What is chemical engineering?

(http://navier.engr.colostate.edu/whatische/ChEL01Body.html)

Picture a world where penicillin and other antibiotics are rarer and more expensive than the most precious gems. Picture onceprosperous countries gripped by famine as dwindling supplies of natural fertilizers become increasingly scarce, and pests
devastate what little crops can be grown. Imagine hospitals where kidney dialysis is so risky that patients opt not to do it; where
open heart surgery requires so much donor blood that only a select few can have it done; where organ transplants are unheard
of because of tissue rejection; and where diabetics rely on the harvesting of insulin from animals. Imagine serving in the armed
forces or in a police department without a lightweight bulletproof vest. Picture a closet without easy-care, mothproof synthetics
like rayon, nylon, Gortex, and even polyester, or a home without durable, easy-to-clean carpets. Picture American cities choked
with smog and soot from millions of residential coal furnaces and millions of automobiles without emission controls. Imagine
our world wide web trying to function on vacuum tubes and ferrite core storage for data processing, and a "personal" computer
the size of a bungalow. Imagine paying $40 for a gallon of gasolineif you can even find itand your automobile weighing 3
tons because of the absence of today's lightweight alloys and high-strength polymers. Picture a home where perishable foods
last no longer than a day, because that's how long it takes the block of ice in your "refrigerator" to melt.
Chemical engineers have made so many important contributions to society, in such a short span of history, that it is hard to
visualize modern life without the large-scale production of antibiotics and other drugs, fertilizers, agricultural chemicals,
physiological-compatible polymers for biomedical devices, high-strength polymer composites, synthetic fibers and fabrics,
protective coatings, and microelectronic devices. How would our industries function without environmental control technologies;
without processes to design and make semiconductors, magnetic and optical storage media; and without modern petroleum
processing? All these technologies require the ability to produce specially-designed chemicalsand the materials based on
themeconomically and with minimal adverse impact on the environment. Developing this ability and implementing it on a
practical scale is what chemical engineering is all about.
The products that depend on chemical engineering come from the diverse array of industries that play a key role in our economy.
These industries include the traditional chemical and petroleum processing industries that dominated chemical engineering for
over half of its existence, but they also include food and beverages, textiles, paper, rubber and plastics, ceramics,
microelectronics, biomedical devices, and a wealth of others. These industries produce most of the materials from which
consumer products are made, as well as the basic commodities on which our way of life is built. But, chemical engineering is
more than a group of basic industries or a raft of products. As an intellectual discipline it is deeply involved in both basic and
applied research. Chemical engineers bring a unique set of tools and methods to the study and solution of some of society's
most pressing problems.

How it started
Chemical engineering is the newest of the four major engineering disciplines. As recognized professions, civil and mechanical
engineering both predate it by over 100 years. Chemical engineering arose as a separate, distinct profession somewhat slowly,
almost reluctantly, between the end of the 19th and the early 20th century. Once established, its rise was fast, however,
becoming a well-recognized engineering discipline by the late 1920's. This relatively late beginning and long
adolescence tends to conceal the fact that many procedures and techniques now considered standard were
practiced long before the profession came about.

Justus von Liebig

was the first great
educator in
chemistry. He
promoted
chemistry as the
central science,
trying to
underscore its
direct benefit to
man in the form of
pharmaceuticals.

The origins of chemical engineering go back even further, to the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th
century in Europe and the United States, and the changes following the 1848 revolution in France and
Germany. In the beginning of the 19th century the art and the science of chemistry flourished in Germany.
A number of pioneering chemists revolutionized the way in which new chemicals were discovered,
synthesized, and marketed. The most prominent of these was Justus von Liebig, who established a small
chemistry laboratory at the University of Giessen, a tiny town 30 miles north of Frankfurt. Prof. von Liebig's
greatest contribution was not the discovery of revolutionary new compounds; rather, it was his almost unique
ability to educate students who would themselves become famous scientists. And it was the intellectual
descendants of these brilliant chemists who would populate the universities and research laboratories in
the United States and throughout the western world.

