00:00:00 It's a nice view from up here, isn't it?

00:00:04 Yes, I chose this room because when I came here first, there was a Panton Brewery just

00:00:09 a hundred yards across there.

00:00:12 And I got the lovely smell of malt from here.

00:00:14 I'll bet you did.

00:00:16 I had several choices, but this was really marvelous, to have the window open in the

00:00:20 sun and get the malt smell.

00:00:21 Yes, I love it.

00:00:22 It's packed up now, but it's very, very nice.

00:00:25 I must say, the Garden House Hotel is absolutely delightful.

00:00:29 It's a beautiful hotel, and we had a very nice meal.

00:00:32 I'm going to give you a count down, and then you proceed on to the next one.

00:00:39 You don't have these papers.

00:00:41 You don't have these papers.

00:00:43 What papers?

00:00:44 These.

00:00:45 You don't see these.

00:00:46 No.

00:00:47 Oh, good.

00:00:48 Five, four, three, two.

00:00:53 Professor Emelius, can we begin by talking a little bit about your family background?

00:00:58 I know, for example, that your father led a very interesting career before he finally

00:01:03 moved to England and settled in Sussex.

00:01:06 Yes.

00:01:07 Well, as you probably know, he was a Swedish Finn, as opposed to the Finnish-speaking Finns,

00:01:16 who were the original people of Sweden, coming to the west coast of Finland and settled there.

00:01:24 It was an old family, and his father was a judge, and he died rather young.

00:01:34 My grandmother married again, and we went over there in 1909 for the first time and

00:01:41 spent the summer at the family villa out on one of the lakes.

00:01:46 After that, we had several more visits, but before the war spoiled everything and family

00:01:53 fortune went away with the upheaval of the communist regime coming into Russia, because

00:01:59 Russia owned Finland in those early days.

00:02:02 My father did his national service in the Russian army, and he qualified as a pharmacist

00:02:12 at the University of Helsinki, and he practiced for a short time.

00:02:21 But then I think he and his brothers got into some incipient political trouble, because

00:02:27 it was a fashionable thing for young Finns to be anti-Russian, and he went to sea and

00:02:34 sailed before the mast to Australia several times on Finnish ships, right round the horn

00:02:43 of the grain run, and then jumped his ship in Oregon and qualified again in pharmacy

00:02:53 at Brooklyn.

00:02:54 He'd qualified in Helsinki first, then in Brooklyn, and practiced for a short time there,

00:03:00 and came back to England and met my mother, and they were married and raised a family.

00:03:07 I was born actually in the East End of London, in Poplar, but I was taken down to Sussex,

00:03:14 and I'll tell you about that perhaps a little later, as a three-month-old infant.

00:03:20 Well, he met your mother in rather interesting circumstances, didn't he?

00:03:26 Oh yes.

00:03:27 Her father was a dock engineer in the West India docks in charge of the dock gates, and

00:03:37 they lived right on the dock.

00:03:39 And she was the secretary to Mrs Axel Lien, who ran the Scandinavian Sailors' Home.

00:03:48 Now, Mrs Lien's husband was a Swedish inventor who, among other things, provided the big

00:03:58 liners with David, launching the lifeboats, and Mother was there mixing daily with Scandinavians,

00:04:10 and she learned the three Scandinavian languages quite by ear almost, and could speak them

00:04:18 fluently.

00:04:19 And I think she and her father would have both been, in this day and age, university

00:04:26 calibre people.

00:04:27 Her father was entirely self-educated, my grandfather, and he brought himself up on

00:04:35 one of the popular self-educators of the time.

00:04:39 A real old Victorian character, a splendid old man.

00:04:43 So, after your father did get married, they eventually opened a pharmacy in Battle.

00:04:49 Yes.

00:04:50 And that pharmacy still exists today, doesn't it?

00:04:53 Oh yes, yes.

00:04:54 Yes, my brother qualified, and he took it on, and his son is now running it, and the

00:05:00 brothers retired, but are still in Battle.

00:05:03 We've still got the family connection with the old place, and it was a magnificent old

00:05:08 house, built in around 1540, with oak timbers taken from Battle Abbey.

00:05:14 It's a beautiful old place.

00:05:17 Of course, when we were kids, it was very primitive.

00:05:22 There was no plumbing in the house, and the loo was out in the backyard with a lantern

00:05:28 to get to it at night, and everything was most primitive.

