00:00:01 I just got some stuff from Cotton this morning, which I'm supposed to get off the Wiley's by return, but it's not going to be today.

00:00:10 And how did you come to write the book with Cotton?

00:00:15 Well, he was my first graduate student at Harvard.

00:00:22 And the idea for this was?

00:00:25 Well, it was actually his idea, because he took the first course in inorganic chemistry, the first course I'd ever given in my life.

00:00:35 I mean, that was one of the things that I had to give at Harvard when I first went there.

00:00:42 And then he decided to work with me. He'd come to actually work with George Kistiakowsky, but he decided after he'd taken my course to work on inorganic chemistry.

00:00:53 So he's my first graduate student. And after he'd finished and was going off to MIT, he said, why didn't I write up some of my lectures, you know, as a textbook, because at that time it wasn't really a good textbook.

00:01:08 So I said, OK, I'll do it if you come in.

00:01:12 So when I came back here in January 1956, I mean, that's when he was at MIT.

00:01:20 And then he came over that summer in my father-in-law's office. My father-in-law was director of a pharmaceutical high school in Copenhagen.

00:01:28 And we sat in his office and sort of drafted out this textbook and we started writing.

00:01:34 And five years later, we had the first edition. And this is the fifth edition.

00:01:39 And how much do you think that contributed to recognizing the work you did on homogeneous potassium?

00:01:46 Oh, that was nothing to do with that. That was years before that. I mean, this was 1960, the first edition.

00:01:55 I mean, what that first edition did, more outside of this, revolutionized the teaching of inorganic chemistry.

00:02:03 I mean, that was probably the biggest revolution in inorganic chemistry that would be the center of that textbook.

00:02:12 And does that give you equal satisfaction to the research work?

00:02:19 It's made it possible for me to live in London. That's the only thing I can say to you.

00:02:23 If it hadn't been for that, I'd have been on the office.

00:02:28 And what led you to the work in complexes that eventually became known as Wilkinson's Catalyst?

00:02:38 Well, it actually started with some work I actually did myself.

00:02:44 It was actually the last piece of work I published under my own name, which was the idea that—

00:02:51 See, I discovered, when I was working in Copenhagen, I discovered a well-known compound now,

00:02:58 which is cyclopentadienyl rhenium hydride.

00:03:03 And this was the first compound in which the spectroscopic characteristics for a metal hydride were able to be determined.

00:03:15 I mean, it turned out this used to have—or it still has—it has a bandwidth of 2,000 wavenumbers.

00:03:24 But this was just the time nuclear magnetic resonance was being brought in.

00:03:29 And we didn't have an NMR machine at Harvard.

00:03:33 And I knew Earl Mutipes, who was one of the graduate students at Harvard, and he was at DuPont.

00:03:40 And I rang him up and said,

00:03:42 Look, I've got this interesting new compound. Can you run the NMR spectrum?

00:03:45 So they ran the NMR spectrum.

00:03:47 And they saw the peaks for these cyclopentadienyls down here.

00:03:52 They couldn't find anything else.

00:03:54 And I said, Look, run it, you know, as far as you've ever run it.

00:03:57 And this was quite remarkable.

00:03:59 They found this hydride peak way out at the high field line in a previously quite unrecognized region.

00:04:06 So that got me off onto hydrides.

00:04:10 And then many other hydrides were made subsequent to it.

00:04:15 They all had either organometallic ligands or carbonyls or pi-bonding ligands.

00:04:22 And it occurred to me that it should be possible to make metal hydrides with non-pi-bonding ligands,

00:04:32 that's to say amines.

00:04:34 And I picked one of the so-called substitution inert rhodium species,

00:04:48 which was that one, the dichloride, this ethylene rhodium dichloride.

00:04:53 And I just treated it with borohydride.

00:04:57 And I was able to characterize those hydridic species.

00:05:06 Now, this then led me into looking at other amine hydrides.