What made von Liebig and his students different from other chemists of that age was their effort to apply
their fundamental discoveries to the development of specific chemical processes and products. This
scientific approach, striving for the rational and methodical rather than the empirical and observational,
seems like a logical way to explore new areas of technology. However, "rational and methodical" are often synonymous with
"slow and expensive," and the human tendency to proceed quickly once something is discovered is ofttimes irresistible. The
scientific method espoused in the 1830's and '40's by the chemist von Liebig had a significant impact on the birth of chemical
engineering 50 years later.

An event that also had an direct impact on the birth of chemical engineering was the political revolution of 1848 that began in
France and swept across the Rhine into Germany. The revolution, which gave central Europe a taste of liberal reform, resulted
in the immediate improvement of work conditions in the industrialized European countries. Industrial workers demanded shorter
work weeks, higher pay, and safe(r) working conditions. These demands led to a need to revise acceptable industrial processes
with an emphasis, albeit primitive, on safer and more efficient production methods. An important component of workplace
safety, taken for granted today, is that workers will be safer if they actually understand what they're working on. Back in the
mid-1800's, however, technical education, as opposed to scientific education, was not formalized. At best, students obtained
some superficial knowledge of the relevant processes in chemistry courses. The operation of chemical processing equipment
distillation columns, filtration units, heat exchangers, boilers, etc.was taught in technical schools, not universities. The
students at these technical schools were taught how to operate the units, but they learned very little of the theory behind the
working of the units.
During the second and third quarters of the 19th century the chemical processing industry followed an unvarying formula: a
university-trained chemist discovered wonder compound X, or a new route for the synthesis of already-discovered compound
X; a team of mechanical engineers designed and built the plant to produce large quantities (maybe hundreds of pounds per
day or week) of compound X; factory workers with rudimentary training ran the equipment in the plant. When compound X was
easy to synthesize this formula worked well, but in the latter half of the 19th century chemists were discovering, synthesizing,
and otherwise stumbling upon new compounds that were difficult enough to make in milligram quantities, let alone tens or
hundreds of pounds at a time. Requiring mechanical engineers, who at the time received no chemistry education, to design
equipment for the large-scale production of increasingly complex chemicals and compounds became more than impractical; by
the 1880's it was apparent that, if the societal contributions of organic and inorganic chemistry were to keep pace with other
areas of science, something had to change in the transition from the laboratory to the mass market.

Emergence as a discipline
Although many of the amazing advances in chemical manufacture were taking place in central Europe, France and Germany
in particular, it was in the United Kingdom that the first steps were taken for formalize an education in "chemical engineering."
In 1887, an unknown industrial inspector from Manchester, England, George E. Davis decided to transfer his vast knowledge
from his years of inspecting chemical plants in the industrial region of England to the classroom. In the fall of 1887 he gave a
series of 12 lectures, later published in the Chemical Trade Journal.
The material in the course was very empirical, that is, based on observation rather than theory, but it had a
definite advantage in that, at last, an individual had put onto paper a series of articles on the operation of
some of the most important (and complicated) chemical processes of those days. The teaching of chemical
plant operation later became known as unit operations, a phrase coined in 1915 that survives to this day,
because Davis' lectures covered the operation of the units, or individual pieces of equipment, that made up
a chemical plant.

Prof. Lewis M.
Norton of MIT's
Chemistry
Department
introduced
chemical
engineering to
the United
States.

However, despite all of the activity in France and Germany, and despite all of George
George E. Davis
Davis' attempts to formalize the teaching of unit operations in the U.K., even with his
taught the first
publication of one of the first textbooks on chemical engineering in 1901 (A Handbook of
chemical
Chemical Engineering), it was in none of these three countries that chemical engineering
engineering
emerged as a discipline. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is
course. It was
given in
simply that, although George Davis aggressively promoted his book and the concept of
Manchester,
chemical engineering as a separate profession, his impact was minuscule. Basically, no
England in 1887.
one listened to him. This was truly unfortunatenot just for George Davis of course
because he was the first to recognize that the subject of unit operations should be developed and analyzed
as a whole rather than as a set of individual operations. The time was ripe for this unit operations philosophy
to emerge, and appropriately enough, it happened in the United States, which was well on its way to
becoming the world's technological leader.