00:05:33 But we had a marvellous time as kids, and very, very little money.

00:05:40 The business just about scraped by, and supported the family, but there was very, very little

00:05:47 to spare.

00:05:50 And we just lived in the country.

00:05:52 There were no bicycles.

00:05:54 We walked everywhere.

00:05:55 Thirty miles a day, there was nothing, and we fished in the local little brooks.

00:06:03 I remember well catching my first trout.

00:06:07 It was just a marvellous upbringing, which has had a profound effect on my whole life

00:06:12 ever since, you know.

00:06:15 I have always, always loved the country, and I think, in a sense, have lived in town under

00:06:21 protest.

00:06:22 And having settled down, you were not the first child, of course.

00:06:26 You have an older brother.

00:06:27 No.

00:06:28 I had a...

00:06:29 My brother, George, he's still with us, and he and I went to Hastings Grammar School.

00:06:37 That was about five to seven miles away.

00:06:40 I used to go there by train each day and back.

00:06:42 And as was the case with those old grammar schools, the teaching was marvellous.

00:06:51 And I think we both got interested in science because it was a good science teaching.

00:06:58 My brother went to Cambridge.

00:07:01 He got a scholarship at St. John's and read physics, and then went on to do a PhD with

00:07:08 Rutherford and CTR Wilson, and subsequently ended up as Professor of Physics at Belfast,

00:07:16 Queen's University Belfast.

00:07:18 And he is still living over there now.

00:07:23 And I know I tried two years after him to get a scholarship at St. John's.

00:07:27 They wouldn't have me, which I think, in retrospect, was a blessing in disguise.

00:07:33 I went then to Imperial College and got a small exhibition there.

00:07:39 And thanks to the sacrifices made by my parents, I was able to qualify to get my degree there.

00:07:48 You said you had very good science teaching at school.

00:07:51 Can you remember any teacher in particular from those early days who perhaps inspired you?

00:08:00 My chemistry teacher was Mr. Ernest Hole, H-O-L-E.

00:08:05 He was a splendid teacher.

00:08:07 And it is amazing what a difference good teaching can make.

00:08:13 I fear that educationists have now got their teeth into the educational system.

00:08:20 And in some ways, they're spoiling it.

00:08:22 You don't get that very, very fine personal attention to youngsters.

00:08:27 And did he have a large class with the many students taking chemistry or science or whatever it was?

00:08:33 Well, it was a little bigger than now, I should think.

00:08:38 I couldn't give you the size of the class.

00:08:41 But in my last year, I had a free hand of the laboratory.

00:08:45 And I did a lot of work then which would otherwise have been done at Imperial College in my first year.

00:08:53 We had a chemical balance which was really reliable to a tenth of a milligram.

00:09:01 It meant I could do all the standard gravimetric analysis up to university standard.

00:09:07 And I did a lot of that.

00:09:09 And of course, it was an enormous benefit.

00:09:12 We had all the usual sports.

00:09:15 I played cricket and I played soccer and I played hockey, field hockey.

00:09:21 And I was reasonably proficient.

00:09:24 But when I got to college, I just worked.

00:09:28 There was no...

00:09:30 I was getting, every Monday morning, two pound notes arrived with a lovely letter from my mother.

00:09:37 And that was my ration for the week.

00:09:40 I managed everything on that.

00:09:42 And so it was quite difficult when you were going to university then.

00:09:45 I mean, you had to be extremely frugal.

00:09:47 Well, there was nothing like the public support for me, you see.

00:09:52 You had to do it the hard way.

00:09:55 And, golly, I learned a lot from that.

00:09:58 It was useful because in later years I met lots and lots of hard-up students

00:10:04 and I think I had a feeling for them which I wouldn't have had

00:10:07 if I'd been rather better cushioned in the early days.

00:10:12 Was it always expected by, say, your father or your mother

00:10:16 that you would, say, go into pharmacy or go into the family business?

00:10:21 Or did you always know that you were going to go into science of some sort?

00:10:26 Because it seems to have always been that you were doing science from a very early age

00:10:30 and there was no question in your mind that science was where your interests lay.

00:10:33 Well, in a way, my chemistry started at home.

00:10:38 I used to mix up horse medicines and make pills.

00:10:43 Quite a lot of these operations, of course, were done then.