00:05:13 And we did quite a bit of work on substitutions and found that alcohols,

00:05:22 in fact, it was an old observation that by Delaping in France,

00:05:27 that alcohols and hydride, well, not so much really alcohols,

00:05:32 but really able to show that hydride sources were able to speed up substitution reactions of that sort.

00:05:41 And we finally got on to a rhodium system,

00:05:46 which was rhodium trichloride plus pyridine,

00:05:52 and found that that reaction to give rhodium trichloride pyridine

00:06:06 and then to give rhodium pyridine four times Cl2.

00:06:15 That time, this was speeded up by hydride sources.

00:06:20 And I said to Bob Gillard and John Osborne, who were my students at the time,

00:06:26 why don't you try molecular hydrogen?

00:06:29 So we tried molecular hydrogen as a hydride source.

00:06:33 And lo and behold, molecular hydrogen catalyzed this reaction.

00:06:42 So then I'd always sort of been vaguely interested in hydrogenation.

00:06:47 So I said, well, look, why don't you put some olefin into this system

00:06:50 and see if it will catalyze the hydrogenation of olefin,

00:06:54 in other words, to catch any intermediate hydrides here.

00:06:59 So we did indeed put some hexene into this system.

00:07:07 And indeed, hydrogenation to hexane.

00:07:14 But the system was actually rather labile

00:07:20 in the sense that it readily deposited rhodium metal.

00:07:24 In other words, it hydrogenated the rhodium chloride pyridine system,

00:07:29 hydrogenated hexene quite nicely,

00:07:32 but the rhodium complexes were unstable

00:07:36 and, you know, you got black rhodium coming out.

00:07:40 So then the next thing was to say, well, okay,

00:07:44 we'll try something that stabilizes the metal to reduction,

00:07:49 the complex to reduction down the metal.

00:07:55 So what do we do next?

00:07:57 What we're saying to do is to replace pyridine by triphenylphosphine,

00:08:08 and this particular compound,

00:08:12 the compound rhodium trichloride,

00:08:15 triphenylphosphine, three times had been claimed by Luigi Benenzi.

00:08:23 So we tried that system,

00:08:26 and that indeed also acted as a catalyst,

00:08:30 but we had trouble repeating Benenzi's prep.

00:08:35 And I remember saying to Fred Jardin,

00:08:38 who was a student who was doing this,

00:08:41 why don't you chuck in a large excess of triphenylphosphine?

00:08:44 Instead of using the stoichiometric amount of phosphine here,

00:08:47 as Benenzi did to get this,

00:08:50 I said, why don't you use a large excess?

00:08:53 And if we use a large excess,

00:08:56 what we got out of that was a nice red crystalline.

00:09:02 Instead of being rhodium-3, it was rhodium-1,

00:09:07 and that was what now people know as Wilkinson's compound.

00:09:12 So that's how we actually discovered it.

00:09:15 It was over a period of years,

00:09:19 from doing the original hydride substitution

00:09:23 on this rhodium-bisethylenediamine complex,

00:09:27 the hydride-catalyzed substitution reactions of rhodium

00:09:32 to the pyridine-rhodium system,

00:09:34 then to the pyridine-rhodium-3 system,

00:09:38 and then accidentally we made that rhodium-1 species.

00:09:43 So that's how Wilkinson's catalyst, so-called, was discovered.

00:09:48 And then after you observed it, it hydrogenated?

00:09:51 Well, I mean, we tried this one then by itself,

00:09:53 and of course this went like a bomb.

00:09:56 You could actually see the hydrogen in one atmosphere,

00:09:58 you could see the hydrogen monomers, it just went off like that.

00:10:03 And then you decided to work in other areas after this,

00:10:07 rather than catalysis?

00:10:11 Well, I mean, the only other thing really in catalysis I did subsequently,

00:10:15 apart from doing the catalytic system with this,

00:10:18 then we went on and made analogs.

