Abstract
THE period extending between the two World Wars has been remarkable for the advances made in what is usually termed 'technology', and it is especially in chemical technology that this development has been most rapid and spectacular. A scientific discovery in a chemical research laboratory may be the progenitor of a finished manufactured article, but the aims and objects of the discoverer and those of the manufacturer are quite different. Since the manufacturer is interested in producing an effect, and since also economics plays an important part in his considerations, it is clear that many steps alien to a pure research laboratory have to be taken after a discovery has been made before a plant is in actual operation. We are confronted with the problem as to the most suitable training for such workers in chemical technology. Prof. Haber, who was at Cambridge at the end of the War of 1914–18, when asked what English chemical industry needed, replied that our weakness lay in not applying the methods of physical chemistry to industry. There is more than a germ of truth in this. Chemical engineering may be regarded by some as a misnomer for chemical technology; and it is within the orbit of physics and chemistry rather than engineering that the new development should take place.
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Chemical Engineering at Cambridge. Nature 155, 262–263 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155262a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155262a0