Page 1 BOHNING: Will you be attending the Vancouver meeting of the

Canadian Society of Chemical Engineering?

GAUVIN: First of all, it is the Canadian Society for Chemical

Engineering, not the Canadian Society of Chemical Engineering.

Don't ask me what the legal requirement is [laughter], but it's

an odd one. Often in Europe they'll say to me, "Bill, do you

mean the Canadian Society of....," and I say, "No, it's the

Canadian Society for...." [laughter]

No, I won't be attending the Vancouver meeting. The reason

is that I'm not presenting a paper. If I had presented a paper,

then the little consulting company I operate could have paid for

it. But if I don't present a paper, then I want to be honest and

not travel. I wish more professors in Canada would follow my

example. [laughter]

BOHNING: Well, why don't we get started. Dr. Gauvin, I know

that you were born on 30 March 1913 in Paris.

GAUVIN: That's right.

BOHNING: Could you tell me something about your parents and your Page 2 family background?

GAUVIN: Surely. That's an odd question but I have nothing to

hide. I was born in 1913 on the eve of the war. There is a

reason for my first name William, because my real first name was

Guillaume (the name of the German Kaiser), and like the first

names of Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler, my dad (during the

Second World War) felt it had to be changed. He could not

legally make a radical change, but the equivalent of Guillaume in

English is William. That was accepted; legally, my first name

became William. The French, of course, not knowing any English

(or German for that matter) didn't make the connection between

Guillaume and Wilhelm and it has remained Bill, or William.

My dad was at the time a wealthy Canadian. He tried to

escape, but we didn't suffer too much during the war. On one

occasion we were in a suburb of Paris about twenty kilometers

from the city. That was in 1917. I remember an incident. I was

almost five, playing in our big garden. I saw those tall fellows

dressed in very striking green uniforms, with a strange helmet on

them, and they were on horses. They were Uhlans as I learned

later. That doesn't mean anything to you but that was the

mounted German cavalry. It was a small advance party and they

had reached about twenty kilometers from Paris through the

forest. An officer at that time picked me up in his arms and

said in very good French, "Don't worry, little fellow. We're

going back now but we shall return." That was my one contact Page 3 with the enemy and it made a very strong impression, which I

remember well.

Shortly after that we moved to London, where my dad had

interests. We were in a little place near London called Croydon.

At the time it was a small airport--still is, actually. I spent

three or four years there. Things quieted down, and we went back

to Paris. And that's it. I went to elementary school in

Croydon, where apparently I learned a smattering of English (at

that age you pick up a language very quickly) which I promptly

forgot when I went back to Paris.

After that my parents decided to come to Canada, and at age

fourteen they left me with my grandparents in Brussels. My

mother was Belgian, and her maiden name was Van Halle. My

grandfather was a man who made a great impression on me. He was

a wonderful chess player, and also he was a terrific admirer of

Napoleon. He had copies (I don't know how he got them) of some

of the campaign orders that Napoleon always prepared before a

campaign, in which he ordered so many cannons and so many this

and that--book after book after book for each campaign. He was

quite a planner, let me tell you. Then I returned to Paris,

because I wanted at that time to be a chemical engineer.

Incidentally, all my grandfather's Napoleonic memorabilia were

seized by the Germans when Brussels was occupied in 1940.

BOHNING: Why did you want to be a chemical engineer? Where did

that interest develop?

Page 4 GAUVIN: At school in Brussels. It's interesting that you ask

this question because, in retrospect, my life has been dictated

by what I call "turning points." One of them was when I attended

a gymnasium, the equivalent of which they call in Brussels

Athénée [Athenaeum]--L'Athénée Royale d'Ixelles. It's a

secondary school after the German pattern. A very tough course.

I was in "Mathématiques Spéciales," and at the age of fourteen we

already had covered most of the elementary calculus, differential

equations and the theory of conics (a perfectly useless branch of

analytical geometry). We had a completely unbalanced curriculum-

-fifteen hours of math every week, one hour of physics, one hour

of chemistry, no lab. Typical of the German training at that

time. I was filled with math. When I arrived in Canada I could

even teach mathematics at McGill. [laughter]

When I went back to Paris I was really doing two things.

The first was to study piano seriously at the Conservatory. The

second was to prepare for the entrance examination for the

Grandes Écoles (universities). I don't know if you're familiar

with the French system.

BOHNING: No, I'm not.

GAUVIN: It's very tough to enter École Centrale or the École

des Arts et Métiers or the École des Mines or Polytechnique (all

famous engineering schools in France). The entrance competition

was, and still is, horrendous. But I was a good student and I Page 5 was confident. Then disaster struck. That was September 1929,

the big crash! I received a telegram from Canada to come back in

a hurry, because the fortunes of the family were in trouble.

Fortunately, I was not quite eighteen and could emigrate to

Canada legally. I arrived and it was a real disaster. My father

was a poet; he almost never worked and I guess he "clipped

coupons." He had a number of companies which he all lost. But I

had a good head for business. I went over his portfolio and

there was one little company, an essential oil company, in which

he owed only $50,000; the rest of the companies were hopelessly

bankrupt. It was really poverty, I'm not kidding. So, I got

some nerve together and went to see our bank manager. I had a

lot of gall. (I was only eighteen.) I asked him for a loan of

$50,000. He just laughed at me and said, "Look young man," (he

didn't say "squirt," but that's what he meant) "you come back

when you have a reasonable proposal." I did, several times, and

finally, six months later, I came with a proposal which made

sense to him and I walked out with $100,000 in credit. So we

were cleared of our debt and three years later we all had our

cars and were doing reasonably well in spite of the Depression.

I wanted to go to the university, but I had to wait until I had

enough money, which was in 1938. Then I entered McGill but still

kept an eye on the little company, which was a moneymaker.

Now to answer your question about why I chose chemical

engineering, or rather, plain engineering, because chemical

engineering in those days, as you know, did not exist; it was Page 6 called industrial chemistry. When I was at L'Athénée Royale

d'Ixelles we had a course which strangely enough had an English

title, "Self-help." It got its name from a translation of an

English book, by that title, which I've been trying desperately

to obtain since then, which was simply a recital of the lives of

famous people. The theme was always the same--terrible hardship,

terrible poverty, illness and so on, and finally triumph through

hard work. And I said, "By God, if those guys with all of these

problems could do it, I can do it too!" I remember the life of

Goethe affected me an awful lot, and the life of Blaise Pascal

who was half blind.

BOHNING: Do you remember the title of the book?

GAUVIN: Yes. As I said, Self-help (1). I've been trying to get

a copy ever since. I went several times to Athénée Royale

d'Ixelles much later (I like to go on these memory trips), but I

could never find a copy of it. This course was a real

inspiration and, in a way, was a bit of a turning point.

Certainly, at that time I wanted to be an engineer. That there

was no doubt about. But it was many years before I could go to

McGill.

BOHNING: Not a mathematician? You had all this mathematics.

GAUVIN: Yes. So, I went to see the dean (Dean Brown), and

chemical engineering was a five-year course in those years. When Page 7 I explained all the courses I had taken in math, that's when he

said, "Well, gee, you could teach these courses." [laughter] So

I entered directly in the third year.

BOHNING: That would have been 1936?

GAUVIN: No, it was a little later. That was in 1938. Three

years later I got out with a bachelor's of chemical engineering.

By that time this branch of engineering had evolved and the head

of the department, Jack [John B.] Phillips, had been a student of

Tom [Thomas K.] Sherwood.

BOHNING: At MIT.

GAUVIN: Yes, at MIT. Jack Phillips was really up to date, and I

was very grateful for the training I got under him, so that I

wanted to push on. The war was fully on (in 1941), and I tried

to enlist, but I was prevented by the Canadian government. They

wanted me to stay at McGill and do some advanced work on the

synthesis and properties of RDX for my Ph.D. thesis.

