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00:00:35 Professor Harry Julius Emeleus is emeritus professor of

00:00:40 inorganic chemistry at the University of Cambridge.

00:00:43 Born in 1903 to Carl Henry and Ellen Biggs Emeleus,

00:00:48 he was educated at Hastings Grammar School and later

00:00:52 attended the Royal College of Science in London,

00:00:55 where he studied with Professor Baker,

00:00:57 researching the luminescent oxidation of phosphorus.

00:01:02 In 1931, he became assistant lecturer at Imperial College,

00:01:07 researching inorganic and physiochemical problems,

00:01:10 publishing this work in 1938.

00:01:14 During the war, Professor Emeleus and his colleagues

00:01:18 worked on chemical antitoxins.

00:01:21 Later, he was commissioned as a member of the Home Guard.

00:01:25 In 1944, he transferred to Oak Ridge Laboratories in the

00:01:29 States, where he worked on electromagnetic separation

00:01:32 of uranium isotopes.

00:01:36 Professor Emeleus has served on numerous committees and

00:01:39 councils, including the Council of the Royal Society,

00:01:43 the Chemical Society, and the Faraday Society.

00:01:46 He was president of the Chemical Society and the

00:01:49 Royal Institute of Chemistry.

00:01:51 He has been a consultant to the chemical industry for over

00:01:54 25 years and has published seminal works in inorganic

00:01:59 chemistry, including the Journal of Fluorine Chemistry.

00:02:03 This interview, conducted by Ms. Moira Donnelly of the Royal

00:02:08 Society of Chemistry, was videotaped in April of 1987 at

00:02:13 the University Chemical Laboratories and at Professor

00:02:18 Emeleus' home in Cambridge.

00:02:20 You were not the first child, of course.

00:02:22 You have an older brother.

00:02:23 No.

00:02:25 My brother, George, he's still with us.

00:02:27 And he and I went to Hastings Grammar School.

00:02:33 That was about five to seven miles away.

00:02:36 We went down by train each day and back.

00:02:38 And as it was the case with those old grammar schools, the

00:02:46 teaching was marvellous.

00:02:48 And I think we both got interested in science because

00:02:51 there was a good science teaching.

00:02:55 My brother went to Cambridge.

00:02:57 He got a scholarship at St. John's and read physics and

00:03:03 then went on to do a PhD with Rutherford and CTR Wilson and

00:03:09 subsequently ended up as Professor of Physics at

00:03:12 Belfast, Queen's University Belfast.

00:03:15 And he is still living over there now.

00:03:20 And I know I tried two years after him to get a scholarship

00:03:23 at St. John's.

00:03:24 They wouldn't have me, which I think in retrospect was a

00:03:29 blessing in disguise.

00:03:30 I went then to Imperial College and got a

00:03:34 small exhibition there.

00:03:36 And thanks to the sacrifices made by my parents, I was able

00:03:41 to qualify to get my degree there.

00:03:45 And when you went to university, it was not known

00:03:50 as Imperial College in those days, was it?

00:03:53 It was the Royal College of Science.

00:03:56 And there were the three colleges which were separate.

00:04:02 There was City and Guild Engineering College, the Royal

00:04:04 School of Mines, and the Royal College of Science.

00:04:07 And I took my degree, I took the Associateship of the Royal

00:04:13 College of Science, and then had to take the external

00:04:17 London BSc in the following September.

00:04:21 I think that was the last or the next to last year when

00:04:26 that old system had to maintain.

00:04:34 One or two years after that, it was possible to take the

00:04:37 London BSc automatically on the strength of the results of

00:04:41 the college exam.

00:04:44 And then some years later, it became the Imperial College

00:04:49 with one administration.

00:04:51 And when you were doing your undergraduate work, you began

00:04:55 some research projects.

00:04:57 You had a particular project, didn't you?

00:04:59 A research project.

00:05:02 Not, you see, I'd done enough at school under those post-war

00:05:09 conditions to take my final exam in two years.

00:05:14 And then I went straight into research.

00:05:17 And there was no research project as part of the

00:05:23 undergraduate course.

00:05:25 The professor of inorganic chemistry, I think I went to

00:05:30 him because I liked his lectures.

00:05:34 I had a choice.

00:05:35 I could have gone to physical or to organic chemistry.

00:05:39 And neither attracted me particularly.

00:05:41 But inorganic, I liked the lectures with the

00:05:46 demonstrations in the lectures.

00:05:48 And H.B. Baker was the professor.

00:05:53 And he was a very interesting old gentleman.

00:05:58 Because when one went to ask him about research, the one

00:06:02 thing that was fatal to do was to say you

00:06:05 wanted to get a PhD.

00:06:07 One did with him, one did research for its own sake.

00:06:10 There was no half measure at all.

00:06:13 And then I went on from that to study the low temperature

00:06:16 oxidation of sulfur and arsenic and of ether.

00:06:21 And those three things together made up my doctor of

00:06:24 science thesis.

00:06:25 Which you got in which year?

00:06:27 I got that after I had been to Germany.

00:06:30 Yes.

00:06:31 You actually had a PhD before you had your doctor of

00:06:34 science, did you?

00:06:35 Yes.

00:06:35 You did get the PhD, even if Baker had not encouraged you

00:06:38 to work towards it necessarily.

