Early Days
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It was indeed a small
party that moved in from the College laboratories in the summer of 1941. The
Report of the Delegates of the University Museum for the year ending 31 July
1942 lists the following under Physical Chemistry Laboratory: Dr Lee's
Professor: C.N. Hinshelwood (left), University Demonstrators: R.P.
Bell (on leave of absence at the Foreign Office), E.J. Bowen, J.H. Wolfenden
(on leave of absence, Scientific Liaison Officer, Washington), (H.W.
Thompson, another University Demonstrator, was still housed in the Old
Chemistry Department), Departmental Demonstrator: L.E. Sutton, Part-time
Departmental Demonstrators: R.F.Barrow, C.J.Danby, J.G. Davoud, D.H.
Everett, R.M. Lodge and J.R.E. Smith, four of whom are listed as working for
D.Phil., and there were seven working for B.Sc., J. Gadsby, A.H. Willbourn,
H.E. Airey, H.J. Yallop, S.W. Hawkins, Miss M. Grove, and G.P. Harris. There
were also two Part II students already engaged in making charcoal, B.G.
Harvey and E.M. Hawes (known as the Black Gang), to make a grand total of
staff and research students of eighteen. |
At the very beginning there was an emphasis
in the PCL on kinetic studies, both in the gas-phase and in solution. After the
work on the hydrogen-oxygen reaction, (carried out partly with the aim of
studying, and then reducing gun-flash), in which, remarkably, the existence of
the hydroperoxy radical HO2 had been predicted on the
basis of kinetic evidence alone, the balance of Hinsh's own work shifted
gradually towards the interpretation of the kinetics of bacterial growth and to
the study of the adaptation of bacteria in hostile environments. Ronnie Bell,
studying reaction kinetics in solution, including hydrogen-deuterium isotope
effects was laying the foundations for his book The Proton in Chemistry,
first published in 1959. However other subjects were being developed too. James
Lambert was soon beginning his measurements of ultrasonic dispersion in gases
which could be interpreted in terms of the efficiency of the collisional transfer
of energy, and John Danby added mass spectrometry to classical kinetics with
the aim of the more complete analysis of the products - some of them in minute
concentrations - of gas reactions, and thence, later, moved towards the study
of problems in ion physics. Douglas Everett was beginning work on the
thermodynamics of liquid mixtures and of the adsorption of gases on solids.
Tommy Thompson was both developing the experimental techniques of recording
infrared spectra at improved resolution and sensitivity, and also furthering
the analysis of vibration-rotation spectra. Leslie Sutton was setting up and
improving his electron diffraction machine in the basement, at the same time
using measurements of dipole moments to elucidate questions of molecular
structure. Ted Bowen was active in studies of fluorescence and fluorescence
quenching with apparatus constructed from characteristic mutilated biscuit
tins, painted battleship grey.
Titles of early papers, published in the
1940's, give some of the flavour of the scientific life in the PCL in those
days. The chemistry of the very considerable effort on respirator charcoal
carried out for the Ministry of Supply is largely distilled into two articles
which appear in the Journal of the Chemical Society for 1946 and 1947,
`The kinetics of adsorption of gases from an air stream by granular reagents'
by Danby, Davoud, Everett, Hinshelwood and Lodge, and `The redistribution and
desorption of adsorbed gases' by Barrow, Danby, Davoud, Hinshelwood and
Staveley. Similarly, striking developments in infrared spectroscopy and the use
of that technique in molecular fingerprinting, partly carried out for the
Ministry of Aircraft Production, were described in H.W. Thompson's Tilden
Lecture, delivered at the beginning of 1944. David Crawford and Barrow were
working with Ted Caldin, later Professor at the University of Kent at
Canterbury, on the spectroscopy of coloured flares: SrCl and SrO for red, Na
for yellow, BaCl for green and CuCl for blue. Time was still found for academic
work, without direct relevance to the war effort. These were the early days of
Hinsh's study of physicochemical factors controlling bacterial growth and this
was to continue, with many collaborators from Reggie Lodge to Alastair Dean,
and to be carried on by Dean himself when Hinsh retired. The study of chemical
kinetics under varied conditions remained a dominant theme, and, for example,
Tony Willbourn published papers with Hinsh on `The mechanism of the
hydrogen-oxygen reaction', work reviewed in Hinshelwood's Bakerian Lecture to
the Royal Society in 1946, while W.A. Cowdrey, on secondment from I.C.I.
Dyestuffs, was working on the mechanism of the Bucherer reaction and Gadsby,
Long, Sleightholm and Sykes were studying the mechanism of the carbon dioxide-carbon
reaction. Christopher Longuet-Higgins with Ronnie Bell had published the bridge
structure of diborane in 1943 (in a paper dated 4 February 1941, when
Christopher was still an undergraduate at Balliol); in 1945, they discuss the
normal vibrations of bridged X2Y6 molecules. The mechanism of acid-base catalysis was pursued by Ronnie
Bell (e.g. Bell, Everett and Longuet-Higgins, Proc. Roy. Soc. A 1946:
Bell, Smith and Woodward, ib. 1948). Leslie Sutton had moved from the
Dyson Perrins Laboratory, and, with Hank Skinner, he describes electron
diffraction studies of some tin, arsenic and nitrogen halides (Trans.
Faraday Soc. 1943). In 1946, Charles Coulson writes on the `Representation
of simple molecules by molecular orbitals' (Quarterly Reviews of the Chemical
Society), and in the following year, Ted Bowen, with E. Mickiewicz
discusses the fluorescence of solid anthracence (Nature, 1947), and the
work on the fluorescence of naphthacene in anthracene will elucidate the
question of energy transfer in solids and in solution.
Such were some of the main concerns of
members of the PCL in its early years. It is now time to see how these themes
were developed and how new ones emerged
Hinshelwood's
research group in 1950. Back row from left: A.C.R. Dean, M.G. Peard,
A.S. Buchanan, J.P. Willshire, A.A. Eddy, T.C.N. Carroll, B.C. Kilkenny, K.U.
Ingold and H. Nord; Front Row: T.A. Eastwood, P.C. Caldwell, A.C. Baskett,
C.F. Cullis, C.N.H., F.J. Stubbs, S. Jackson, J. Shorter and J.A.E. Bardwell.