I don't know if you've heard about that damn explosive that

the Italians had developed, but it was disastrous to the Allies

particularly as an underwater explosive. It was very easy to

make, but we didn't know a lot about the properties of it and its

stability. I was under the supervision of a wonderful chemist

named Dr. Carl [A.] Winkler. He had fifteen boys, all working on

RDX. After a while I got so fed up with trying to measure Page 8 viscosities, thermal properties, etc., under all kinds of

conditions, that he allowed me to pursue a formal thesis project.

So I had two advanced projects. One resulted in a report on RDX

(I think I have a copy), and the formal one was in

electrochemistry (2). He had the nerve to send my Ph.D. thesis

to Samuel Glasstone of Princeton, a giant in the field, who gave

me an excellent grade in his review as external examiner. That

explains why my first publications (about ten of them) are all in

electrochemistry. That was good training. I have forgotten to

mention that prior to my electrochemistry work, I had picked up a

M.Eng. degree based on a complex analytical heat transfer

project. No laboratory work--just mountains of calculations!

The work was never published.

BOHNING: I want to back up a little bit. The company that you

rescued for your father--what did that company do?

GAUVIN: They were traders. We were buying flavor chemicals,

like vanillin, and coumarin, and also an awful lot of dyestuffs

and essential oils, which during the war we got mainly from

Europe. Usually they arrived through Portugal or Sweden, but I

suspect that some of them were German products. The Germans

needed the money; we needed the chemicals. In a way, a war

stimulates business. I shudder now because some of the dyes that

we got, like the red amaranth dye, are now banned. The yellows

were banned since then. The blues were really toxic. We didn't Page 9 know what the hell we were doing, to be honest, but they were

used in such small concentrations that they were harmless.

By that time my dad was well launched and the company was

comfortable--not wealthy but comfortable. So I decided to live

on my own. As I told you, I joined McGill and graduated with my

Ph.D. in 1945. A classmate of mine was the son of Frank Horner.

They're still in operation under the name of Frank W. Horner

Limited. When we were at school, Frank died and his son Howden,

my classmate, suddenly became the president of a fair-sized

company, not as large as Merck or anything like that, but fair-

sized. He said, "Bill, I like you. I want you to come to work

with me. I want to develop new medicinal products. I don't want

to mix vitamins like my dad did, a pound of this and a pound of

that, add coloring material, sugar and stir, you see. I want to

make new products. You are a lousy chemist but I have a good

research group. Your job will be to take their results, develop

production methods and design the full-scale plant equipment."

It was the most colossal training I ever had. He gave me a

free hand. Some of the large-scale equipment we required for a

number of unit operations had to be designed and built from

SCRATCH: solvent extraction, evaporation, crystallization, and

filtration, and everything was controlled by heat transfer under

a bewildering variety of operating conditions to maintain a high

degree of product purity. In the course of this work one of the

most baffling problems I had to face was how to extract amino

acids from extremely dilute solutions, in the form of very fine,

dry powders, without destroying their biological activity. This Page 10 is how I came to select spray drying as the possible solution. I

did not invent it, but in 1946 it was still somewhat of a

laboratory curiosity, with little published information. The

problem was pressing, and Howden Horner told me to go ahead and

build a production unit. Now spray dryers require very large

volumes of drying air and are consequently very large. The one I

designed was relatively small (a conical chamber, twenty-five

feet high and fifteen feet in its larger diameter). It looked

like a monster to us--but it worked, right from the start! A

beautiful example of serendipity! I did not know it at the time,

but it was another turning point in my life. Spray drying--and a

modified version of it--turned out to be my life-long interest.

Then I got ill. We were working with pancreas glands from

animals to decompose casein into peptides and finally amino

acids, and they are wicked. To make the story very brief, in

that particular department I allowed my technicians to work for

only three hours a week, and even then they could develop

terrible cases of dermatitis. I seemed to be impervious.

However, I didn't work in that particular lab directly; I was in

and out most of the time. Finally it got me! It affected my

liver, put me in the hospital, and darn near killed me. I was

saved by sulfa drugs which were then coming into use.

When I was recovering after three months in the hospital,

Jack Phillips came to see me. "Bill," he said, "I need you.

There's nobody in the department of chemical engineering but me.

I'm going nuts. You have taught chemical engineering throughout Page 11 your master's and your Ph.D., so I want you to come and work for

me." And I did. He gave me a hell of a big salary, starting as

an associate professor. Five thousand dollars a year in 1947 was

a fair salary, indeed. I got that salary for one year, and then

I went to see him. I said, "Look, forget about my salary, but

will you allow me to go on developing and selling my spray

dryers" (I was making a good deal of money) "for various

industrial applications?" Spray drying was still in its infancy,

but developing fast. Phillips allowed me to do that with no

salary. I taught at McGill continuously until 1961, at which

time I joined Noranda but stayed on at McGill as a research

associate, in charge of a large group of Ph.D. students. I am

very proud of this long-standing affiliation with McGill which

continues to this day, only now I only have one Ph.D. student,

albeit an outstanding one. I should add that, while handling a

heavy load of lectures in the chemical engineering department

until 1961, I also had a job with the Pulp and Paper Research

Institute, working on new processes and new techniques. It was

next door to our McGill plasma lab. I am still affiliated with

them in the supervision of an intriguing project on kraft black

liquor recovery. It seems that all my life I always had two jobs

at once. It made for an interesting life.

Then in 1961 Noranda made me an offer that I couldn't

refuse. To create a brand new laboratory (the Noranda Research

Centre) literally from scratch. I reluctantly told Phillips,

"That's the end of my lecturing days; this is the opportunity of Page 12 a lifetime!" but that I would still conduct research. I had ten

graduate students, and I couldn't just dump them. Noranda kicked

like a mule; they said something about split allegiance and that

they didn't believe in one of their employees doing this. I told

them, "Never mind allegiance. All the things that I'm doing may

be of use to you! But it's up to you to use them." They bought

it. From then on, I always had a sizeable gang of chemical

engineering students, with their tacit approval. And indeed,

quite a few of the graduate projects turned out to be pertinent.

Noranda! Talk about a turning point! It was a terrific

experience. It was the first contact with a mining company I had

ever had. Highly structured, not arrogant but damn proud of

their success. Typically their first move was to appoint one

guy--a big shot in the Toronto seat of power--to whom I would

report. His name was Joe Stovel. A prince of a guy, who

fortunately knew nothing about research, but he sure knew a lot

about management. We made a good team! He gave me all the

freedom I required concerning the technical aspects of the future

lab (facilities required for about 150 scientists, technicians

and supporting staff). He selected a good group of architects

(Peter Dobush et al.) and the final site (in Pointe Claire,

Quebec). We rented a large suite of offices (Would you guess it?

550 Sherbrooke St. West, close to McGill!) and I started hiring

right away (Thank God, he left the hiring to me). Within six

months, I had hired thirty-five people, including all my division

heads and senior engineers. (Quite a few were former graduate Page 13 students. We placed them wherever we could: at McGill, at

PPRIC, at some of our Montreal manufacturing operations.) To

prepare them for their jobs, Stovel organized a lot of plant and

mine visits. They started moving to the half-finished laboratory

by the end of 1962. The building was finished by the end of

1963. These were exciting days!

BOHNING: I'd like to go back to your undergraduate days at

McGill. Could you tell me a little more about what the

curriculum was like, and what kind of courses you took?

GAUVIN: I was given credit for all the courses in math, and

strangely enough in physics and chemistry in spite of my weakness

in these two disciplines and others. I've never taken

descriptive geometry, for example. I'm sorry I sort of evaded

that. Jack Phillips gave a splendid course. I admired him as a

professor. He put in a lot of energy in his courses, constantly

wiping his forehead while he taught. It was, I must admit, in

those days, the latest in unit operation theory. I got a

splendid undergraduate training, to his eternal credit. Later

on, when he allowed me to take over some of his lectures, I put

new stuff in it, and I kept up with the literature. I also

benefited an awful lot from my fellow graduate students. We were

breaking ground. None of these trivial things like measuring the

viscosity of water to the tenth decimal place--none of this

stuff. All new processes, with industrial applications as

objectives. Page 14 Slowly I got involved in higher and higher temperatures of

operation. In the AST (atomized suspension technique) process,

for example, I was limited by the mechanical resistance of the

hot walls, which were acting as the energy source. I couldn't

exceed 1000° Centigrade. The temperature was too low for high

rates of heat transfer and the reactors required were too large.

