00:00:00 My father was a blacksmith in Cullum, which was a town of about 500. Believe it or not,

00:00:10 there were four competing blacksmiths at that time. That was during my early years. Then

00:00:16 later he became a traveling salesman for a heavy hardware concern. But I do recall spending

00:00:24 a good deal of time in the blacksmith shop over there as a boy.

00:00:30 Up in the attic of my home, one day I ran across a book, Steele's Fourteen Weeks in

00:00:37 Chemistry, that captured my imagination. This was a book printed in 1861. The first half

00:00:47 of the book was general descriptive chemistry, and the latter half was devoted to directions

00:00:55 for carrying out simple experiments with chemicals that were available around the house, like

00:01:01 cell soda and salt. I got interested in doing these experiments.

00:01:07 On my tenth birthday, my father built me a little shop out in the back of our house.

00:01:14 I put up a shelf across there to make a place where I could do experiments. So I started

00:01:21 doing these simple chemical experiments at that time with the vinegar and other chemicals

00:01:27 that were available around the house, plus a few chemicals that I was able to get from

00:01:31 the local drug store.

00:01:34 So by the time I entered high school, I had made up my mind I wanted to be a chemist.

00:01:43 My first professor over there was Dr. Carl S. Marble, Speed Marble, and I was permitted

00:01:49 to start some research even though I was just a freshman.

00:01:52 Yes, I thought at that time I was going to be an organic chemist. I was intrigued by

00:01:57 the possibility of making all these fancy dyes and things of that sort.

00:02:01 So Speed started me out on a program of synthesizing some dialkyl mercury compounds, dipropyl-nispropyl

00:02:11 mercury. These happened to have a rather high vapor pressure, and I immediately got mercury

00:02:17 poisoning. So after a couple of months in the laboratory, I was sent home for the Christmas

00:02:22 holidays and after about a month there, I came back to the laboratory and the mercury

00:02:28 symptoms reappeared. So that's when I changed from organic chemistry to physical chemistry.

00:02:35 This was right after World War I, and our country did not have much of a chemical industry

00:02:40 at that time. That's one thing the World War I taught us, that we should have a chemical

00:02:44 industry. So there was a great deal of interest, and that's why chemical engineering suddenly

00:02:49 became the popular field. The chemical engineers received the top starting salaries when they

00:02:56 left. So there was a lot of drive to get people to go into chemical engineering.

00:03:03 Yes, I've always been interested in the practical side and the engineering side of chemistry.

00:03:11 You know, the chemical engineers were not accepted by the engineering school at Illinois

00:03:17 at that time. They looked down the nose and said, well, chemical engineering is nothing

00:03:22 but a chemist with a pipe wrench.

00:03:27 Yes, the Illinois chemist, matter of fact, did play an important role for no other reason

00:03:31 than Glenn and I got very well acquainted. Glenn left Illinois, went to Wisconsin to

00:03:37 get his doctor's degree, and finally came back here to Southern California working for

00:03:42 the Sunkist Fruit Growers Exchange, whereas I went out to Caltech and finally got my degree

00:03:48 there.

00:03:49 But the main thing was just being at Western Electric Engineering, because they had many

00:03:55 symposia, of course, and I would sit in there, and that's where I learned what little I know

00:04:00 about electronics. I sort of soaked it up by osmosis, and I built two or three radio

00:04:07 sets for friends and things like that. But it was that brief exposure to electronics

00:04:13 that I'm sure led to the pH meter. If I hadn't had that, I would have never suggested to

00:04:18 Glenn Joseph that we use a vacuum tube voltmeter to replace a galvanometer.

00:04:23 Glenn had a job of making byproducts from lemon juice, pectin and citric acid, and he

00:04:32 had the problem of measuring the hydrogen ion concentration, and lemon juice had been

00:04:37 heavily dosed with sulfur dioxide. That's a very difficult thing to do by conventional,

00:04:43 by the ordinary hydrogen ion method. And he was using properly a glass electrode. The

00:04:49 trouble was the glass electrode was very, very fragile at that time, and he was using

00:04:54 a galvanometer, even though it was a high-sensitivity galvanometer. The current required was so

00:05:00 great that the glass electrode had to have very, very thin walls and a sizable diameter

00:05:08 on the thing. So he came in to see me one day complaining that one or the other was

00:05:12 always breaking, either the glass electrode was breaking or the galvanometer was breaking.

00:05:17 So I suggested to him that he get rid of the galvanometer and substitute a rugged, what

00:05:22 we called a vacuum tube voltmeter in those days, an electronic amplifier, we called it.

00:05:28 And so I built him one.

00:05:30 It just happened that the American Chemical Society was meeting in San Francisco in September

00:05:39 of 1935. So I took this interest up there to show it to some of my professors to see

00:05:45 whether they thought there was a market for them. We would have to charge $195. That was

00:05:52 a lot of money in those days. A chemist might spend $195 for a good and a little to balance,

00:06:00 but otherwise it was mainly test tubes and beakers and things of that sort. So to suggest

00:06:06 $195 for someone to do nothing but measuring acidity didn't look too good. Well, I talked

00:06:11 to my professors. They said they didn't know. They suggested that I talk to the apparatus

00:06:16 dealers. They'd be better. So Mr. Beckman and I got on the train and took a trip across

00:06:22 the country with the pH meter. We stopped at Denver, Denver Firefight Company, at Scoggo,

00:06:30 Central Scientific Company, E.H. Sargent, Scoggo Apparatus, and Ironman Arm, and then

00:06:34 in New York, that was before it was taken over by Fisher, Fisher in Pittsburgh, and

00:06:40 Arthur H. Thomas in Philadelphia and so on. Well, most of them were pretty pessimistic,

00:06:46 but Arthur H. Thomas Company, the son of the sales manager, Ed Patterson, was an optimist.

00:06:52 He said, well, he thought with luck we might be able to sell as many as 600 of these over

00:06:57 a 10-year period before we saturated the market. This is where they say the rest is history.