00:10:46 It was way before the days of very mixed-up medicines.

00:10:52 The pharmacist was the local vet and people came to him

00:10:57 and he dispensed all his own mixtures for them for the various ailments.

00:11:01 I mixed not for humans but for animals.

00:11:04 I trusted with making things like that.

00:11:07 Oh, and in my early teenage,

00:11:10 I can remember with a pair of old pharmacist scales,

00:11:15 being precise in my weighing was something that mattered to me.

00:11:20 But I think father had the ambition that we would,

00:11:23 my brother and I, would go to Heidelberg.

00:11:26 And, of course, when the time came, we should have gone

00:11:29 and family money was all disappeared.

00:11:32 His eldest son would have been reasonably well off from the Finnish estate

00:11:36 but that all disappeared and we had to do it for ourselves,

00:11:43 which, just fair enough, that's the way it came.

00:11:48 He had a great ambition for us, but never to be pharmacists.

00:11:54 He wanted us to get into the academic world.

00:11:58 And your mother?

00:12:00 Well, she was a magnificent person, absolutely marvellous.

00:12:04 She kept the whole thing going.

00:12:06 We had a lovely home life and she,

00:12:10 well, somehow she managed to keep the business solvent

00:12:16 on post-dated cheques.

00:12:19 And the result was that home was just what it always should be.

00:12:26 And so she provided the sort of very comfortable background

00:12:31 This time there were five of you.

00:12:33 You had sisters and brothers.

00:12:35 Can you tell us a little bit about your other brothers

00:12:38 and your other members of your family?

00:12:40 Well, one brother went to Cambridge

00:12:43 and the second qualified in pharmacy

00:12:48 and took over the business.

00:12:51 And the two sisters,

00:12:54 one didn't marry, she helped with the pharmacy,

00:12:58 and the other married a man

00:13:01 who joined the Black Watch in the First War of 16

00:13:04 and had been badly smashed up,

00:13:06 and they had a chicken farm.

00:13:10 He was a pretty good chap,

00:13:14 but, golly, he had a bad, rough time.

00:13:17 That was the family.

00:13:19 We were all very, very much a unit

00:13:21 and four of us are still alive,

00:13:24 so we're very blessed.

00:13:26 And when you went to university,

00:13:30 it was not known as Imperial College in those days, was it?

00:13:33 It was the Royal College of Science

00:13:36 and there were the three colleges

00:13:40 which were separate.

00:13:43 There was City and Guild Engineering College,

00:13:45 the Royal School of Mines,

00:13:46 and the Royal College of Science.

00:13:48 And I took my degree,

00:13:52 I took the Associateship of the Royal College of Science

00:13:55 and then had to take the external London BSc

00:13:59 in the following September.

00:14:01 I think that was the last or the next to last year

00:14:05 when that old system had to maintain.

00:14:12 One or two years after that

00:14:16 it was possible to take the London BSc automatically

00:14:20 on the strength of the results of the college exam.

00:14:24 And then some years later

00:14:26 it became the Imperial College

00:14:29 with one administration.

00:14:32 And what was the college like when you went to it?

00:14:34 What was life like as a student

00:14:36 back in London in those days?

00:14:39 Well, I lived in a bedsit.

00:14:41 I had a thoroughly miserable time.

00:14:44 Well, if it had been for the work

00:14:46 I'd have been miserable,

00:14:48 there was hardly any recreation.

00:14:52 Occasionally to the Old Vic,

00:14:54 the gallery for sixpence.

00:14:56 Can you remember anything you saw at the Old Vic?

00:14:59 Why, yes.

00:15:00 I saw most of the Shakespeare's

00:15:02 and there was opera there too.

00:15:05 And I got a pretty good dose of it.

00:15:09 That went right through my time in London

00:15:11 when I was even doing postgraduate work.

00:15:14 And when you were doing your undergraduate work

00:15:17 you began some research projects.

00:15:20 You had a particular project

00:15:22 into a research project.

00:15:24 Not, you see,

00:15:26 I'd done enough at school

00:15:29 under those post-war conditions

00:15:32 to take my final exam in two years.

00:15:36 And then I went straight into research.

00:15:39 And

00:15:43 there was no research project

00:15:45 which was part of the undergraduate course.

00:15:48 And what was the first research project

00:15:50 you did undertake?

00:15:52 Oh, that was rather a joke really.