And then I happened to read about plasmas! That was it! That

changed my life completely, because then I could put a fantastic

heat source right into the medium inside the reactors, with much

lower wall temperatures. I've written forty or fifty papers on

the fundamental aspects of this new heat transfer method.

BOHNING: When you were an undergraduate, were other faculty

besides Phillips in the chemical engineering department?

GAUVIN: No. Until 1961 Phillips taught the chemical engineering

so-called unit operations. Shortly after that Ken Schelstad was

hired as a lecturer to teach the elementary courses in

thermodynamics, etc. Then one of my wonderful graduate students

by the name of T. W. Hoffman gave us a hand. I got him to teach

courses in heat transfer. He was an older guy, and he was

working on a very tough problem of radiation from clouds of

particles at high temperature. In those days, [Hoyt] Hottel was

the expert in radiation in combustion furnaces. The systems we

studied did not involve combustion, but sequential chemical

reactions. I don't think he was interested in that particular

area. Page 15 Then [W. J.] Murray [Douglas] came on the scene, I think in

the late 1950s. I'm not quite clear about the time. He was a

wonderful teacher, and we formed a profound friendship to this

day. He is presently taking a sabbatical in Toulouse, France; he

loves France and he married a delightful French girl. He manages

to come back every three months because he has eight or nine

graduate students working in what is now called the Pulp and

Paper Research Centre, right next to our plasma lab. He stayed

with me in my home, during one of his visits to Montreal from

Toulouse. I have also maintained wonderful friendships with many

of my past students. As an example (and we do this probably once

every ten years), a gang of these students invited me to come to

New York about a month ago, and we spent a riotous three days in

New York City together. There were about twelve of them, from

all over the States and Canada, reliving the experiences we went

through in the course of their graduate work. These memories,

and the bonds they created, are probably my most cherished

rewards.

[END OF TAPE, SIDE 1]

GAUVIN: As I said before, there have been a number of turning

points in my career throughout my life. The spray drying

development completely changed my life around. At one time as a

young man, I was pulling a good deal of money selling those spray

dryers. It made me financially independent, and that's

important.

Page 16 BOHNING: How did that develop? How did you get into that in the

first place? What was the key there?

GAUVIN: The key is simply that the work I started at McGill in

1948 on the fundamental aspects of spray drying quietly got

around industry. It culminated in three early theses (Knelman,

1950; Lyons, 1951; Pinder, 1952) which became part of the public

domain. I also published a formal publication in 1955 (3).

Industry was also aware of my successful installation at

Horner's, but not of the details of the application. It would be

a breach of ethics to disclose here the industrial applications

in which my spray dryer design was used. But my design was still

crude. I would spend the next twenty years to refine it. But it

was adequate for simple applications.

In the meantime, another turning point occurred--quite

unexpectedly, as usual! One day, during the early 1950s, I was

having lunch at the McGill Faculty Club with a friend of mine who

had obtained a Ph.D. at the same time I did. He said, "Bill, I

have a troublesome problem. I'm working for the Pulp and Paper

Research Institute. I'm a research associate there, and they

asked me to fluidize bark and find what kind of organic chemicals

you can get from the treatment of bark at high temperatures." I

said, "You're nuts! You cannot fluidize bark particles. Bark is

too fibrous." "But," I added, "I think I know how to do it.

I'll come back to the lab with you this afternoon. For safety Page 17 reasons, do you have in your lab a bucket full of sand?" (Since

every lab in those days had buckets full of sand.) [laughter]

"Okay, we'll add sand to your reactor, and we'll fluidize your

goddamn bark!" And it worked. We were evolving a lot of noxious

gases, but what they were was his business. Incidentally, to my

knowledge, nothing useful came out of this test.

At this moment, about four o'clock, in walks a tall,

handsome man. "Hello, gentlemen. What are you doing?" And my

friend Allan, who was kneeling near his reactor, got up on his

feet immediately--he almost saluted. [laughter] And he said,

"Dr. [Lincoln R.] Thiesmeyer [the new president of the Pulp and

Paper Research Institute of Canada], I want you to meet a good

friend of mine. He's giving me a hand. His name is Bill Gauvin;

he's attached to the department of chemical engineering." "Oh?"

he said. "Hello, Bill. My name is Thies." (That was his

nickname). "Do you know of the problems of the pulp and paper

industry?" I said, "No. What's the problem?" "A shortage of

sulfur." And it was true. You wouldn't believe it, Dr. Bohning;

you're too young to remember those days. [laughter] In Canada,

no sulfur, no pulp and paper. He asked, "Is there any way of

recovering sulfur from the spent liquors?" I said, "No, but I

could take a crack at it." Then as now, I was the eternal

optimist. We talked and he said, "Let's have a drink." We had a

drink. "Let's have dinner." We had dinner. "Come back to my

house." I went back to his house. He was a heavy drinker, and I

don't mind having a drink. At twelve o'clock I walked out. I Page 18 had a job, and a damn good one, in the Pulp and Paper Research

Institute, which is next door (it was ideal!), at a good salary.

This time I accepted their salary; no B.S. [laughter]

A few years later I became head of his chemical engineering

division--which was small, mind you. There were never more than

twenty people, including a good number of my graduate students--

as usual! We worked like hell, and we recovered the sulfur a few

years later, but by that time sulfur was plentiful. So my

initial raison d'être disappeared, but in the meantime I had

developed a new technique of treating waste pulp liquors called

AST--atomized suspension technique, which we patented. That one

we patented, widely. It had many applications in other areas.

That was promptly taken up by the industry. I was head of the

chemical engineering division of PPRIC until 1962, at which time,

as I told you before, I latched onto the Noranda people because I

realized that I was developing a lot of interesting processes,

few of which applied to the pulp and paper industry. And

Thiesmeyer was under fire, and couldn't continue to support my

work. By that time I'd already received about a million dollars

in support of my work from him, which was a good sum in those

days. So we kissed goodbye with a great deal of sorrow on my

part. He had an uncanny ability to motivate his people which

influenced me for the rest of my career. Shortly after I left,

strangely enough he also resigned. But he had left his mark.

For one thing, he had built this huge lab on St. John Boulevard.

You could see it from here if you had your room facing the other

direction. That lab opened its door in 1956, but I stayed Page 19 downtown. It was a beautiful lab, well equipped and well

appointed. That's to his credit. Then he was replaced--by

another friend of mine, incidentally.

When I resigned, I felt that Noranda offered a better

future. It was a big company, even at that time, and we dickered

a heck of a lot because they didn't want me to go on with my

research work at McGill, even without lecturing. I said, "I'll

never leave McGill! I'll never leave! Take it or leave it!" So

they left it. But they came back a few months later, and we were

good friends again. I immediately started the recruiting

campaign which I already described to you.

Once we were ensconced in our new building, we continued to

recruit, and the planning of our R&D program began. I was now

responding to a research committee in Toronto. (Thank God! They

were far away so that they were not breathing down my neck all

the time.) My marching orders were simple: improve existing

production processes and develop new applications for some of our

more exotic by-products, such as selenium and tellurium. The

nature of the work was completely new to me. I managed to

motivate my staff and they respected my gray hair (I was by far

the oldest guy on the team) and my research experience. Many of

my senior people were former students of mine, which provided for

a very close rapport. We simplified the administrative headaches

as much as possible. We played ball with the research committee

and in return they gave us a great deal of freedom, providing we

stayed within budget. For the first time, I had to pay close Page 20 attention to pollution problems and the ever growing demands for

improved productivity. What a training I got--which I needed

very badly. My young tigers were forever trying new things. For

example, we had the guts to develop a new technique to assess, in

dollars and cents, what actual returns we were making to the

company. This was carried out by an independent group of MBAs.

