Willis R. Whitney


Willis Rodney Whitney was an American chemist and founder of the research laboratory of the General Electric Company. He is known as the "father of industrial research" in the United States for blending the worlds of research and industry together; which at the time, were two very distinct careers. He is also known for his corrosion theory of iron which he developed after studying at M.I.T. and the University of Leipzig. Whitney was also a professor at M.I.T. for some time before his career transition into research directing. He received many awards, including the Willard Gibbs medal, the Franklin medal, the Perkin medal, the Edison medal, the John Fritz medal, the Chandler medal, and many others. He was an astute believer in researching and experimenting for pleasure and voiced his belief at various science conferences.

Personal life

Whitney was born in Jamestown, New York, the son of John Jay Whitney and Agnes Whitney. He had a sister named Caroline Whitney Barrett. Whitney was curious from the very start. He would wonder why things were the way that they were and often performed various experiments at home. Notably, he wondered why bark grew stronger on one side of trees, what pigeon talons looked like compared to chicken talons, and how things looked like at a microscopic scale. His curiosity of the microscopic was driven by a free YMCA class he attended with his friends. The class taught by William C.J. Hall, a millowner in Jamestown, showed the boys how to prepare specimens and use an optical microscope.
Whitney also learned from his father, a furniture maker and business owner, how to make and use a ledger. He and his friends started a junk-collecting business, going around town collecting scraps. They would wait until the market price rose for scrap and then sell them for a profit. Whitney and his friends eventually invested in bicycles with their saved allowances to maximize their business's reach. He would also often work for his father in his father's factory.
Whitney attended Jamestown Free School as a young boy. One day, he met Evelyn Jones on their way to class. She had lost a nickel in the tall grass and was crying that she could not find it. Whitney stopped and helped her find it. Gradually the two spent more and more time together. Whitney decided that he would get a bicycle to go on rides with her; however the bicycle cost nearly the same as a microscope he had hoped to get. He ended up getting the microscope first and then the bicycle. Eventually the two became husband and wife. They had a daughter named Evelyn "Ennin" Van Alstyne Schermerhorn. She was born on May 13, 1892.
As a child, Whitney was Presbyterian and very religious. His formal religion started to fade as he read the likes of Mark Twain, but he kept his faith until his death. He would teach Sunday school in Boston's Chinatown during his time as a student at M.I.T.
Whitney's father died in his sleep after several months of being ill. Upon hearing the news, he returned from an American Chemical Society conference in California and went to comfort his mother, who was slowly going blind. Attending the funeral, he found his mother very calm and serene after she completely lost her sight. Whitney began visiting her more often, until she died in 1927.
Whitney got to meet the likes of Madame Curie, Thomas Edison, Robert Millikan, and Arthur Compton when he was invited to a luncheon honoring Marie Curie at the Carnegie Mansion. Soon after this, he met J.J. Thomson on a trip to Cambridge University in Europe and also got to see Madame Curie's laboratory.
As he retired, Whitney spent more time on his hobbies: bicycling, his various experiments, collecting arrowheads, and learning such as studying neurology and welding for fun.
During the depression years starting in 1929, Whitney battled a personal depression brought on by ever-increasing pressure to defend his laboratory. He had to let go of many of his workers and was devastated that he could not help them. Businesses were debating whether a research budget was actually a cool insurance or an unnecessary luxury. The integrity of the G.E. Research laboratory as a scientific institution was challenged. Whitney took a vacation to recover. During his vacation time, he did some manual labor around his home, visited Florida, visited the Grimaldi Caves, visited Nassau, and learned that when living conches are scarred, a pearl-like lime substance will fill in the scarred area. When he returned, he stepped down from his position as the director of the G.E. laboratory, naming Coolidge as his successor. He was diagnosed with psychomotor acceleration around this time. He recovered and relapsed through it until his death in a hospital at the age of 89.

Education

M.I.T.