00:06:40 Well, that came in one stride.

00:06:42 Yes.

00:06:44 And when the war started, you didn't want your wife to stay

00:06:49 up in London.

00:06:50 So your wife actually moved down to live with your family

00:06:53 in battle, didn't she?

00:06:54 She took a small house on the outskirts of battle, yes.

00:06:58 And I went to live in college.

00:07:03 I had a room in the college union.

00:07:07 And you possibly know that Imperial College was the only

00:07:14 London college which did not evacuate

00:07:16 itself to the provinces.

00:07:19 We went on with our teaching.

00:07:21 And the research was switched over to special research for

00:07:25 the ministry.

00:07:28 And did life go on as usual in the lab during the war?

00:07:32 I mean, it must have been very difficult sometimes.

00:07:37 You mean during air raids?

00:07:38 Well, yes.

00:07:39 You were involved in some work associated with air raids,

00:07:44 weren't you?

00:07:46 Well, there were several parallel things going on.

00:07:51 Let me talk about the work first.

00:07:53 The work was mostly work that was secret and was for the

00:08:03 Ministry of Supply.

00:08:06 And we were asked to investigate the preparation

00:08:10 properties of a range of very aggressive but little known

00:08:17 fluorine compounds.

00:08:19 The problem was would they be used by the

00:08:22 Germans as war gases?

00:08:25 And these compounds included bromine and fluorine, iodine

00:08:30 fluoride, nitrosyl fluoride, and things of that sort, all

00:08:34 of which were very, very toxic.

00:08:38 And we had the experience of preparative chemistry.

00:08:41 And we made these.

00:08:44 And we had white rats kept in the building for preliminary

00:08:50 toxicity tests.

00:08:51 And then we worked closely in connection with the Porton

00:08:55 Experimental Station, chemical defense station.

00:08:59 So that was really the work.

00:09:00 And the people working with me, again, about half a dozen,

00:09:04 they could do their PhDs on the basis of that secret work.

00:09:08 Much of which was never published, although it was

00:09:11 accepted by the university.

00:09:13 I chose Cambridge.

00:09:15 I can't tell you why.

00:09:16 But it turned out beautifully, of course.

00:09:20 When you, about 1946 it was, I think, you got the FRS.

00:09:25 Yes.

00:09:26 Was that because of the work you'd done at Imperial College?

00:09:30 Was that recognition for that work?

00:09:33 I don't know.

00:09:36 I never inquired.

00:09:37 People don't automatically become

00:09:40 elected to the Royal Society.

00:09:42 No, I think it was just I had built up

00:09:46 a little bit of good work, I suppose, the war work.

00:09:52 The work on bromine trifluoride had been published then.

00:09:59 It was known anyway.

00:10:01 And before the war, we'd had a lot of good success

00:10:04 on silicon hydride chemistry.

00:10:08 And of course, there weren't all that many inorganic chemists

00:10:13 who would have been eligible.

00:10:15 We were just beginning to spread.

00:10:19 When I started, I think, in the 20s,

00:10:22 there could have been only two or three chairs

00:10:24 of inorganic chemistry.

00:10:25 And gradually, it became fashionable and even necessary

00:10:31 for each university to have a professor

00:10:33 of inorganic chemistry.

00:10:34 But that wasn't so when I started.

00:10:36 And I think that's one of the reasons why my boys were

00:10:39 so favorably placed for jumping into these chairs, which

00:10:42 they filled admirably.

00:10:45 I think I wouldn't like to discuss or even to speculate

00:10:49 as to why one was in the Royal.

00:10:52 That's one of the nice things that happens.

00:10:55 Looking back over a very distinguished chemical career,

00:11:01 what would you say was the single most important

00:11:04 contribution made by you and your group?

00:11:11 I think the most important thing we

00:11:13 did was breaking open the field of organometallics

00:11:18 where fluorocarbons were in the molecule.

00:11:23 Because that was literally a new branch of chemistry.

00:11:28 And it's been taken up worldwide.

00:11:32 And it's still moving very rapidly.

00:11:35 That, I think, was the top that we reached.

00:11:45 It's a very, very pretty field because there's

00:11:47 enormous scope for different techniques to come into it.

00:11:51 And fluorine is so different as an element

00:11:55 from the other halogens that you can never quite

00:12:02 tell what's going to happen.

00:12:03 It's one of those elements, when you get into its chemistry,

00:12:07 it's always worthwhile trying a thing.

00:12:10 Don't just say, don't even bother with theory.

00:12:12 Just try it.

00:12:14 And with fluorine, something pretty well always happens.

00:12:17 And it can be something very unexpected and exciting.

00:12:23 That's what we've been finding.

00:12:24 And I think lots of other fluorine chemists

00:12:26 have found the same thing.

00:12:27 It's just stone fascination.

00:12:30 Looking back through the students who've

00:12:33 passed through your labs, is there one in particular

00:12:37 that you would say had gone on to make a major contribution

00:12:42 or just a large number of them?

00:12:47 I think a large number of them.

00:12:49 Very, very difficult to pick out one from all that number.

00:12:57 No, in fact, I would feel quite positive.

00:13:00 There was not one who was other than very, very distinguished.

00:13:06 And they've all done well.