The first results, for the period 1963-1973, were lousy. That

was par for the course for a young R&D group. The next two, for

five years each, were excellent. We were returning to the

company three or four times the amount they were spending on R&D.

The president, Alfred Powis, issued a press release on our

performance.

So my Noranda experience was another turning point in my

professional life. It was a good company, and growing! It is

now a $10 billion empire. They kept me on a tight leash at first

(by the simple expedient of controlling my budget!) but with

time, we were allowed to work on really exciting projects: fiber

optics, hydrogen production, continuous casting of thin strips,

new smelting techniques, and even plasma technology developments.

One of these (on molybdenum production) resulted in the design of

an entirely new plasma reactor design which I patented in sixteen

countries with George Kubanek as co-inventor. I did not know it

at the time, but this invention would play an important role in

my twilight years. I am a strong believer in planning for

retirement, and by the time I reached the age of sixty-five, I'd

formed a small consulting company, and I was all ready to move.

Then I got a call from my boss in Toronto, a very good friend. Page 21 He said, "Bill, we can't find a replacement for you. Will you

work for us another five years?" "What's the incentive?" "Ten

thousand dollars more a year." I said, "That does it." So I

stayed with them until 1983.

When I left them in 1983, my small company was in operation,

and then I got a big contract with Hydro-Quebec. I had

negotiated the sale of our plasma reactor patents on behalf of

Noranda with their director of research (another good friend!)

for a very impressive amount indeed, several times what it cost

Kubanek and me to develop this invention! Believe me Dr.

Bohning, R&D pays, but it takes a guy with the soul of an

Armenian carpet vendor (like me!) to sell it. The director of

research had foreseen the possibilities of exploiting this new

technology and he wanted me to promote the development of this

technology for Hydro-Quebec. And then, for the first time in my

career my proverbial luck abandoned me. Disaster struck! I was

hardly installed in my new office at the Hydro-Quebec Research

Institute, when the director had a stroke. The new director

didn't have the same vision. The promised assistants and working

facilities did not materialize. I struck an arrangement with

McGill, however, and partly remedied the situation by training

new graduate students in the Hydro-Quebec Research Centre called

IREQ.

BOHNING: That's here in Montreal?

Page 22 GAUVIN: No, it's in a suburb called Varennes, not quite forty

miles from my home. A big lab. Six hundred and fifty

researchers. Well appointed. So there I was every morning

leaving in horrendous traffic and coming back at night. I damn

near killed myself. In the meantime, I had struck a similar

arrangement with another laboratory called the Industrial

Materials Research Institute, a division of the National Research

Council of Canada, in the nearby village of Boucherville. This

time I was developing advanced ceramics, TiN, Si3N4, based on

plasma technology, and also titanium production. Between the two

labs, I trained three Ph.D.s and one M.Eng. Finally in the early

1990s I got fed up with this mad travelling and I resigned from

both labs. Since then I am semi-retired. (It's tough to quit!)

But I am active at McGill. I'm on the Board of Governors. I'm

on the Patent and Invention Committee, which I love; the Pension

Funds Administration Committee, which I love less; and various

lesser committees. That's it. That's the story of my life.

BOHNING: What changes have you seen in McGill from the time you

first arrived? How would you characterize McGill when you

arrived, and how would you characterize it today?

GAUVIN: When I first joined the Board of Governors, I had the

impression that McGill was overburdened by administration, the

desire of the former principal, to please everybody: the board,

the senate and very vocal faculties. So as a result they were

very slow in making decisions, but things began to change when Page 23 David Johnston became the new principal, five years ago. McGill

is in a hell of a financial situation. Our debt is now about $70

million. McGill gets most of its funds from Quebec, which gets

its funds from the federal government. Quebec insists on

allocating these federal funds to the various universities. To

be honest with you, they have been very tough with McGill. It is

now being corrected, so I think this year for the first time,

we'll close our budget, but the monumental debt of $70 million

still remains. That caused David Johnston to engage in a very

difficult job of belt-tightening. Even now, the closure of the

faculty of dentistry is being contemplated. Priorities have been

established in detail and are being implemented. To my mind,

Johnston is handling the job with a great deal of panache. He is

diplomatic most of the time and can be darn tough with the

government. As McGill is rated as the best university in Canada,

he can yield a big stick in the press.

I am darn proud of our department of chemical engineering.

The latest Gourman Report rated us fourth among the leading

departments in North America. Our chairman, Dr. M. R. Kamal, is

a distinguished researcher in his own right in spite of a very

heavy administrative load. Under him, our curriculum has

significantly improved, due to the extensive use of computers.

BOHNING: Let me go back again to your early days at McGill. You

ran into Winkler through the RDX program.

Page 24 GAUVIN: That's right. How? When I got my B.Eng. in 1941 and

found I couldn't enlist, I had to work on RDX, and chose Carl

Winkler as my thesis supervisor. After a while, as I said before

he allowed me to work on another project as well. What I wanted

was to get a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, but I couldn't--a) it

was not allowed by the department of chemistry, and b) a one-man

department could not have a graduate program at the doctorate

level. So Winkler turned around the difficulty and my own Ph.D.

is not in chemical engineering--it's in physical chemistry. I

don't know if you noticed that.

BOHNING: Yes, I did notice that, and that's what I was getting

to. I wanted to ask you about that.

GAUVIN: By that time Phillips came back from London, and I

started to work for him; we decided that we had to have a

doctorate program. So we insisted and insisted with the faculty

of graduate studies. At first all my students were master's

students. Finally, we got permission. I think my first Ph.D.

student graduated in 1954. Ironically, his doctoral project was

in electrochemistry!

BOHNING: Could you tell me some more about Winkler? What kind

of a person was he to work for?

GAUVIN: Carl Winkler was a prince of a fellow. We all loved

him. He was an excellent lecturer. He could see a relationship

in some experimental graphs on heat transfer coefficients I Page 25 showed him one day, where all I could see was the scatter. At

the beginning of my RDX work, I must admit I was rather lax in my

lab attendance. He didn't bawl me out; he just gave me the

silent treatment. That did it! From then on, I really worked

hard.

Then one day, I asked his permission to do something else,

in addition to my RDX property measurements, which I had

mechanized to the point where I was carrying out thirty tests at

once. "Well," he said, "I'm very interested in the

electrochemical deposition of copper" (strangely enough, because

I didn't know that particular type of work would play a role in

my Noranda career, eventually). "I'd like you on the q.t. to

start a project on the effects of addition agents on the

properties of the metallic copper deposit that you get." My

first ten papers were on that.

BOHNING: There was an industrial relationship there too, wasn't

there? I mean, was he consulting for companies?

GAUVIN: Yes, he was consulting for Inco [International Nickel

Company], and I got a scholarship from Inco in 1943 and 1944.

Inco was not very responsive; I could never get them interested

in my work. I was there in his office when Winkler got mad one

day. He called the vice president and said, "I'm coming to see

you next week with my student, Bill Gauvin. We want to show you

our results, which are very interesting." Reluctantly the guy Page 26 accepted us, but then he kept us there in Sudbury for three days

because he got interested. From then on, we got his attention.

They were also depositing copper, but not at the same level of

production as Canadian Copper Refineries, which belonged to

Noranda in Montreal East. So I went to see Canadian Copper

Refineries as well, not knowing that one day, in thirty years, I

would have research projects in the works there, too!

BOHNING: So you did this electrochemical work on the side while

you were doing the RDX work, is that true?

GAUVIN: Yes, that's exactly it.

BOHNING: Well, you said you had the energy. It must have

required a lot of time.

GAUVIN: Yes, twelve hours a day and weekends, etc. We all

worked hard. To this day, Ph.D. students still work hard. They

were wonderful days.

BOHNING: You said the first ten papers were mostly

electrochemical with Winkler. But by 1955 you had a paper on

spray drying (3).

GAUVIN: Yes.

BOHNING: So you were moving in that area already.