00:10:21 I mean, the one that was subsequently made

00:10:24 was ruthenium hydride chloride for phosphines,

00:10:31 which again was an extremely rapid hydrogenation catalyst system.

00:10:38 But then, doing the reactions of that rhodium chloride-trisphosphate,

00:10:46 we showed quite easily that this stuff

00:10:53 really reacts quite easily with carbon monoxide

00:10:57 and gives rhodium-chloro-carbonyl.

00:11:03 So then, I had the idea that we might as well

00:11:09 just have a look at this rhodium system for doing hydroformylation.

00:11:15 Of course, the hydroformylation reaction was discovered in Germany

00:11:19 by Reuven in about 1936 or 1937.

00:11:24 I think the first commercial plants were probably put up after the war,

00:11:29 at least in the States.

00:11:31 I think they had an operating plant in Germany during the war.

00:11:34 That was carbon monoxide, hydrogen, plus all the things to give alcohols.

00:11:41 But the problem with that was always that they got a mixture of

00:11:46 straight-to-french-chain alcohols out of it,

00:11:49 and there had been quite a bit of work, people trying to improve this.

00:11:54 So anyway, we tried this rhodium system,

00:11:57 and that did indeed work quite nicely.

00:12:02 But eventually, it wasn't the chloride that we found was the effective catalyst.

00:12:08 It was actually the hydrido species,

00:12:14 rhodium-hydrido-carbonyl-trystyl-phosphene.

00:12:19 And on working with that,

00:12:23 we found that if you actually load the system up

00:12:27 with excess triphenylphosphine,

00:12:30 that you get very highly selective hydroformylation

00:12:35 from out one ene to give the straight-chain aldehyde.

00:12:41 And it was unique in the sense that here was a system

00:12:46 which would actually give you pure,

00:12:50 essentially pure, or 99-98% of the straight-chain aldehyde

00:12:55 from the olefin.

00:12:56 So in other words, you'd added the hydrogen and the formyl group,

00:13:01 this hyperformylation,

00:13:03 you'd added them anti-Markovnikov to the double bond.

00:13:10 And there was some similar work done by Union Carbide in the States

00:13:18 by my old friend, Bob Pruitt.

00:13:21 And what this led to eventually was

00:13:26 commercial development of this rhodium-excess-phosphene system

00:13:32 as a tripartite arrangement,

00:13:35 with Johnson Matthews here, who had my patents on this stuff,

00:13:39 with Davy Powergas,

00:13:41 the English plant constructors and chemical engineers

00:13:45 who'd improve the sort of recycle,

00:13:49 the gas recycle, and Union Carbide.

00:13:53 And so that has been a very successful commercial process

00:13:58 which is now operated by about eight or nine companies

00:14:02 all over the world.

00:14:06 So that was really my rhodium catalysis,

00:14:10 one on one side, the Wilkinson's catalyst,

00:14:13 and stemming from that, going into hyperformylation.

00:14:17 And, well, both things have in effect been commercial.

00:14:22 I mean, I haven't probably made as much money on the patents

00:14:26 on Wilkinson's catalyst as I should

00:14:28 because I think a lot of pharmaceutical companies

00:14:31 have just picked that up and applied it to their own systems.

00:14:35 And, you know, you can't stop people doing that, really.

00:14:40 Now, how were you aware of the patent system

00:14:44 and would take out a patent on this?

00:14:47 Well, I wasn't quite as smart as I should have been.

00:14:51 I was a bit naïve about patents in those days,

00:14:53 but at least I had enough sense to patent,

00:14:58 which, in fact, I did myself with the rhodium fluoride system.

00:15:05 Then I persuaded Johnson Matthys, from whom I was borrowing the rhodium,

00:15:09 to sort of take the patents out on the other thing.

00:15:12 So, really, I mean, Johnson Matthys helped me, you know,

00:15:18 take out the patents and so on,

00:15:20 and that put them into a position where they were able to go in with,

00:15:25 certainly on hydroformylation with Davy Powergas initially,

00:15:29 and then subsequently Union Carbide.