00:15:57 The professor of inorganic chemistry,

00:16:02 I think I went to him because I liked his lectures.

00:16:07 I had a choice.

00:16:08 I could have gone to physical or to organic chemistry.

00:16:11 And neither attracted me particularly

00:16:14 but inorganic I liked the lectures

00:16:17 with the demonstrations in the lectures.

00:16:20 And H.P. Baker was the professor.

00:16:26 He was a very interesting old gentleman

00:16:30 because when one went to ask him about research

00:16:34 the one thing he was fatal to do

00:16:36 was to say he wanted to get a PhD.

00:16:40 With him one did research for its own sake.

00:16:43 No half measure at all.

00:16:45 And I think I said all the right things

00:16:49 because he accepted me.

00:16:51 And the question arose obviously

00:16:54 what I was going to do.

00:16:56 And he said he thought he had a problem

00:16:57 that would interest me

00:16:58 which was to study

00:17:00 whether platinum would be attacked by bromine

00:17:05 under the influence of rays from radium

00:17:10 that was the phrase he used.

00:17:13 Well of course my next question was

00:17:15 where's the radium?

00:17:16 And he went into his old desk

00:17:18 which was horribly untidy

00:17:21 and scuffled around

00:17:22 and finally he produced a piece of lead

00:17:25 with a small open tube

00:17:27 which was violet in colour

00:17:29 and he said that was the radium.

00:17:30 Now nobody knew how much that was

00:17:33 I think it was an old sample he'd got from France

00:17:37 in the old days of radium.

00:17:39 And I was left to devise an experiment

00:17:43 I sealed this

00:17:48 tried to seal this up in vacuum

00:17:51 with a bit of bromine

00:17:52 and a weighed piece of platinum

00:17:54 and the radium tube inside

00:17:56 and the problem was to evacuate it.

00:17:58 We had no oil pumps to evacuate the tube

00:18:01 so we had a water pump

00:18:03 attached to a water pump

00:18:04 went away to lunch

00:18:05 and someone turned off the water pump

00:18:06 and flooded the whole thing

00:18:07 radium and oil.