Whitney initially wanted to study biology and by chance visited M.I.T. on the same day that entrance examinations were being administered. He was curious about the questions and got permission to take the exam that day. He passed without any preparation. He would later choose MIT to be his academic institution on account of its laboratories. Whitney was a hard-working student but he was fearful of having a limited scope of knowledge. He was a special student in that he had not decided on a major. For advice he went to General Francis Amasa Walker, then president of M.I.T., who offered that Whitney should avoid electrical engineering, then a relatively new field at M.I.T., and stick to chemistry or biology. Whitney discussed his ideas with his peers, Pierre du Pont and George Hale. He ultimately decided on chemistry.
During his sophomore year at M.I.T. Whitney met Arthur A. Noyes, a laboratory assistant in the chemistry department who inspired Whitney with his work on solutions.
Shortly before his graduation from M.I.T. in 1890, Whitney was appointed as Assistant Instructor of Chemistry for the following academic year. It was during this time that he met Gerard Swope and William D. Coolidge. He also taught Alfred P. Sloan, Paul Litchfield, and Irénée du Pont. He taught general chemistry for two years and then made the switch over to analytical chemistry. He lectured without notes and got to know the individual student. Whitney saw students as knowledge-seekers rather than storage containers of answers. Similar to his senior, Arthur A. Noyes, Whitney's approach was more research based. He would give students a problem that was not in their textbook and told them to solve it by researching, devising a method, carrying it out, and by presenting a report. This clashed with the institution's approach. After two more years of teaching analytical chemistry, Whitney decided to go to the University of Leipzig to obtain his doctorate and study under Wilhelm Ostwald.

University of Leipzig

Studying under Wilhelm Ostwald, who also taught Whitney's predecessor, Arthur A. Noyes, Whitney's thesis project was on color changes during chemical reactions. He also accepted the task of translating Max Le Blanc's Electrochemistry textbook. Le Blanc was a colleague of Ostwald who Whitney met in Leipzig. In 1896, Whitney finished the translation, finished his laboratory work, and successfully defended his thesis. He earned his doctoral degree and went from assistant instructor of chemistry to doctor of philosophy. After attaining his doctoral degree, Whitney did not leave Germany to return home immediately. Instead, he studied organic chemistry with Charles Friedel at the Sorbonne in France for about six months.

Corrosion Theory

After returning from Leipzig with his doctorate, Whitney resumed working with Noyes in the laboratory. Whitney was intrigued by the competing theories of corrosion during his recent consulting assignment at a Boston hospital where rust plagued the water pipes. He designed an experiment to see whether carbonic acid, which was widely accepted to be necessary for rusting to occur, was really necessary. To do this, he examined corrosion through a physical chemistry approach. He reasoned that corrosion must occur in an oxidation-reduction reaction, similar to how Nernst explained the physical chemistry of a battery. His experiment then consisted of eliminating all traces of air, acid, and soluble alkali from sealed water bottles. He placed pieces of iron in the water bottles and sealed them with paraffin. Then he left the bottles on a shelf and checked to see if any rust had formed each day. Seeing as no rust formed for weeks, he decided to open them and let air in. Almost immediately, the water turned yellow and then rust started forming. Whitney reasoned that iron would not have dissolved between the time he opened the bottle and the formation of rust occurred. Thus, he reasoned that the iron dissolved into the water before he opened it, due to the hydrogen ion concentration. To verify his results, he sent his undergraduate students to gather more research. Based on Whitney's theory, hydrogen ions would be present during this process; one Whitney student verified this by opening up a rusty radiator and lighting a match. Hydrogen was present. Basically, Whitney found that the proper electrical contact between the cathode and anodic region as well as the presence of hydrogen ions were enough to make corrosion occur. He also found that keeping iron in an alkali solution could prevent rusting. He published his results in 1903 and earned immediate recognition in the American audience. However, Wilhelm Palmaer, one of Arrhenius's students in Sweden, published a similar article in 1901. While Whitney can not be credited for discovering corrosion theory, he did introduce it to the masses.

Eastman Kodak

from Eastman Kodak came to M.I.T. one day, to enlist Arthur Noyes and Whitney's help. In merging with the American Aristotype company, Eastman needed help to lower costs by making the production of photographic paper less wasteful. Specifically, Eastman saw the need to recover the alcohol and ether vapor that was going to waste in the photographic paper production process. After some weeks, Noyes and Whitney had found a solution. Although the exact details of the solvent recovery process remained as secret, the procedure appeared to have involved collecting the evolved vapors and distilling them back into their constituents after passing them through a certain chemical gel. In July 1899, Noyes and Whitney signed a contract that granted the company full use of the process while paying the two chemists a handsome sum of money, funding half of a laboratory, and giving the two chemists stock from said company. At the time, this crossover between academics and businessmen was uncommon.