00:15:34 Well, after the prize, people say there's about a five-year period

00:15:39 where one has to work hard, having won that,

00:15:44 and get away from science, yes.

00:15:47 Oh, it made absolutely no difference to me at all.

00:15:50 I mean, I just kept on doing exactly the same thing.

00:15:53 I was doing before, which was running a few students,

00:15:57 and, I mean, we've done odd little bits on catalysis since,

00:16:01 but, I mean, effectively, I haven't really.

00:16:03 I mean, I was never really a catalysis chemist in that sense.

00:16:08 I mean, I was an organometallic chemist.

00:16:10 I was a coordination chemist.

00:16:12 I was just doing as best I could, as I'm still doing, new chemistry.

00:16:18 If some of the things happened to be catalytically useful, okay,

00:16:22 but, I mean, I never deliberately, you might say,

00:16:25 set out to work on catalysis.

00:16:29 What would you say is the thing that gave you most pride so far

00:16:37 in what you've done?

00:16:41 Well, it's difficult to say.

00:16:42 There's a lot of things I'm quite pleased with,

00:16:45 but I suppose the original thought of the sandwich compounds,

00:16:50 which was when I was at Harvard.

00:16:53 The second thing I'm always quite pleased with,

00:16:56 because I was 10 years before anybody else,

00:16:59 was the recognition of functional molecules.

00:17:03 You know, these things were rotating,

00:17:06 which was work that I did at Harvard on this cyclopentadienyl.

00:17:14 Iron dicarbonyl, we made what was the sigma compound,

00:17:22 which you could write that way.

00:17:24 And this was, I think, the first organometallic compound

00:17:29 that was ever measured, apart from the radium one

00:17:34 I mentioned before, which was measured at DuPont.

00:17:38 This was the first that was done on our first NMR machine

00:17:42 at Harvard, and that's where one saw this sharp band

00:17:47 for this cyclopentadienyl ring here,

00:17:50 and then one saw a very broad peak.

00:17:54 And that was this other ring here,

00:17:57 and I worried about this for a long time

00:18:00 until I recognized it was a matter of timescale

00:18:06 on which you have the spectra.

00:18:09 Infrared spectra, the timescale

00:18:11 is sort of 10 to the minus 10 seconds,

00:18:13 whereas NMR is sort of 10 to the minus 4,

00:18:16 10 to the minus 5 seconds.

00:18:18 And I was sitting at my desk,

00:18:20 which happened to be a well-known desk

00:18:24 because it was the desk that Theodore W. Richards

00:18:27 used when he was at Harvard.

00:18:30 And, of course, he got the Nobel Prize

00:18:32 for his work on atomic weights.

00:18:33 And I was sitting with my feet up at that desk.

00:18:37 And, of course, I'd been a photographer, I suppose,

00:18:42 when I was about 15,

00:18:44 and it suddenly struck me that if you take a photograph

00:18:48 of a moving wheel at, say, 500th of a second,

00:18:52 you'll stop it.

00:18:54 If you take it with a one-second exposure,

00:18:57 you just see a blur.

00:18:59 That's exactly what this was.

00:19:01 I mean, the difference in timescale

00:19:03 on the infrared spectrum and the NMR spectrum,

00:19:08 the order of magnitudes of difference

00:19:11 in the time in which you were looking at a molecule,

00:19:14 you could stop this unique hydrogen here by infrared,

00:19:18 but you couldn't stop it because this thing

00:19:20 was doing a one-two shift,

00:19:22 and that ring was actually just going around.

00:19:26 And that was really the first discovery

00:19:28 of the flux of a molecule,

00:19:30 so I was quite pleased with that.

00:19:32 And it was 10 years before another one was discovered.

00:19:38 But NMR was rather new at that time.

00:19:40 How did you become interested in NMR?