00:18:08 So that was absolutely disastrous

00:18:10 and of course I had to tell him

00:18:13 I don't think he was very pleased

00:18:16 it didn't really hit the ceiling

00:18:18 but I think he did it after I'd left him

00:18:21 and I went through the motions

00:18:25 of recovering the radium

00:18:26 by adding barium

00:18:27 and precipitating barium sulphate

00:18:30 I presented him with a very clean white sample

00:18:33 which I told him would contain his radium

00:18:36 no one knew what was lost

00:18:39 or what the quantities were at all

00:18:43 so that was my first research

00:18:46 and after that

00:18:48 that dear old gentleman

00:18:50 never suggested anything else for me

00:18:54 he left me to find my own research projects

00:18:57 which was alright to start with

00:19:01 but the thing was

00:19:03 what I did

00:19:05 I was encouraged to publish

00:19:06 entirely in my own name

00:19:07 and of course

00:19:08 those first few years of research

00:19:10 if one can publish independently

00:19:12 it's absolutely critical

00:19:14 to getting established

00:19:16 you have to choose the right things to do obviously

00:19:19 but I was attracted

00:19:22 by a phenomenon

00:19:24 which then was known as

00:19:25 the glow of phosphorus

00:19:27 the chemiluminescent oxidation

00:19:29 and

00:19:31 I

00:19:34 had seen this demonstrated

00:19:36 in Baker's lectures

00:19:38 and there was various facets

00:19:40 of that problem

00:19:41 there was no theory of chain reactions

00:19:43 in those days

00:19:44 it was all

00:19:46 just trying to explain a phenomenon

00:19:48 and I made some

00:19:50 I suppose quite interesting studies

00:19:52 including

00:19:54 photographing the spectrum

00:19:56 of the glow of phosphorus

00:19:57 with a very small aperture

00:19:59 spectroscope

00:20:00 quartz spectroscope

00:20:01 and observing for the first time

00:20:03 the lovely set of bands

00:20:05 in the infrared

00:20:07 in the ultraviolet spectrum

00:20:09 of the emission spectrum

00:20:11 it

00:20:13 it was quite a

00:20:15 quite a nice project

00:20:17 and it gave me my first publications

00:20:19 and then I went on

00:20:21 from that to study

00:20:23 the low temperature oxidation of sulfur

00:20:25 and arsenic

00:20:27 and of ether

00:20:29 and those three things together

00:20:31 gave me my doctor of science thesis

00:20:33 which you got in which year

00:20:35 I got that after I had been to Germany

00:20:37 yes

00:20:39 you actually had a PhD

00:20:41 before you had your doctor of science

00:20:43 you did get the PhD

00:20:45 even if Baker had not encouraged you

00:20:47 to work towards it necessarily

00:20:49 well that came in one stride

00:20:51 yes

00:20:53 I think it must have been

00:20:55 yes I was three years before the PhD

00:20:57 including the first year

00:20:59 I might have been undergraduate

00:21:01 and I had then

00:21:03 I was still very hard up then

00:21:05 because the

00:21:07 the grants from the government

00:21:09 were not anything like as generous

00:21:11 as they are now

00:21:13 but your fortunes changed a little bit

00:21:15 when you did decide to go to Germany didn't they

00:21:17 although actually you had a choice of going to

00:21:19 you were going to go abroad

00:21:21 from you

00:21:23 no they changed when

00:21:25 I got a

00:21:27 a senior exhibition

00:21:29 1841

00:21:31 1851 sorry

00:21:33 that was for those days

00:21:35 it was a very very

00:21:37 nicely funded

00:21:39 scholarship

00:21:41 I think it brought in 450 pounds a year

00:21:43 which was marvellous

00:21:45 and

00:21:47 Baker advised me to go abroad

00:21:49 and

00:21:51 he and Sidgwick

00:21:53 interviewed me

00:21:56 and Baker wanted me to go to Paris

00:21:58 to

00:22:00 a Frenchman, Lebeau

00:22:02 who'd been one of Moisson's assistants

00:22:04 in the field of fluorine chemistry

00:22:06 and Sidgwick wanted me to go

00:22:08 to Alfred Stock

00:22:10 who worked on silicon

00:22:12 and germanium hydrides

00:22:14 Stock was then

00:22:16 he'd just moved to Karlsruhe

00:22:18 and

00:22:20 because that was a

00:22:22 black

00:22:24 that's

00:22:26 that's a real pyramid

00:22:28 yes

00:22:30 yes

00:22:42 well Stock had just been

00:22:48 diagnosed as suffering from mercury poisoning

00:22:50 and he was just scared of it

00:22:52 and got a lot of mercury

00:22:54 into his system

00:22:56 and I used to do mercury analyses

00:22:58 on his urine

00:23:00 and this is hard to believe

00:23:02 but from one litre of urine

00:23:04 one could get a visible

00:23:06 droplet of metallic mercury

00:23:08 so he really had

00:23:10 bad effects of it

00:23:12 that was a thing

00:23:14 in the lab

00:23:16 but my social life was

00:23:18 very much

00:23:20 that of the assistant

00:23:22 we had our coffee parties

00:23:24 and we went up

00:23:26 I didn't do any skiing

00:23:28 that was the one thing I missed

00:23:30 we were just on the edge of the black forest

00:23:32 I didn't ski but we made a lot of trips

00:23:34 into the black forest

00:23:36 at weekends together

00:23:38 and I swam in the Rhine

00:23:40 which was then not too dirty

00:23:42 mostly work

00:23:44 I'm afraid I was addicted to that

00:23:46 in those times too

00:23:48 one and a half years

00:23:50 and then what did you do after that?

00:23:52 I went back then and finished my Doctor of Science degree

00:23:54 and the question was

00:23:56 what would I do

00:23:58 go into industry or teach

00:24:00 or go on

00:24:02 and luckily

00:24:04 I

00:24:06 chose to go on

00:24:08 and I had an interview

00:24:10 with ICI

00:24:12 in Billingham

00:24:14 they offered me 500 a year to go there

00:24:17 and I turned that down

00:24:19 and I got an American scholarship

00:24:21 which was very generous

00:24:23 and took me to Princeton

00:24:25 that was the

00:24:27 scholarship funded by the Harkins Foundation

00:24:29 of New York

00:24:31 and it was called a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship

00:24:33 and we

00:24:35 had

00:24:37 two

00:24:39 years

00:24:41 and I worked with H.S. Taylor

00:24:43 the physical chemist at Princeton

00:24:45 and in my

00:24:47 vacations I had an obligation to travel

00:24:49 which meant I saw a lot of

00:24:51 states

00:24:53 How did you travel to the United States

00:24:55 at that time

00:24:57 when you first left England

00:24:59 was it by sea?