Page 27 GAUVIN: That's right, yes. My work actually started in the late

1940s. To be honest with you, all the spray dryers in existence

at the time which I had designed were either identically the same

size as the one that I had developed for Frank W. Horner or a

multiple thereof, without ever altering the relationship between

the important parameters. In other words, I didn't know what the

hell I was doing, but I was doing something right. Then I said,

"This has got to stop." That is when I started the whole series

of studies on all factors involved in spray drying, starting with

particle dynamics, heat transfer, mass transfer, fluid mechanics,

effects of turbulence, etc. This would take about thirty years,

and finally we knew what we were doing!!

BOHNING: I recall one paper that you had where you did some

radioactive tracer work to try and follow the particles (4).

GAUVIN: With Len Torobin. That's right, yes. That was a clever

piece of work. Torobin, who did that particular work with me,

was at that New York party (I mentioned earlier) a few months

ago. I shook hands with him and I found that his right hand was

still deeply scarred, thirty years after this particular project.

As you said, the experimental technique consisted to fire

individual particles (previously irradiated in the N.R.X. reactor

at Chalk River) vertically upward in a large ballistic tunnel,

equipped with ultra-sensitive Geiger-type sensors. The particles

of various sizes were received from Chalk River in a lead Page 28 insulated "castle." One day, in his haste, Len took a particle

out of the castle with his hand. It was a foolish thing to do.

I said, "Len! What are you doing, for Christ's sake! Those

particles are hot." To this day he bears the scars, but he is a

big fellow and has regular check-ups, so there is no danger at

all. His work was excellent. It was a very, very effective way

of measuring the instantaneous velocity of particles under all

kinds of conditions, all kinds of shapes, all kinds of

acceleration, deceleration, and so on. The work went on with

other fellows, to investigate the effects of oscillation and

other factors. We certainly learned a great deal about particle

dynamics. Stuart Churchill was very interested in this work.

[END OF TAPE, SIDE 2]

GAUVIN: There is one thing to my small credit. Basically, I'm

an industrial engineer and all my projects, or most of them, had

an eventual ulterior industrial application. But I've always

felt the necessity, to this day, of knowing what the hell you're

doing from a fundamental point of view. That has paid off

handsomely.

BOHNING: Well, certainly your mathematics background paid off

there.

GAUVIN: Oh, sure, you're right.

Page 29 BOHNING: I was trying to figure out when you started using

computers because there was one paper where I noticed you were

using an IBM 650 (5).

GAUVIN: Yes! [laughter] You are referring to Torobin's work on

turbulence. That's all we had at McGill around the middle 1950s.

But from then on, practically every graduate student used a

computer. But sometimes our requirements exceeded the capacity

of our central facility. This was the case, for example, of [N.

N.] Sayegh's work on very high-temperature heat transfer to

spheres (6). We had worked out all the required correlations

(very complex) but our computer was too slow to make the

equations converge. So in desperation, I called [A. E.]

Hamielec, a good friend of mine, in Hamilton at McMaster

University. They had, for these days, a high-power computer, and

even then we kept that damn thing running for hours at a time.

But we solved all our equations.

Since that time every one of our students has his own

computer and they use them profusely. I'm lousy on computers.

The reason is that at Noranda I had an army of guys working for

me. If I knew what I wanted, I'd say, "Okay, you figure out the

programs, and you work out all the computational steps," and they

did the work. So I considered computers a little bit like

plumbing. We had plumbers, and we had draftsmen, and we had

computer guys! I deplore this now, because now that I have time,

and my own computer, I find I have a lot of catching up to do.

Page 30 BOHNING: There are some other things that I would like to

discuss. [shuffling papers]

GAUVIN: Where the devil did you accumulate all this?

BOHNING: Mostly I'm just following through the papers that you

wrote and piecing that together.

GAUVIN: Oh, I see. I have a few write-ups here which are

different. There is one in Canadian Chemical News from March of

this year which presents a summary of my career (7). It starts

out here, "William Gauvin"--of course, you have to read it with a

grain of salt. But the substance is there. "Researcher,

teacher, and manager." Well, that's true.

I got a prize in 1984. It's described in this book. It's

in French, but it's a very good summary of my career (8).

[showing photographs] There I am at Noranda when I was visiting

the mines. I became a mining engineer in a limited sense.

That's me and some of my former students, because naturally you

will not be surprised to learn that in those days, most of the

staff of Noranda was filled with Gauvin's boys. [laughter]

[showing photograph] And this is at the official opening of

the Noranda Research Center. There I am, there is Madame

Kirkland-Casgrain, who was a minister of some sort, and this was

the premier of the province, René Lévesque. You probably have

heard about that character.

Page 31 BOHNING: Yes.

GAUVIN: It's a book; it's well done. It's La Passion de la

Science--A Passion of Science. But it's in French. It has

portraits of various people who got the prize [Prix Marie-

Victorin, Prix des Sciences du Québec]. It's the big prize of

Quebec. But the prize that I most cherish is the Killam

[Memorial] Prize in Engineering. It carries more money.

[laughter]

BOHNING: Would it be possible to borrow this to photocopy? I

might be able to do that downstairs in the hotel before you

leave. That way I won't have to take it with me.

GAUVIN: Yes, that's right. But it is in French. I also brought

the program, which they may not have sent you, of the [Eugenie]

Lamothe Lecture (a bit of a misnomer, since it was actually a

series of lectures, spread out over a day and a half). You will

recognize that L. B. Torobin was our luncheon speaker. He

described to us his invention of a process to make hollow glass

micro-spheres, based, he said, on his training in particle

dynamics at McGill. As a director of one of his companies, I can

vouch for the immense financial success of his inventions.

Stuart Churchill was the dinner speaker. Do you know Stuart?

BOHNING: Yes.

Page 32 GAUVIN: I respect him immensely, you know. There are a few

other personalities who were there. Julian Szekely of MIT was

one of our speakers. There was Ed Crosby, University of

Wisconsin. (Bob Marshall was dead, although he was also a close

friend.) Crosby is a very good spray drying man. Also Pierre

Fauchais, who is president of the University of Limoges. And

Emil Pfender, you may or may not know him, from the University of

Minnesota, one of the outstanding authorities in plasma theory in

the world.

BOHNING: No, I don't know him.

GAUVIN: What you may not know is that this was just the first in

a series of annual lectures made possible by the bequest to

McGill and to our department of funds from the will of the late

Eugenie Ulmer Lamothe. The theme of the day-and-a-half

conference was "particle systems and plasma processing," and

covered most of my activities at McGill. That's why so many of

my former graduate students had been invited.

I've been doing a lot of talking, but what is the purpose of

all this?

BOHNING: The purpose of all of this is, as we've done with

Stuart Churchill (9), to create a document for future use, to

outline your career in such a way that other people might use Page 33 some of this information in the future, for scholarly purposes.

It's an archival project.

GAUVIN: But I'm not a Stuart Churchill. Let's be very honest

about this. In Canada I'm fairly well known.

BOHNING: Exactly.

GAUVIN: But Stuart Churchill in his way is a giant, and I don't

compare with that kind of guy.

BOHNING: I have talked to Hoyt Hottel, by the way, too, a number

of years ago (10).

GAUVIN: Yes. And what did he say? Shot me down, eh?

BOHNING: No, we didn't talk about you at all.

GAUVIN: That's even worse. [laughter] Hottel was damn good in

his days.

BOHNING: Let's see. Who else have we talked to? Donald Katz

(11).

GAUVIN: Oh, yes.

BOHNING: I just talked to Neal Amundson last year (12). He was Page 34 at Wisconsin.

GAUVIN: Oh, yes. Another giant, for gosh sake.

BOHNING: And Manson Benedict, who was in nuclear engineering at

MIT (13). He's actually a physical chemist.

GAUVIN: I don't know him.

BOHNING: Well, let me ask you a few more questions, if I may.

GAUVIN: Sure.

BOHNING: Can we go back to Horner again? I was quite intrigued

by that time period and the work you were doing there.

GAUVIN: Yes, that's right. It was at the end of the war;

industry was trying to spread its wings again and face again the

competition that would surely come.

BOHNING: You really developed spray drying through that

association.

GAUVIN: Absolutely. I have photos of the spray dryer that I

designed for them. Those were very formative years.