00:19:43 Well, I only became interested in NMR

00:19:47 because I had then a specific problem,

00:19:49 and then Harvard got the first NMR machine

00:19:52 that Barry never produced,

00:19:54 and then I started running some of my things on NMR.

00:19:57 I was particularly interested in the metal hydrides,

00:20:01 and, you know, this one was...

00:20:03 We just started running it through NMR spectra,

00:20:06 and this was, in fact, the first one we ran,

00:20:08 and it showed up this quite remarkable phenomenon.

00:20:13 So, quite pleased with that.

00:20:16 Quite pleased with Wilkinson's catalyst.

00:20:20 Quite pleased with the first really stable

00:20:25 transitional metal alkyls in high oxidation states

00:20:29 of which perhaps the most amusing one,

00:20:34 of which I want to bet from Henry Talbott

00:20:36 that it couldn't have been made,

00:20:38 is Hexamethyl tungsten.

00:20:43 Hexamethyl tungsten.

00:20:45 Nobody in their right mind, I think,

00:20:47 would have predicted that Hexamethyl tungsten

00:20:50 could ever be made, or indeed would be stable.

00:20:53 And I remember betting Henry Talbott,

00:20:55 this was when I was consulting for Hercules,

00:20:58 once that, you know, that thing,

00:21:00 if you could only find a way of making it,

00:21:02 it would be stable.

00:21:04 And we did indeed try,

00:21:07 and more or less accidentally,

00:21:09 we found a way of...

00:21:11 Well, we were trying to make it,

00:21:12 but I think if we hadn't had an accident

00:21:16 in the way that we were doing it,

00:21:18 we might not have spotted it.

00:21:20 And that was because when you treat

00:21:25 WCl6 with, say, methyl lithium,

00:21:30 you get reduced species,

00:21:36 which we could never characterize,

00:21:38 and it was only by having some adventitious oxygen in there

00:21:43 that we could oxidize these reduced species

00:21:46 up to Hexamethyl tungsten.

00:21:49 So, and that was because

00:21:52 a student was not degassing his petal properly.

00:21:55 I mean, if he degassed his petal properly,

00:21:58 we probably would never have spotted this stuff.

00:22:00 So, that was a lucky break.

00:22:03 So, I mean, those are some of the things

00:22:05 that kept me loose.

00:22:07 There are other things I've done,

00:22:09 like making molybdenum diacetate,

00:22:11 which is the first MO2 acetate four times,

00:22:16 which has been a very fashionable molecule

00:22:18 ever since people have done hundreds of papers.

00:22:21 I mean, you know, it's one of these things

00:22:23 that opened up hundreds and hundreds of publications.

00:22:26 So, you look back and say,

00:22:29 you know, there are some molecules

00:22:31 that you're quite pleased to have made.

00:22:33 Do you consider yourself more of an experimentalist

00:22:36 or a theoretician or both?

00:22:38 Oh, oh, experimentalist.

00:22:40 I mean, I don't really care very much about the theory.

00:22:43 And, I mean, when I was at Harvard,

00:22:47 there was one of my friends,

00:22:49 he was an English student originally of Kunsen's.

00:22:53 And he was becoming fashionable

00:22:56 to talk about theory and MO stuff

00:22:59 and all that sort of stuff at that time.

00:23:01 And I was sort of rather impressed

00:23:05 by this sort of theory.

00:23:06 But I remember Bill Moffitt saying that,

00:23:09 you know, don't worry about the theory, Jeff,

00:23:11 because A, in five years' time,

00:23:14 the theory will be obsolete,

00:23:16 but your compounds will be good still, you see.

00:23:20 And then I've had other experiences

00:23:23 with a friend of mine in Copenhagen

00:23:25 where I told him,

00:23:27 because of the experimental work we've done,

00:23:29 that certain sandwiches, that rhenium one, for example,

00:23:32 had to be bent.

00:23:34 Because we'd made,

00:23:36 we'd actually made a series

00:23:40 of cyclopentadienyl rhenium hydride,

00:23:45 cyclopentadienyl molybdenum dihydride,

00:23:51 and cyclopentadienyl tantalum dihydride.