00:25:01 Oh yes

00:25:03 those were the days

00:25:05 you might say

00:25:07 I was with

00:25:09 two other Commonwealth Fellows

00:25:11 we had a very good party on board

00:25:13 What were their names?

00:25:15 Eric Ashby

00:25:17 he is now

00:25:19 a peer of the realm

00:25:21 he was a botanist

00:25:23 from Imperial College

00:25:25 and he was going out

00:25:27 as a Commonwealth Fund Fellow

00:25:29 to go to Hawaii

00:25:31 I think he was working on tropical agriculture

00:25:33 seemed a very delectable

00:25:35 place to go to

00:25:37 then

00:25:39 Monty Barrack

00:25:41 he was

00:25:43 a fellow chemist from Oxford

00:25:45 he was a New Zealander

00:25:47 and I did a big travel with him

00:25:49 in the

00:25:51 long vacation between my two years

00:25:53 we had a car

00:25:55 and camping gear

00:25:57 went right across to the Rockies

00:25:59 and spent

00:26:01 about two months

00:26:03 in the Rockies in the wilds

00:26:05 camping and climbing and fishing

00:26:07 very good going

00:26:09 Can you tell us what life was like

00:26:11 in Princeton

00:26:13 for people coming from

00:26:15 England in those days

00:26:17 Well I think for me

00:26:19 it was totally new

00:26:21 because I had been

00:26:23 living in bed sit accommodation

00:26:25 in London

00:26:27 which was not at all good

00:26:29 and there I lived in the graduate

00:26:31 college at Princeton

00:26:33 and it was marvellous

00:26:36 we had a couple of very nice rooms

00:26:38 the grad college is out on the

00:26:40 golf links

00:26:42 we worked hard

00:26:44 I had a car to drive

00:26:46 and

00:26:48 we had reasonable social life

00:26:50 very much like Cambridge College

00:26:52 and

00:26:54 swimming

00:26:56 skating

00:26:58 we even had an 8 on the river

00:27:00 on the lake, on Lake Carnegie

00:27:02 that was

00:27:04 we were coached by

00:27:06 Bob Spence who

00:27:08 later on was

00:27:10 at Harwell

00:27:14 he was a Durham

00:27:16 oarsman

00:27:18 and at one time we had 7 nationalities

00:27:20 in our 8

00:27:22 in the graduate college

00:27:24 it was very nice

00:27:26 one of them was Wegener

00:27:28 a very notable

00:27:30 physicist

00:27:32 who later on developed

00:27:34 studied

00:27:36 a phenomenon known as the Wegener effect

00:27:38 but it really

00:27:40 was my first touch

00:27:42 of proper social life

00:27:44 in the university

00:27:46 and you took up folk dancing

00:27:48 well I met my wife on folk dancing

00:27:50 my future wife

00:27:52 and

00:27:54 we went down for two trips

00:27:56 to New York

00:27:58 with a Princeton team

00:28:00 and

00:28:04 we were married

00:28:06 the day before I sailed

00:28:08 to the little church around the corner in New York

00:28:10 which was rather

00:28:12 a well known place over there

00:28:16 your wife's name was

00:28:18 Catherine Horton

00:28:20 she was from Virginia wasn't she

00:28:22 yes, from Lynchburg

00:28:26 and you weren't allowed to

00:28:28 be married

00:28:30 so you actually had to wait

00:28:32 I had to wait yes

00:28:34 I was allowed one day

00:28:36 but it was

00:28:38 she was working

00:28:40 as a secretary to the librarian

00:28:42 at Princeton

00:28:44 so it was very

00:28:46 obviously near neighbours

00:28:48 and

00:28:50 everything worked out very nicely

00:28:52 what did you work on

00:28:54 what sorts of problems were you working on in Princeton

00:28:57 well Taylor was

00:28:59 interested in photochemistry

00:29:01 and I worked on the photochemistry

00:29:03 of ammonia

00:29:05 and amines

00:29:07 and the polymerisation of olefins

00:29:09 in presence of the radiated ammonia

00:29:11 and amines

00:29:13 it made quite a

00:29:15 new field for me

00:29:17 facilities were very good

00:29:19 and I got three or four publications

00:29:21 with H.S. Taylor

00:29:23 to show for my time

00:29:25 and when you and your

00:29:27 wife left New York

00:29:29 to go to England

00:29:31 did she expect that she was going

