have a lot of trouble

00:47:18 with it. They know what we want.

00:47:20 For foreign-based manuscripts,

00:47:22 the following rejection ratio,

00:47:24 about 30% in 1983,

00:47:26 20% in 1984,

00:47:28 33% in 1985.

00:47:31 So the foreign authors,

00:47:34 maybe they can't make the comparison,

00:47:36 or maybe they're just going to try to go fishing,

00:47:38 like Jim Coleman loves to do,

00:47:40 and let's send this one in there

00:47:41 and see what we can pull out.

00:47:42 And we have a lot of trouble with the manuscript

00:47:44 because of that.

00:47:46 I'd like to say this brings up the point.

00:47:48 We shouldn't forget the people who review for us.

00:47:51 They are really the journal.

00:47:54 They can't really do the job

00:47:55 of 1,200 manuscripts a year.

00:47:57 And it does put an extra burden on reviewers

00:47:59 to first make a decision

00:48:01 whether there's something interesting in the thing.

00:48:03 And besides, if there is,

00:48:05 maybe some of them can help us with the English.

00:48:07 If not, that's what we have,

00:48:08 the people that were credited right at the beginning

00:48:10 of this gathering,

00:48:13 Rayat, Joni, and Joni,

00:48:15 and I don't know how many other guys

00:48:16 abuse their wives this way,

00:48:18 but people in the editorial office

00:48:22 do go over the manuscripts that way.

00:48:27 So we're proud of being the nationalization of the journal,

00:48:31 even though it means it's a bigger effort

00:48:33 and there's bigger pain involved with it.

00:48:35 Nobody likes to have to reject the work.

00:48:37 It's more work to reject the work

00:48:38 because you have to tell a guy why it's done good.

00:48:41 On the other hand,

00:48:43 I think the fact that the journal is international

00:48:46 is a source of great pride for us

00:48:49 and we hope it's also a source of great recognition to us

00:48:52 that international people publish there,

00:48:54 maybe international libraries will put it on their shelves.

00:48:57 And we've seen this development happen over the years

00:49:01 and we're welcome foreign manuscripts.

00:49:07 We've done a few foreign manuscripts with us tonight

00:49:09 and though it means a little more work,

00:49:11 we're happy to do it.

00:49:13 Thank you very much.

00:49:15 Thank you.

00:49:21 On the subject of publication,

00:49:24 I think we ought to congratulate Mary Ann and Celia

00:49:28 and their co-workers

00:49:30 on the fact that they got us such a schedule.

00:49:33 Right.

00:49:34 You are the best performing library publication

00:49:38 which means the best of all publications

00:49:40 on the ACF as of September.

00:49:43 Very good.

00:49:44 Thanks a lot.

00:49:50 Now,

00:49:51 the next speaker is

00:49:53 Hugh Shriver.

00:49:56 He's a member of a fire board.

00:49:59 He's a tele-sign.

00:50:00 I'm an award winner.

00:50:01 And an award winner.

00:50:02 Right.

00:50:03 I'm the one that's not qualified to talk

00:50:06 but everyone else is either an amateur

00:50:08 or a president of society or a comrade.

00:50:10 Oh no, you're a Northwesterner.

00:50:12 Well,

00:50:13 one thing,

00:50:14 one point I did want to make

00:50:16 is the way inorganic chemistry

00:50:18 really charted the progress of our field.

00:50:21 It was, I think,

00:50:23 a very important publication

00:50:27 in terms of the progress of our subject.

00:50:29 It focused a lot of attention on inorganic chemistry.

00:50:32 It focused on inorganic chemistry at the time

00:50:35 because it wasn't a very respectable topic.

00:50:40 It wasn't a very respectable profession, I think.

00:50:46 I started in the 1950s

00:50:48 in organic chemistry

00:50:50 and the research momentum was very great at that time

00:50:54 but I feel there were many departments

00:50:57 in which it wasn't particularly significant.

00:51:00 First class.

00:51:01 That's changed a lot.

00:51:02 I think one of the things that's done in organic chemistry

00:51:04 so I'm happy to bring along with me

00:51:09 page one of volume one of inorganic chemistry

00:51:13 illustrates the progress in this area.

00:51:15 It's a paper by my colleague Fred DeSolo.

00:51:18 I don't know how he managed to get

00:51:20 to run there but

00:51:21 well, you know.

00:51:30 In any case,

00:51:31 it's a clever little paper

00:51:33 in which he describes the synthesis of a nitroso compound

00:51:37 and the thing that led to this synthesis

00:51:39 was a mechanistic idea that he developed earlier.

00:51:42 But if you read through the paper,

00:51:44 it was very simple.

00:51:45 It uses infrared spectroscopy

00:51:47 in terms of structure

00:51:49 and that was about it.

00:51:51 I don't believe he published that.

00:51:54 We probably have to have synthesized three compounds.

00:51:57 We probably have to have three crystal structures.

00:52:00 That's a Jim Ivers standard.

00:52:03 It's remarkable to look at the change

00:52:06 in the standard material.

00:52:08 We now have ten more synthetic techniques available to us.

00:52:14 It's a credit to the editorial people

00:52:17 that this has come about.

00:52:19 The journal really has been impressive in the field.

00:52:22 I think a lot of it was due to the recent efforts

00:52:25 with Fred and her

00:52:27 rocking it up and getting it this far in their area.

00:52:30 We're going to talk about our intervention in the foster table

00:52:33 and any other interdisciplinary analysis field

00:52:37 that our journal and Fred have brought to the table.

00:52:40 Thank you.

00:52:41 Thank you.

00:52:42 Applause