00:24:01 And we got the NMR spectra of these things.

00:24:05 And also we showed

00:24:07 that this could be protonated by acids.

00:24:12 This one could be protonated by acids.

00:24:18 So we had to postulate a lone pair there,

00:24:21 two lone pairs here,

00:24:22 and the only way you could do this

00:24:24 is by bending the rings.

00:24:26 So I told Carl Bauhausen in Copenhagen what we'd done,

00:24:30 and I said, look, we've come to the conclusion

00:24:31 that these things have to be bent.

00:24:33 There are lone pairs here.

00:24:35 In the tantalum trihydride, there's no lone pairs.

00:24:38 And then, blow me, he didn't believe it to begin with.

00:24:41 So I said, well, why don't you go away and think about it?

00:24:44 Then he goes away and thinks about it,

00:24:46 and about six months later, publishes a paper predicting.

00:24:50 You know, he knew the answer to begin with.

00:24:53 And I'm afraid that's my attitude to theory.

00:24:57 The other thing, I mean, at Harvard,

00:25:00 I remember once saying to Bill Moffitt,

00:25:04 I said, look, cyclopentadienyl iodine.

00:25:11 Minus six bioelectrons.

00:25:16 Benzene, six bioelectrons.

00:25:19 Another six bioelectrons.

00:25:21 I said, cyclopentadienyl can bind to a metal.

00:25:24 How about benzene?

00:25:27 And he went away and thought about it

00:25:30 and came back and said, oh, no, no.

00:25:32 The symmetries and the energy levels, they're all wrong.

00:25:36 You know, no way.

00:25:37 But, I mean, you know, he was a theoretical chemist.

00:25:40 I believed him.

00:25:42 I should have done the experiment.

00:25:44 Because, in fact, the benzene compounds

00:25:47 had been made but not recognized.

00:25:49 This was all Heinz polyphenol chromium compounds

00:25:52 from 1922 and 1923.

00:25:55 They were in the literature.

00:25:56 I knew about it.

00:25:57 That's what I thought, you know.

00:25:59 He said, oh, no, it must be something else.

00:26:01 And then, damn me, Harold Zeiss at Yale came up

00:26:06 because Einstein had that idea as well.

00:26:10 And Ernst Adolf Fischer in Germany did the same thing.

00:26:14 And I could have done the damn experiment

00:26:16 about two years before.

00:26:18 I mean, I wouldn't have done what they would have done.

00:26:20 But all I would have done was to, which is,

00:26:24 I kid myself for not having done this.

00:26:26 I should have technically said,

00:26:27 polymolybdenum carbonyl plus benzene.

00:26:32 And if I'd done that, I would have got

00:26:34 benzene molybdenum tricarbonate.

00:26:37 But I never did the experiment.

00:26:39 So, ever since then, I've taken not a slightest bit

00:26:42 of notice of theories.

00:26:45 And it's very interesting.

00:26:47 In this fifth edition of this well-known textbook,

00:26:49 there's hardly any theory left.

00:26:52 I mean, even my colleague F. Albert Koppen,

00:26:55 who's certainly more theoretically orientated than I am,

00:26:59 I mean, we've decided, you know,

00:27:02 facts and experiments are more important than theory.

00:27:06 So, no, I'm an experimentalist and an empiricist.

00:27:11 I mean, you know, if I get an idea,

00:27:13 I just say, all right, well, let me try it out.

00:27:15 And some of them work and some of them don't.

00:27:17 But if you come up with 51% of your experiments working,

00:27:21 you're winning.

00:27:23 Well, you sound like you found it difficult

00:27:25 to give up the hands-on experimental work.

00:27:28 Is that it?

00:27:29 Oh, yeah. Yeah.

00:27:30 I mean, I'd never do that.

00:27:32 I mean, I have to retire at the end of this year.