00:29:33 to settle here, I mean did it ever occur

00:29:35 to you that you might settle in the United States

00:29:37 well I came home

00:29:39 without a job

00:29:41 that was a poor start

00:29:43 I got one

00:29:45 £300 a year at Imperial College

00:29:47 which was less than she had been earning

00:29:49 in Princeton

00:29:51 and we settled down

00:29:53 in a very scruffy

00:29:55 little

00:29:57 ground floor flat

00:29:59 in Battersea

00:30:01 just off the park

00:30:03 that was

00:30:05 pretty much to ask of her

00:30:07 but she was a good

00:30:09 pioneer spirit, she stuck it

00:30:11 and it worked out gradually

00:30:15 I got a job at Imperial College

00:30:17 in the lowest

00:30:19 bracket

00:30:21 and I was very glad of it

00:30:23 so what were you working on

00:30:25 at Imperial College

00:30:27 I had

00:30:29 I was on my own

00:30:31 that's important

00:30:33 and I did a mixture

00:30:35 of things

00:30:37 I had the experience of physical chemistry

00:30:39 with Taylor

00:30:41 I had one or two projects in physical chemistry

00:30:45 but one of the main things I

00:30:47 developed was an interest in

00:30:49 hydride chemistry where I could

00:30:51 use the Stok technique

00:30:53 because that technique

00:30:55 was brand new in England

00:30:57 no one had ever had it before

00:30:59 and I was able to develop that

00:31:01 for the first time

00:31:03 and it gave me a very

00:31:05 good

00:31:07 line because

00:31:13 I think it was a

00:31:15 I was interested in preparative chemistry

00:31:18 and I gradually dropped the physical chemistry

00:31:20 and got more and more

00:31:22 into preparative chemistry

00:31:26 you see

00:31:28 you really have to remember

00:31:30 that chemistry wasn't

00:31:32 developed in anything

00:31:34 like the degree it is now

00:31:36 all of the modern things

00:31:38 like NMR, spectroscopy, infrared

00:31:40 and even x-ray work

00:31:42 was

00:31:44 only just beginning

00:31:46 and there wasn't a lot to do

00:31:48 in inorganic

00:31:50 except preparative work

00:31:52 and the

00:31:54 field was absolutely enormous

00:31:56 anyone with any sort of imagination

00:31:58 could pick up a journal

00:32:00 and get

00:32:02 absolutely unlimited

00:32:04 ideas for worthwhile new research

00:32:06 and there was

00:32:08 hardly any competition

00:32:10 there was a certain amount

00:32:12 of good manners

00:32:14 I remember writing

00:32:16 to somebody in Germany

00:32:18 very apologetically and saying

00:32:20 would he mind if I did so and so

00:32:22 because he had shown some interest in it

00:32:24 that was the norm then

00:32:26 but it really was

00:32:28 a pretty wide open field

00:32:30 and with the silicon hydride

00:32:32 one of the things

00:32:34 my students made

00:32:36 was the

00:32:38 silicon analogue of methyl iodide

00:32:40 SiH3I

00:32:42 which of course

00:32:44 is a

00:32:46 opens up the whole field of

00:32:48 organometallics

00:32:50 using silicon

00:32:52 SiH3

00:32:54 instead of CH3

00:32:56 and we took that and we made

00:32:58 a lot of

00:33:00 derivatives

00:33:02 that and with the methyl silanes

00:33:04 and

00:33:06 extended

00:33:08 that also to some

00:33:10 chemical work on SiH3

00:33:12 gradually you see built round

00:33:14 into the preparative side

00:33:16 as opposed to the physico-chemical

00:33:18 and that's what

00:33:20 became known for

00:33:22 I had a very small number of research students

00:33:24 but they were very good

00:33:26 and that went on

00:33:28 until the war years

00:33:30 and did you have

00:33:32 many

00:33:34 publications

00:33:36 you were opening up this field at this time

00:33:39 so you must have had lots of

00:33:41 publications

00:33:43 yes I think

00:33:45 I couldn't give you numbers

00:33:47 but they were half a dozen

00:33:49 a year that was the sort of output

00:33:51 which was in keeping

00:33:53 with the size of our group

00:33:55 and was your

00:33:57 financial position improving