BOHNING: Who built these spray dryers? As you said, they were Page 35 large.

GAUVIN: Yes--quite large (twenty-five feet in height, and

fifteen feet in diameter). It's simplicity itself. It's simply

tinsmith kind of work, of the kind used in large-scale industrial

ventilating systems. Mind you, though, in such a large size, the

walls have got to be sturdy. The first time we tried our

prototype, the volume of hot drying air was so large and the

walls were so thin, that you could actually see the damn thing

bulging out! [laughter] Which frightened us no end. I had

miscalculated the resistance of materials, of the thin plate I

had prescribed. We cut down the air temperature, which cut down

the air volume and the bulge disappeared. Some plates had to be

replaced by thicker material. That was all.

I worked for Horner for only two years, and all my time was

used in developing production methods for the new materials

coming out from the R&D group, which was darn good. I understand

that, after I left, they used the spray dryer more and more to

prepare dry products, which could then be used to form solid

tablets or pills.

BOHNING: Well, you have over the years been involved with and

talked about science policy and the government here in Canada.

GAUVIN: Yes.

BOHNING: Maybe we should talk about that a little bit, because I Page 36 was intrigued by that. You've commented that here you had money

and a free hand, but later on in your associations you didn't

have that free hand.

GAUVIN: No. It would be more correct to say that I had

sufficient money to carry out a well-thought-out program, but not

new intriguing ideas only remotely relevant to our business or

market plans.

BOHNING: Do you think that that stifles creativity?

GAUVIN: This question requires careful consideration. If I were

a pure type of academic, I would say (in agreement with all my

friendly professors), "Yes. Absolutely." However, as a half-

baked industrial I hedge my answer. You need a certain amount of

freedom, but my dear fellow, it must be oriented freedom. I mean

by that that before we embarked on anything, we did an awful lot

of preparation, not least of which were clear statements of the

objectives. (I didn't know you were interested in that aspect,

because it's quite a story.) To make a long story short, I've

become really obsessed with the necessity of adequate government

support for R&D. I published a paper on this topic, which I

think is entitled "Contributions of R&D to Economic Growth."

Unfortunately it was published in Chemistry in Canada (14), a

journal with very limited distribution. I took one of our

companies (we didn't name which one) at Noranda, as a test case,

and calculated what contributions accrued to the government from Page 37 a successful research grant to the company. Of course the

company which served as a model provided us with all the actual

figures which were required for this analysis. But the results

were irrefutable. The government was, by far, the greatest

winner from its industrial R&D support program. I was astounded

to see what the government, out of the amount invested in

research, got back from all sources. The article is quite long

and difficult to read, but at that time (it was written in 1978-

1981) it summarized most of the important findings on the effects

of R&D on the many components of a nation's economy. In effect,

it was a mini-course in this particular area of economics.

BOHNING: What kind of a response did you get to that paper?

GAUVIN: Very good, from a limited number of people. To this

day, I still receive responses, generally quite positive. It was

published in 1981. I started working on this material in 1975,

and began to give talks on it while I was president of the

Chemical Institute of Canada in 1977-1978. When it was finally

ready I felt duty-bound to submit it for publication in Chemistry

in Canada, the official publication of the CIC. Unfortunately,

this was the wrong journal, with a small readership, largely

consisting of academics. As expected, it was heavily panned by

certain government officials who bombarded me with unbelievably

imbecillic objections.

BOHNING: I'd like to have a copy of that.

Page 38 GAUVIN: As a result of all this soul-searching, I promoted this

concept of what we called "actions concertées" ("concerted

actions"), in which we got industry, university, and government

together in concert to work on a number of promising projects of

common interest. The one I participated in involved McGill,

Noranda, Sherbrooke University, Hydro-Quebec, and the Industrial

Materials Research Institute. Those were glorious years. It

never went very far (our personal interests were too divergent)

but the concept is still very much alive, albeit on a more

limited basis. The one I am still involved in is the Plasma

Technology Research Centre.

BOHNING: In addition to the one paper we've just mentioned, you

had papers such as "Chemists and Science Policy" and "National

Planning for Innovation" (15, 16). Were you involved with the

government directly or was this effort on your own?

GAUVIN: Actually both. I was always involved with quasi-

governmental organizations, such as the Science Council of Canada

(1966-1970 and 1971-1976), Le Conseil de la Politique

Scientifique du Quebec (1971-1979), the Council of NRC (1964-

1970) and a number of interesting groups in the U.S.A. But my

closest contact with the senior levels of government came when

Alf Powis, then president of Noranda, called me one day to say

that Bill Schneider, then president of the National Research

Council had asked him to loan me to the Council on a half-time Page 39 basis, and that he had accepted. My title would be Délégué

Général (in fact vice president for policy and planning). What a

bombshell! Now NRC is a big lab. I knew that Bill Schneider was

under fire, because a lot of business people were complaining

that the work of the Council was too academic, and my job would

be to develop a plan to give their various programs a greater

practical orientation. Now as a Frenchman I knew immediately

what he meant when he mentioned the title of Délégué Général, but

a lot of people who came to see me asked, "So what the hell is a

Délégué Général?" So when I finally left the Council some twenty

months later, I said, "The first thing you're going to do is do

away with that stupid title." [laughter] In his telephone call

Powis added, "I'll give you all the facilities and all the time,

providing you could spend half of your time in Ottawa," which I

did, religiously. I had a grand office with all these

assistants. It was a tough job, talking to all these directors

of divisions and their staffs. They were all powerful men, and

very proud. And slowly, slowly, not losing my temper (which was

tough), I think I contributed a little. I think I was aided in

this by Noranda's big reputation as a driving force in the

economy.

At first they thought, because of the powers I had, that I

was going to be a hatchet man. I visited all the darn divisions

and talked to all the guys, and I entertained a lot. I think I

initiated some changes which are probably coming home to roost

now. I started at that time to impress them with the necessity, Page 40 "Do fundamental work, like I have. I'm an example! But try to

orient towards the eventual industrial application." By that

time Noranda had obtained some two hundred patents. So I

insisted that in all the programs (on certain projects, not all

of them) they indicate the relation of this fundamental work to

the industrial implications of the program. I insisted that this

be done. Well, some of them were convinced and they did. I did

that for a year and a half and it damned near killed me. I

remember sometimes going to Ottawa twice the same day. Mind you,

it's only an hour and a half each way. For example, leaving the

house about seven o'clock for an eight-thirty meeting with the

president, whipping back at around eleven o'clock for a luncheon

appointment with some of my group at the Centre, whipping back

for a three o'clock meeting at NRC, coming back home, limping,

for my supper. [laughter] I didn't do that often, but I did it

on a number of occasions.

But I had wonderful assistance from all my people at

Noranda. They knew what I was trying to do and they were proud

of the fact that the boss was doing this. I was trying

desperately to set examples. I strongly believe in motivating

people; that's the key to success in research. So that's what I

tried to do in a very, very small way. It's strange that it's

not on my curriculum vitae. Probably I thought it was not

important enough.

BOHNING: You also had a paper called "Northward Looking--

Strategy and Science Policy for Northern Development" (17).

Page 41 GAUVIN: Oh, yes. At that time I had been re-elected for a

second term (another three years). Early in my term, the

president of the Science Council said, "Bill, you're going to

head a team. We're going to give you the funds, and you're going

to crisscross the North, talk to the people, and see what the

hell your team can do with these Inuits, Eskimos, Metis, and

Indians. You have a free hand." And I did. For three weeks a

small gang of us, with a variety of backgrounds, travelled from

Aklauik, Inuvik, Tuktoyaktuk and the Beaufort Sea in the West to

Resolute, Arctic Bay and Pond Inlet in the East. I must say,

however, it was in the late summer so I can't tell you glorious

stories about the long nights. [laughter] On the contrary, we

were working on too much daylight, so we couldn't go to sleep.

[laughter] To survive, we walked half of the so-called night,

and played interminable games of chess the rest of the time.