At the end of the 19th century the competition between the U.K., France, Germany, and the United States
for industrial chemicals had become fierce. Only one year after Davis' 1887 lectures in Manchester,
Professor Lewis M. Norton of the Chemistry Department at MIT started teaching a course in chemical
engineering (although it wasn't yet called chemical engineering in the United States). The material in this
course was taken predominantly from Norton's notes on industrial chemical practice in Germany, which at that time had what
was arguably the most advanced chemical process industry in the world.
When Norton died in 1893 at the age of 39, Professor Frank H. Thorpe, who received his doctorate in chemistry that same year
from the University of Heidelberg, took responsibility for Norton's course. In 1898 Prof. Thorpe published what may be
considered the first textbook in chemical engineering, Outlines of Industrial Chemistry.The term "industrial chemistry" appearing

for the first time in Thorpe's book was an attempt to broadly describe the industrial processes applied in the production of
chemicals; this phrase would become strongly associated with chemical engineering over the next 50 years. It was not until
radical (i.e., fundamental) approaches to the analysis of chemical engineering problems were introduced in the mid-1950s at
the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin that "industrial chemistry" would be made distinct from the main
goals of "chemical engineering."
Although Norton and Thorpe were the pioneers of chemical engineering enthusiasm at MIT, it was Arthur A. Noyes and later
William H. Walker who brought to this discipline the respect it merited within the engineering curriculum. After a doctorate in
chemistry at the University of Leipzig in 1890, Noyes established a research laboratory in physical chemistry in 1903. William
Walker, who received a doctorate in chemistry in 1892 at the University of Gttingen, recognized the importance of such a
laboratory in chemical research, and in 1908 established a research laboratory for applied chemistry.
MIT is considered to be the first university in the world to offer a four-year curriculum in chemical engineering; the first students
began this course of study in 1888. However, as a separate department at MIT, Chemical Engineering did not become
independent until 1920. Up to that time it was in the Division of Applied Chemistry within the Department of Chemistry. In those
early days Walker was the main driving force in the Division, assisted by Warren K. "Doc" Lewis, who received his doctorate in
chemistry in 1908 at the University of Breslau. (By this time you may have noticed a theme: the people of this era who were to
become the best and brightest chemistry faculty in the United States went over to central Europe, usually Germany, to get their
graduate education. This trend continued through the first quarter of the 20th century.) In 1913 Noyes left MIT for Southern
California, transforming what was then Throop College to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). His strong belief in
chemical engineering as a discipline led to early emphasis of that program at Caltech. Other universities also followed the
example set by MIT. The University of Pennsylvania (1894), Tulane University (1894), The University of Michigan (1898), and
Tufts University (1898) all created four-year degree programs in chemical engineering, but always as part of their respective
Chemistry Departments.

Evolution of a profession
The training of chemical engineers was a subject of much debate in the first years of the 20th century. Milton C. Whitaker, a
professor of chemical engineering at Columbia strongly believed that fundamental training in physics, chemistry, and
mathematics had to be combined with a natural inclination towards engineering, together with an acquired knowledge of
engineering methods and practices. In other words, Whitaker felt that hands-on experience was necessary in the education
and training of chemical engineers, and this training had to be based on a thorough background in the natural sciences. This
idea, common in chemical engineering curricula today, was very controversial back in the early days of the discipline, primarily
because most of the educators were chemists, i.e., scientists, not engineers. Although Whitaker himself was a chemist by
training (Ph.D., 1902), he was one of the earliest "true" chemical engineers, who believed in the rapid separation of industrial
chemistry from chemical engineering. He passed on his views to his own graduate students, but these few were very much
voices in the wilderness with regard to chemical engineering education.
The establishment of a chemical engineering professional society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), in
1908 was intended to legitimize the professions of the converted chemists who were calling themselves chemical engineers.
At this time, however, students interested in chemical engineering were receiving their education within chemistry departments,
and it was by no means unanimous among chemistry faculty that anything other than pure and applied chemistry should be
taught. A number of well-known chemistry professors used the forum of their own professional society, the American Chemical
Society (ACS) to denounce the inclusion of chemical engineering in the education of chemists. It was felt by these individuals
that important technical breakthroughs were already being achieved in laboratories by researchers without engineering training,
so there was no reason to dilute a student's chemistry education. Today we look back on this view as very myopic, because
advances in the laboratory don't automatically translate to the production or manufacturing facilities, and understanding the
process of making a material is different from understanding the properties of the material itself; the missing link between the
lab and the plant is engineering. Whitaker tried many times to point this out, but his arguments fell on disbelieving ears. As a
result, by the time AIChE was formed in 1908, 500 chemical engineers had graduated in the United States, but only 40 were
willing to join a professional society that seemed to fly in the face of the real chemistry society, ACS. (All 500 of these chemical
engineers held bachelor of science or bachelor of engineering degrees. It wasn't until 1924 that the first Ph.D. degrees in
chemical engineering were awarded, at MIT.)
Thus, from its inception in 1888, to the introduction of several innovations in 1923, chemical engineering education primarily
consisted of the study of industrial chemistry, which amounted to learning the sequences of steps in chemical manufacture.

