Fred Wallace Billmeyer Jr

Abstract

Fred Wallace Billmeyer Jr, renowned educator, author, editor, and authority on polymer science and the science of color, died of a stroke following a four-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, in Clifton Park, New York, on 12 December 2004.Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on 24 August 1919, Fred attended Caltech and earned his BSc in chemistry there in 1941. He pursued graduate work at Cornell University, where, under Nobel laureate Peter Debye, he studied light scattering in synthetic rubber and its relation to particle size and molecular weight. In 1945 Fred was granted a doctorate.He subsequently joined the plastics department of the DuPont company in Wilmington, Delaware, where he developed methods of coloring synthetic materials, measuring molecular-weight distributions, and measuring rates of photopolymerization. From 1951 to 1964, he was also a lecturer in high polymers in the University of Delaware’s chemistry department and was a visiting professor of chemical engineering at MIT during the academic year 1960–61.Fred left DuPont in 1964 to accept an appointment as professor of analytical chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He taught and directed research in polymer science and color science, studied chromatography, and measured the molecular structures and chemical and physical properties of polymers. Fred founded the Rensselaer Color Measurement Laboratory and directed the lab from its beginning until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1984. The laboratory was the only institution in the US that granted advanced degrees in color science and was internationally recognized as a major color-science research center. Fred established the color-science journal Color Research and Application in 1976. As the editor-in-chief from the journal’s beginning until the end of 1986, he maintained a high level of scientific and editorial integrity. He was succeeded as editor by Rolf Kuehni in 1987, and Ellen Carter, one of Fred’s graduates, in 1990.In addition to more than 280 scientific publications on polymers, color, and related fields, Fred wrote several books on polymer science, the best known being his Textbook of Polymer Science (Interscience, 1962). He and Max Saltzman wrote Principles of Color Technology (Interscience, 1966), the only text on that subject. Fred’s graduates didn’t have to look far for advice on going into industrial color management. With Richard N. Kelley, Fred wrote a book about it: Entering Industry: A Guide for Young Professionals (Wiley, 1975).Technically and administratively active in every scientific society involving color or polymer science, Fred was a natural choice as an officer or member of governing boards. A list of the honors and awards bestowed on him by national and international scientific societies and other institutions would far exceed the bounds of this brief notice. He received the highest honors.Fred was a member of several national and international standardizing organizations. When he made a proposal or voiced a reasoned objection to one, he got undivided and respectful attention, and rarely much dissent. In the American Society for Testing and Materials, he worked tirelessly as a member of the committee on color and appearance and gave particular attention to matters of terminology. That committee instituted The Fred W. Billmeyer Jr Award for outstanding service to the committee and presented the inaugural award to him in 1999.Fred enjoyed the lighter side of life and included cartoons in his color-technology textbook. When one of my papers concluded with 10 rules for producing material color standards, they appeared in Color Research and Application as commandments, in the language of the King James Bible, and Fred had them set in Old English typeface.Beyond his prodigious legacy of scientific publications, Fred left a living legacy in his many students, particularly the cadre of young color scientists who earned master’s or doctoral degrees in his laboratory. The list of those distinguished graduates reads like a Who’s Who of modern color science. I considered it an honor and privilege to participate in the graduate program as an adjunct professor.Fred perpetuated his living legacy by transferring much of what remained of his laboratory to the Munsell Color Science Laboratory, established in 1983 at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The lab soon came under the direction of Roy Berns, one of Fred’s graduates. In March 2005, RIT established the Fred W. Billmeyer Jr Memorial Undergraduate Fellowship in Color Science to employ undergraduates as research assistants in the laboratory or support their work in other institutions.Fred stood tall in every way. Fred Wallace Billmeyer Jr PPT|High resolution© 2005 American Institute of Physics.