[END OF TAPE, SIDE 3]

GAUVIN: We wrote a very thick report on this, which of course

nobody paid much attention to. Our North is still in a sad state

of development. The report is available from the Science

Council.

BOHNING: What was the major result from that report? What did

you recommend?

Page 42 GAUVIN: Well, we recommended that they should promote cottage

industries. There were a few in operation. I should tell you

that I had been brainwashed by Finland. I presented a paper in

Helsinki in 1973, and then because of this coming assignment for

the Science Council, I arranged to spend a week in Lapland.

There I saw how the Lapps, who are at almost the same latitude as

our own North, were canning caribou meat, for example. They were

doing their own canning (which is a very simple operation after

heat treatment) and selling it as a delicacy in Helsinki, at

something like five bucks a pound. Whereas in our North they

kill the caribou and save only what they are going to consume

themselves. It's different, of course, in the major centers of

Inuvik and Resolute.

They had a bead industry. It was an example of how people

with initiative can really function under extreme northern

conditions and if they're proud and dynamic, make a living out of

it and stand on their own feet. There was something about those

Lapps. If you ever have a chance to visit Lapland it would be a

real eye-opener--the way they stand, the way they're dressed, the

way that they treat the caribou skins, the ornaments that they

have on.

We tried to inject some pride and some motivation into our

northern people. I don't think it worked. In the first place,

we didn't know how to do it. It was a strange phenomenon, when

you can't reach the people, which I certainly wouldn't want to

repeat. In all the localities which we visited, we insisted on Page 43 attending council meetings. Everything is handled according to

the tribal system, or at least it seems that way. To have an

idea of the problems they face, you must get to the council, and

get competent interpreters. Their main concern, as expressed to

us at these meetings, is that they want to have their native

rights respected--which we all agree with. They also complain

about the poor assistance provided by the government, which is

absolutely not true. When we pointed out the tremendous amount

of waste and garbage over most of their communities, they said

that the waste was only temporary. If you go to Arctic Bay, for

example, which is one of the loveliest locations in the high

North (that's north of Baffin Island), what do you see? You see

two things. There are hundreds and hundreds of empty oil drums

(they depend on oil, you see, shipped at a cost I'll leave it to

you). There are also dozens and dozens of snowmobiles which are

left abandoned, sometimes for ridiculous reasons--spark plugs

(they didn't know how to replace them), or batteries, or things

like that. The waste was abhorrent to us, you see. Our North is

in a very sorry state. And of course, those guys are forever

complaining, yet they're well supported by the government--the

nurses, the doctors, the counselors, the schools. Well, I'd

rather not talk about it.

BOHNING: Okay.

GAUVIN: I don't think we were effective. We wrote a factual

report, which should be available, if you are interested in it. Page 44 But the result was the recommendation for the development of a

cottage industry in the small communities, and manufacturing

activities in the larger ones, keeping however the severe

transportation problems in mind.

BOHNING: I have on one occasion been at James Bay, and once at

the Iron Ore Company of Canada in Labrador. I can identify with

some of that problem with what I saw at James Bay.

GAUVIN: Did you visit some native villages?

BOHNING: Yes. We were out in an area where the government had

actually built houses for them, and where they had taken the

doors and the windows out. We were told how they would take

snowmobiles in the dead of winter and go north, surviving as

their ancestors had.

GAUVIN: Yes. I know. It's not unique to the North, you know.

I did a fair amount of traveling for Noranda. In Europe, of

course, but mostly in Africa and South America, some of it in

Iran, and quite a bit in Turkey and Australia. However, it was

mainly in Zaire and Zambia that I became particularly aware of

the role of tribal relationships. While in Kinshasa, for

example, I was receiving calls in the middle of the night,

denigrating the influence of a particular minister whose support

I was seeking for a large-scale hydrogen production project (for Page 45 the production, in turn, of fertilizers) using electricity from

the immense hydraulic power of the Zaire (formerly Congo) River.

Apparently, this minister belonged to the wrong tribe for this

kind of activity, or so was I told by my midnight caller. In our

Palabora copper mine in the north of Transvaal, I was told by the

mine manager that great care was taken that only workers from the

same tribe be allowed to work on the same job.

BOHNING: How did you make that connection with Noranda?

GAUVIN: They came to me. I don't know where they got my name,

but they approached me. Very business-like. It was not an

instantaneous marriage, because of my affiliation with McGill.

Actually, years later, they saw the wisdom of letting some of my

senior men direct some projects at McGill or at Université de

Montreal. (Mike Avedesian, N. Bharucha, and George Kubanek

worked in that capacity to some extent.) Noranda has almost

doubled in revenues since I joined them in 1961. I supervised

two expansions to the Research Centre after 1963, but my staff

never exceeded 175 people. A new director of research is now at

the helm (Dr. Frank Ledderman) and he has recently completed a

third and very large expansion. His staff is now 235. I wish

him luck! In R&D, your headaches go up exponentially with the

size of your staff!

BOHNING: What was their principal thrust in research when you

were there?

Page 46 GAUVIN: To improve the efficiency of the present operations,

find applications for the by-products from their current

operations, and don't look at other things (unless business is

exceptionally good!). Don't bother us with titanium, for

example. However, I supervised a Ph.D. project at IMRI in

Boucherville recently, and I must say to their credit that they

hired my student, a bright Greek. We had developed a method of

producing a titanium alloy as a precursor to titanium metal (18).

Noranda had had a good year and the research center was being

expanded, so they said, "Okay, we'll give it a try." They hired

Peter (he had his Ph.D. by then) and they gave him a large sum as

research funds for two years. "Go ahead and develop the

technology." He made good progress. When the 1991 budget was

finalized (a very painful process, incidentally), titanium

received support for part of the year only, and Peter decided to

resign. He has made good progress with the original project, and

I have little doubt that he will succeed eventually. Whether the

process will be economically attractive is another matter. All

my life I have observed that technical feasibility is easier to

achieve than economic feasibility. Incidentally, I am given to

understand that Noranda and Peter are parting on a friendly

basis.

The only exotic metal that they allowed me to develop was

molybdenum, as previously mentioned. There again, it was the

plasma process which was the most attractive. For excellent

reasons, Noranda decided to have the first plant built in Page 47 Belgium, where we had good contacts with the European market.

Then the stainless steel business collapsed (that's about seven

or eight years ago) and the high-strength, low alloy steel

business as well, which, between them, were very big users of

molybdenum. So molybdenum was no longer in large demand, and the

whole project was wrapped up.

BOHNING: The plasma technique as a chemical engineering process

has a lot of applications, many of which you've developed.

GAUVIN: Yes, I have developed a few, but commercialization has

been slow, at least as far as I know. It is quite possible that

quite a few companies are using plasma technology based on some

of my publications--and I wouldn't know about it. About ten

years ago, I latched on with an engineering consulting company in

England, Davy McKee, in Stockton-on-Tees near Newcastle, in

northeast U.K. I admired their guts; they got a license from

Noranda for my plasma patents. (Hydro-Quebec had bought the

rights for Canada only.) Davy McKee succeeded in selling a few

steel-melting installations in Australia (up to five megawatt

capacity) and have quoted for a slightly smaller unit for Pohung

Steel Company, in South Korea.

BOHNING: There's an article in Chemical Week in 1985, about the

commercial promise of plasma processing. Your name is mentioned

a few times (19).

Page 48 GAUVIN: Yes.

BOHNING: There seems to be some disagreement as to how

commercially promising this process really is.

GAUVIN: Yes. I understand the situation. It's a new

technology, operating at very high temperatures. It takes a lot

of marketing efforts to effect a breakthrough. University

professors working in the field, like my colleague at McGill,

Professor R. J. Munz, or Professor Maher Boulos at the University

of Sherbrooke, simply haven't the time to bang on doors to

promote applications in industry. Marketing is a demanding

activity. I am not very good at it. Although I have done a fair

amount of research, my track record in development is poor. In

other words, I cannot guarantee quick returns. All the

applications I have been working on appear to be technically

feasible. For some of them economic feasibility also appears

attractive. But the fact remains that development work at a

pilot-plant scale, or at least at a reasonable scale, for

continuous operation for a reasonable period of time, is still

required. And that may mean a large expenditure of money. But

yes! Some applications appear to be very attractive, indeed.