00:33:59 were you still in the scruffy flats in Battersea

00:34:03 we gradually got

00:34:05 a little bit better

00:34:07 it wasn't a lot

00:34:09 but it was some of it

00:34:11 and

00:34:13 I couldn't tell you

00:34:15 when the first youngsters was born

00:34:17 it must have been

00:34:19 you see I took my job there

00:34:21 in 1931

00:34:23 must have been 1935 or thereabouts

00:34:25 we got then into a better flat

00:34:27 and moved out to

00:34:29 Turn Green

00:34:31 and

00:34:33 that's where

00:34:35 we were when the war started

00:34:37 and when the war started

00:34:39 you

00:34:41 didn't want your wife to stay up in London

00:34:43 so your wife actually

00:34:45 moved down to live with your family in Battle

00:34:47 didn't she?

00:34:49 she took a small house on the outskirts of Battle

00:34:51 and I

00:34:53 went to live

00:34:55 in college

00:34:57 had a room in the

00:34:59 college union

00:35:01 and

00:35:03 you possibly know that Imperial College

00:35:05 was

00:35:07 the only London college which did not

00:35:09 evacuate itself to the

00:35:11 provinces

00:35:13 we went on with our teaching

00:35:15 and the research was switched over

00:35:17 to special research for the

00:35:19 ministry

00:35:21 and did

00:35:23 life go on as usual in the lab

00:35:25 during the war?

00:35:27 it must have been very difficult sometimes

00:35:29 you mean

00:35:31 well yes you were involved

00:35:33 in some work

00:35:35 associated with air raids

00:35:37 right?

00:35:39 well

00:35:41 there were several parallel things

00:35:43 going on

00:35:45 let me talk about the work first

00:35:47 the work was

00:35:49 mostly

00:35:51 work that was secret

00:35:53 and was

00:35:55 for the ministry of supply

00:35:57 and

00:36:00 we were asked to investigate

00:36:02 the

00:36:04 preparation properties of a range

00:36:06 of very

00:36:08 aggressive

00:36:10 but little known

00:36:12 fluorine compounds

00:36:14 the problem was

00:36:16 would they be used by the Germans as war gases

00:36:18 and these

00:36:20 compounds included bromine

00:36:22 and fluorine

00:36:24 iodine fluoride

00:36:26 and things of that sort

00:36:28 which were very

00:36:30 toxic

00:36:32 and we had the experience

00:36:34 of preparative chemistry

00:36:36 and we made these

00:36:38 and we had

00:36:40 white rats kept in the building

00:36:42 for preliminary

00:36:44 toxicity tests

00:36:46 and then we worked closely

00:36:48 in connection with the port

00:36:50 experimental station

00:36:52 chemical defence station

00:36:54 so that was really the work

00:36:56 again about half a dozen

00:36:58 they could do their PhD's on the basis

00:37:00 of that secret work

00:37:02 much of which was never published

00:37:04 excepted by the university

00:37:06 and

00:37:08 the other things

00:37:10 I did

00:37:12 rather a joke I had a commission

00:37:14 in the home guard

00:37:16 and

00:37:18 then ERH Jones

00:37:20 and I were both

00:37:22 as advised

00:37:24 in fairly senior positions

00:37:26 we lectured to

00:37:28 gas identification officers

00:37:30 on a regular basis

00:37:32 at the college

00:37:34 I think

00:37:36 I think that was

00:37:38 about all we had

00:37:40 because nothing happened

00:37:42 the only major alarm

00:37:44 we had was when

00:37:46 the white solid substance was

00:37:48 found in the roadway at Marble Arch

00:37:50 and we were

00:37:52 Jones and I were rushed up there

00:37:54 with a police escort to identify it

00:37:56 because there had been a scare

00:37:58 about solid arsenic compounds

00:38:00 and this proved to be snow

00:38:02 from a barrage balloon

00:38:04 the whole of Marble Arch was stood to stand

00:38:06 until we gave it a little clear

00:38:08 but that was the sort of

00:38:10 one-off

00:38:12 there was really very little

00:38:14 with the gas job again

00:38:16 What did you do during air raids?

00:38:18 Oh well there I was

00:38:21 in charge of the

00:38:23 firefighting for the college

00:38:25 and