This approach did not allow much time for any in-depth discussion of the scientific principles involved, nor
did it allow students to recognize the commonality of the underlying physics among the different types of
chemical processes. It was the "introduction" of formal unit operations education during the 1920's (more
than 30 years after George E. Davis first proposed the idea over in the U.K.) by Walker, Lewis, and
McAdams at MIT that marked the beginning of America's distinctive system of chemical engineering
education.
Not coincidentally, this "new era" of chemical engineering occurred after the establishment of independent
chemical engineering departments in American universities. During the following three decadesup
through the mid 1950sthe development of the scienceof chemical engineering came about through the
application of physical chemistry to material and energy balances (which are based on straightforward,
fundamental concepts of mass and energy conservation), to thermodynamics, and to rates of chemical
reactions in industrial processes. This unit operations approach to chemical engineering education was
refined and strengthened over the years, but its central theme didn't vary.

Professor William
Walker of MIT
changed the way
chemical
engineering was
taught.

It wasn't until 1955 that a second important change came to chemical engineering, although its impact was felt within all
engineering disciplines. In 1952 the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) appointed a Committee on Evaluation
of Engineering Education, with the goal to evaluate the current state of engineering education and suggest new approaches to
the teaching of engineering. When the Committee's report was released in 1955 a long chapter in the history of engineering
education had closed. The report was only 36 pages long. It was deferential to the old tradition but firm in its recommendations
to the new generation of engineers:
The objective in engineering curricula will not be achieved by repair of patchwork curricula. It requires complete reconstruction of curricula
Some attention to engineering art and practice is necessary, but its high purpose is to illuminate the engineering science, analysis or
design, rather than to teach the art as engineering methodology.
It is the responsibility of the engineer to recognize those new developments in science and technology that have significant potentialities
in engineering. Moreover, the rate at which new scientific knowledge will be translated into engineering practice depends, in large measure,
upon the engineer's capacity to understand the new science as it develops.
Fortunately, some things do not change. Reactions, stresses, and deflections will still occur, and they will have to be calculated. Electrical
currents and fields will following unchanging laws. Energy transformation, thermodynamics, and heat flow will be as important to the next
generation of engineers as to the present one. Solids, fluids, and gases will continue to be handled, and their dynamics and chemical
behavior will have to be understood. The special properties of materials as dependent upon their internal structure will be even more
important to engineers a generation hence than they are today. These studies encompass the solid, unshifting foundation of en gineering
science upon which the engineering curriculum can be built with assurance and conviction.

It is interesting that, although the words above were written to include the four principal engineering disciplineschemical, civil,
electrical, and mechanicalmuch of what is said applies directly to the studies and practice of chemical engineers.
The central theme of the ASEE Committee's report had been taken to heart by five professorstwo at the University of
Minnesota and three at the University of Wisconsinseveral years before the ASEE Committee had published its report. In
1951, Neal Amundson, then an associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota, became head of
the Department. Educated as both a chemical engineer and a mathematician, Amundson realized that further insight into
chemical engineering problems lay in the analysis of chemical processes and phenomena based on a fundamental
understanding of these problems.