BOHNING: Did you develop the peat processing? You had a number

of papers on it.

GAUVIN: Yes.

Page 49 BOHNING: Was that ever developed commercially into anything?

GAUVIN: It is being developed in Finland. They came to see the

process, and they're using it now. Peat is a very good starting

material for the synthesis of many chemicals--where the situation

is right.

BOHNING: But not here.

GAUVIN: No. The harvesting of peat from peat bogs is an

expensive operation, and Canada has no experience in it.

BOHNING: It is just not economically feasible?

GAUVIN: No, it's economical, as shown by detailed economic

assessments carried out by Noranda, but it would be a very big

undertaking requiring considerable investment. It's tough to

make a buck with really advanced technology--in Canada. On the

other hand, Canada has always done very well with well-

established technology, in combination with their natural

resources.

I must admit, however, that a strong marketing campaign by a

technically advanced company is not always conducive to success.

A good example is SKF, in Sweden. They spent millions trying to

market their plasma technology, which was quite advanced, without Page 50 success. After three years, they gave up. There was a fatal

flaw in their marketing strategy, which consisted of trying to

sell a complete plant which costs many millions of dollars. Our

great advantage is that our plasma torches are ridiculously

inexpensive and highly efficient. In this connection, my major

INTEREST IS TO PROVE A NEW CONCEPT: developing a torch operating

on water vapor. Our preliminary research yields an efficiency

close to one hundred percent.

BOHNING: Has the application of plasma technology to waste

disposal caught on?

GAUVIN: Partly, yes. Mainly in France. I've developed several

techniques, again based on my knowledge of AST, the atomized

suspension technique, and spraying the toxic waste in presence of

a plasma flame. I'm approached very strongly by companies right

now, but I refuse to get involved in that kind of activity. It

is needed perhaps, but not exciting work.

BOHNING: How do you assess the state of education in chemical

engineering in Canada today? Are you attracting students,

getting native Canadians to go into the field?

GAUVIN: Chemical engineering at McGill is rated first in Canada

and fourth in North America, as I mentioned before. U. of

Toronto is a close second, followed by U.B.C., McMaster and

Polytechnique. By and large, I would say that our Canadian Page 51 universities are doing a good job. We are well organized, and

our Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering runs a good

journal, well-organized conferences, and is a competent

organization.

Your question is very general. If by "native Canadians" you

mean Inuits, Indians, etc., the answer is zero (which I deplore).

Most of our undergraduate students come from Quebec (about

seventy-five percent), followed by Ontario (about twenty

percent). The others are USA and foreign (non-USA). The

percentage of women is rising (probably roughly twenty-five

percent).

One result I remember well from last year's list of

graduates (B.Eng. in chemical engineering), because it was

discussed at one of our Board of Governors meetings, is our so-

called productivity (graduates per year per full-time staff) is

the highest in the country (around 3.5) versus a Canadian average

of about 2.5 and a US average of 2. Whether that's good or bad,

I don't know, but it may be due to the number of adjunct

professors we have.

BOHNING: Why would U of T have more students? Your program is

ranked higher than U of T's.

GAUVIN: I believe it is a combination of factors: Ontario is

more populous. It is also wealthier. It has no language

problem. Because of its excellent reputation, it probably draws Page 52 students from other provinces. After all, Toronto is an

attractive city! It may also attract disgruntled English-

speaking students from Quebec. These are, of course, all

conjectures.

BOHNING: If most of your students are from Quebec, then it's

considerably localized.

GAUVIN: Yes, very. I should add that we attract a surprising

number of French Canadians, anxious to learn English. Perhaps it

is fifteen to twenty percent of the student population, as a

rough guess.

BOHNING: What about at the graduate level?

GAUVIN: At the graduate level, the student population is far

more heterogeneous, and includes a fair number of foreign

students, mainly Asians, Lebanese, some Turks, Greeks, and

Brazilians. As a rule, they are very good students, highly

motivated. We also have brilliant professors, with attractive

projects, such as Murray Douglas, Musa Kamal and Arun Mujumdar,

to mention a few.

I'm trying to promote, though, university-industry projects,

and I have one going on in which I'm going to act as technical

director. It's one of my ideas to make fused silica, and that's

going to be paid by a small company. They want to upgrade their

production of silica. It will be done at McGill. This is the Page 53 sort of thing that I'm promoting. And I definitely want to slow

down.

[END OF TAPE, SIDE 4]

BOHNING: You said earlier that you had many turning points in

your career, turning points that weren't planned on your part but

events that sort of happened that were crucial events. Looking

back, what would you say was the high point of your career? What

gave you the greatest satisfaction?

GAUVIN: In retrospect, the high point in my career was my long

association with Noranda (1961-1983). This is where I learned to

manage a large group of researchers, while at the same time

carrying out a very active program of personal research, mainly

at McGill, but not entirely. It is to Noranda's credit that they

allowed me to do this. It is during that time that I developed a

unique approach to plasma technology, culminating in my patents

with George Kubanek that would allow me to pursue a final career

with Hydro-Quebec from 1983 almost to the present. I got a great

kick in being able to repay Noranda for their confidence by

selling our patents to Hydro-Quebec with an impressive financial

return.

To answer your second question, the greatest satisfaction I

got was the Killam Prize. In the States you have so many higher

prizes, but in Canada the Killam Prize in Engineering is quite Page 54 an honor. I was the first McGill guy who got it. And David

Johnston, our principal, made a big thing of it. He gave us a

fabulous reception, and I was a hero for one day. And I enjoyed

the cheque!

BOHNING: The Killam Prize is not just chemical engineering?

GAUVIN: No, there are three. There is a Killam Prize in health

sciences, a Killam Prize in natural science, and a Killam Prize

in engineering. It's a very high honor in Canada, as far as pure

engineering is concerned.

BOHNING: What organization sponsors it?

GAUVIN: The funding of these awards is provided by a bequest of

Mrs. Dorothy J. Killam, and administered by the Canada Council.

More correctly, these three awards are called "Izaak Walton

Killam Memorial Prizes."

Well, my dear fellow, I've kept you very busy. It's twelve

o'clock.

BOHNING: I've enjoyed it very much and I appreciate your taking

the time this morning to come over and talk to me.

GAUVIN: Yes, I talked too much.

BOHNING: No, no.

Page 55 GAUVIN: Please excuse me; I didn't know what to expect. It's

not the sort of thing that you can prepare and make a crisp

presentation.

BOHNING: I would prefer that it be spontaneous, actually.

GAUVIN: Well, it was spontaneous, I assure you.

BOHNING: Yes. Because it's meant to be a conversation. It's

been very, very interesting to me. Your career is quite

different in many respects. You have an interesting blend of

your long association with McGill and the academic...

GAUVIN: Yes, that's right.

BOHNING: ...and a very, very strong industrial tie, probably

more than a lot of other chemical engineers in the sense that

they may consult but your association was more than just

consulting. You were actually being employed...

GAUVIN: Yes, that's true.

BOHNING: ...while you maintained doctoral thesis direction at

McGill. That's a very interesting combination and not a very

common one.

Page 56 GAUVIN: It's not, no?

BOHNING: I don't think so.

GAUVIN: Well, not in Canada, I agree, but in the States surely

you must have examples of that.

BOHNING: Well, there the academic tie is the major one and the

industrial tie is the consulting aspect.

GAUVIN: Oh, yes.

BOHNING: But consulting is not the same as what you were doing.

You were the research director, so your input was a lot

different.

GAUVIN: But I must say, to explain this arrangement which seems

different to you, that chemical engineering is an engineering

profession that lends itself beautifully for this, because

chemical engineering the way I always thought about it is

processes. Processes have wider applications. That explains it,

I think.

BOHNING: Well, thank you again.

GAUVIN: You're most welcome. Page 57 [END OF TAPE, SIDE 5]