00:27:34 But as soon as I get this book out of the way,

00:27:37 I'm just preparing myself to start doing

00:27:40 some more experimental work.

00:27:42 So, I think I'll keep on going.

00:27:45 And I was very impressed when I was in Berkeley

00:27:48 six or seven years ago.

00:27:51 Yeah, just about two or three days after,

00:27:56 oh, what's his name,

00:27:59 a famous chemist who died at the age of 103.

00:28:03 You know, he trained the American Olympics in 1935.

00:28:07 And noise?

00:28:08 No, not noise.

00:28:12 Oh, my mind's going.

00:28:15 Anyway, the point was that he had just been turned down

00:28:19 by the National Science Foundation at the age of 95,

00:28:23 not on the grounds that the science was wrong,

00:28:25 but on the grounds that they didn't think

00:28:27 he would live to complete the program.

00:28:34 So, no, I keep going, do experiments.

00:28:38 I mean, it's the only thing you can do.

00:28:42 Well, why do you think England has been an area

00:28:47 where inorganic chemistry seems to thrive

00:28:50 over a long period of time?

00:28:52 Well, it didn't thrive over a long period of time.

00:28:57 I mean, it was marginally better than the United States.

00:29:02 But my chair here was the only established chair

00:29:07 of inorganic chemistry in the entire country.

00:29:09 When I came back from Harvard in 1956.

00:29:14 So you started a new trend in...

00:29:17 Well, there were one or two other people.

00:29:19 I mean, MLS was the first professor in Cambridge.

00:29:22 And I worked with MLS, in fact,

00:29:25 although I was officially my supervisor.

00:29:31 HBA Bristol was officially my supervisor.

00:29:35 And there were two or three other people scattered around

00:29:38 which was P.L. Robinson up in Durham

00:29:41 and Freddie Fairbrother in Manchester.

00:29:45 But there was hardly any more emphasis

00:29:48 on inorganic chemistry in this country

00:29:50 than there was in the States.

00:29:51 And in the States, you could count the places, you know.

00:29:54 There was John Baylar and, well, I mean,

00:29:59 there were two or three people at MIT,

00:30:01 old Sheldon Young.

00:30:04 There were...

00:30:05 Oh, there was K.D. doing fluid chemistry.

00:30:08 You know, there were a handful of people.

00:30:11 And inorganic chemistry was hardly a subject

00:30:15 in most universities in the United States at that time.

00:30:19 And, you know, this is only 35 years ago.

00:30:22 So there's been a dramatic change ever since,

00:30:26 I mean, both in this country and in the States.

00:30:28 And I think maybe, you know,

00:30:31 our book helped this along.

00:30:32 But I think it was a time

00:30:34 when people were beginning to realize,

00:30:36 largely because of the importance

00:30:39 of inorganic chemistry in the Atomic Energy Project,

00:30:42 which was largely all inorganic chemistry

00:30:44 when you come right down to it,

00:30:46 that it was, you know, an essential discipline

00:30:49 and it had been neglected, except in Germany.

00:30:53 A lot of inorganic chemistry in Germany before the war,

00:30:58 I think, if you pick up the first edition

00:31:00 of Amelie's and Anderson's textbook,

00:31:02 I mean, they essentially apologized

00:31:04 for all the German references

00:31:06 and said, this is a reflection of the, you know,

00:31:10 the lack of inorganic chemistry

00:31:12 in the English-speaking countries.

00:31:14 I think those are almost as much,

00:31:16 proportionately, in Australia.

00:31:18 You know, Australia had quite a...

00:31:21 a sizable sort of, compared to the total numbers,

00:31:25 you know, the Australian inorganic chemistry

00:31:28 was less than I hoped was a product.

00:31:30 I mean, Frankie Dwyer and people like that,

00:31:34 I mean, they were quite strong in Australia.

00:31:36 But, you know, elsewhere in the States,

00:31:39 Canada and this country,

00:31:41 very few and far between.

00:31:49 I don't...