A pseudo-scientific autobiography.

Abstract

My life and my scientific career have not been highly structured or clearly directed. Mine have been mostly unplanned and often accidental, but fulfilling. I am a black sheep in my family, because my father, grandfather and great grandfather were lawyers and I became a chemist. When I finished high school, 50+ years ago; there was not nearly as much pressure to choose “the best college” or even to select a college major as there is today (as I infer from frequent conversations with parents and prospective undergraduate students). I had no idea about a college major, much a less long-term goal. I graduated from a small high school on the Texas Gulf Coast (~ 50 in my graduating class) and went to a small (~ 600 total student body) junior college in central Texas, probably because my sister had attended and a cousin taught there, but not because of any particular program of study. I had a chemistry set (Gilbert, I think) when I was young with “real” chemicals, not like modern sets that are safe and uninteresting. However, I can’t remember doing anything significant with my chemistry set. Smells, colors and occasional fires were my only accomplishments. Chemistry, physics, algebra, trigonometry and plane geometry were available in high school, but no research was offered, or even Science Fair projects. I entered Tarleton State College and took liberal arts courses in my first year, including general chemistry and algebra, but not calculus (encouraged only for engineers). I liked chemistry sufficiently well to take a non-laboratory organic course the next year—but still had no major. Had Tarleton been a four-year school when I was there, I would probably have majored in history and gone to law school (and pleased my grandmother greatly). However, since it was only a two-year school at that time, I had to finish somewhere else and transferred to the University of Texas. Again, there was no significant soul searching (or college searching, either) about the next stage of my academic career. However, in one’s third year in college, it was necessary even then to have some idea of a major. My two possibilities were history or chemistry. I chose chemistry as a major that year, either because of, or in spite of, two semesters of quantitative analysis with six hours of laboratory per week and eight o’clock lectures on Tuesday and Thursday with weekly quizzes. I took organic chemistry and physical chemistry together the next year to complete a degree in four years, and was inept at standard organic syntheses. In my senior year, Robin Anderson hired me to (let me) work on an Air Force supported project on thermal reactions of acetylene—creating slowly moving flames in a heated tube that generated many products, from CH4 to solid carbon (probably including C60). Fond of (fascinated by) flames, I decided (against the advice of faculty) to stay at Texas for a master’s degree with Anderson on thermal reactions of acetylene. Perhaps surprisingly, nothing blew up during the experiments in those years. After completing a master’s degree, I transferred to the University of Wisconsin and began to work with John Margrave, in high temperature chemistry. However, I decided that Wisconsin was an uninhabitable part of the world and nothing was worth surviving a second winter there. Against the advice of faculty, I returned to the University of Texas and completed a Ph.D. with Anderson on thermal reactions of acetylene. This time there was one major explosion of a mixture of mostly He, some C2H2 and a little Cl2 (in the dark, of course) that almost caught me. My first connection with mass spectrometry was indirect and occurred when a friend at the Humble Oil & Refining Co. labs in Baytown, TX, obtained low voltage electron ionization spectra of very complex mixtures of products from my reactions. A friend and I had just built the second gas chromatograph in the department (a virtual copy of the first one) and there was no such technique as GC/MS for the analysis of complex mixtures. Jobs were plentiful when I finished my Ph.D. in 1959, and I decided to work for the Research Division of Humble Oil & Refining Co. in Baytown, TX (subsequently Esso, then Exxon and now ExxonMobil). My reasons for choosing Humble were not obvious (then or now) because I didn’t