One Hundred Years of Chemical Engineering

One hundred years ago, in September 1888, Professor Lewis Mills Norton (1855-1893) of the Chemistry Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduced to the curriculum a course on industrial chemical practice. This was the first structured course in chemical engineer­ ing taught in a University. Ten years later, Norton's successor Frank H. Thorpe published the first textbook in chemical engineering, entitled "Outlines of Industrial Chemistry." Over the years, chemical engineering developed from a simple industrial chemical analysis of processes into a mature field. The volume presented here includes most of the commissioned and contributed papers presented at the American Chemical Society Symposium celebrating the centenary of chemical engineering. The contributions are presented in a logical way, starting first with the history of chemical engineering, followed by analyses of various fields of chemical engineering and concluding with the history of various U.S. and European Departments of Chemical Engineering. I wish to thank the authors of the contributions/chapters of this volume for their enthusiastic response to my idea of publishing this volume and Dr. Gianni Astarita of the University of Naples, Italy, for his encouragement during the initial stages of this project.

The Origins of Academic Chemical Engineering.- The Development of Chemical Engineering as Shown by its Texts.- Academic Connections of the 20th Century U.S. Chemical Engineers.- History of a Research Journal, Chemical Engineering Science.- The Development of Fluid Mechanics in Chemical Engineering.- Changing View on the Classical Stefan Problem.- Unit Processes Against Unit Operations: The Educational Fights of the Thirties.- Chemical Engineering in the Netherlands 1935-1965.- Chemical Engineering Developments in India.- Chemical Engineering at University College London.- From Mining to Chemical Engineering at the University of Birmingham.- Loughborough - The Development of a Department.- Chemical Engineering at Purdue University.- History of Chemical Engineering at the University of Rochester.- Chemical Engineering Education at the University of Kansas 1895-1988.- History of ChE at The University of Washington.- The History of Chemical Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).- History of Chemical Engineering at The New Jersey Institute of Technology 1881-1988.