Rutherford
Aris helped
revolutionize
the science
and analysis
of chemical
engineering.

He used his expertise in applied mathematics, and later, computers, to solve increasingly difficult chemical
engineering problems. In 1955, Amundson met a brilliant applied mathematician, Rutherford "Gus" Aris, at
Cambridge University in England, and convinced him to turn his attention to the complex problems in chemical
engineering that were beginning to interest Amundson himself. To someone of Aris' intellect, the lack of a
chemical engineering education was a minor hindrance, and within a year of meeting Amundson, Rutherford
Aris was a professor of chemical engineering at Minnesota, and the author of the first book on a fundamental
treatment of chemical engineering fluid dynamics (the study of how gases and liquids flow). Together,
Amundson and Aris forged a department of chemical engineering at Minnesota that is dominant to this day.

Meanwhile, a second major revolution was taking place at the University of Wisconsin. Professors Bird,
Stewart, and Lightfoot prepared a set of notes in 1957, based on their individual research efforts of the previous
decade, offering a new approach to the analysis of chemical engineering unit problems. The main lesson
imparted by these three professors is that there is a strong unifying backbone to seemingly different unit
operations, through the framework of a relatively simple set of equations describing how fluids flow, heat is transported, and
chemical constituents move within a fluid. The necessity for analyzing each unit or piece of processing equipment separately
was removed, allowing students to learn the common features of this new transport phenomena. The collective teaching of this
subject by Profs. Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot culminated in a book of the same name, Transport Phenomena, published in
1960. It is a tribute to their foresight and collective wisdom that this text has been a staple of most chemical engineering

programs for over 40 years; and it was not until 2002 that the authors found it necessary to bring out a revised version as a
second edition.
Many textbooks have been written on the basic areas of chemical engineeringchemical reaction kinetics and reactor design,
thermodynamics, transport phenomena, unit operations, and control theoryin the 45 years following ASEE's report, and these
all follow the philosophy espoused in the report and put into action by the pioneering chemical engineering educators of the
1950s.

Diverse career paths

We've seen how chemical engineering emerged as a separate profession and the philosophies behind chemical engineering
education throughout the 20th century. Now we need to look at the central issue: what do chemical engineers do with their
degrees? What jobs are open to chemical engineers? This has already been alluded to in the discussion at the beginning of
this section, but now we'll take a somewhat closer look.
For more than 80 years of the profession's existence, up to approximately 1980, this question was easy to answer.
Overwhelmingly, a person with a chemical engineering degree would go to work in the petroleum, chemical, or food processing
industries. To be sure, there were important exceptions to this sweeping statement. For example, Andy Grove earned B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering before heading off to found Intel. But by and large, before 1980 if you
graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering you worked to turn crude oil, oil shale, and coal into useful fuels,
lubricants, and paving materials; or you took petroleum-derived compounds and turned them into useful herbicides, pesticides,
plastics, and synthetic fabrics; or you helped put mass quantities of foodstuffs on America's shelves. These all have been, and
continue to be extremely important segments of the overall manufacturing industry, and the need for chemical engineers in
these fields will never disappear.
Over the past 20 years, however, more professional doors have been opened to chemical engineers. During the 1970's, gifted
educators and laboratory researchers recognized that chemical engineers had much to contribute to disciples outside of
traditional chemical engineering practice, i.e., petroleum, chemicals, and food. Areas such as biochemical and biomedical
sciences, polymer science, microelectronics fabrication, environmental engineering, meteorology, and microbiology all became
fertile ground for interdisciplinary collaboration. The impetus for these collaborations was provided in large part by the National
Science Foundation, which recognized the importance of interdisciplinary education and research. Faculty brought more and
more of their interdisciplinary research into the chemical engineering curriculum, and non-mainstream companies recognized
the need for chemical engineering graduates in their workforce.
Today, chemical engineers work in a wide array of different fields, from anthropogenic emission controls to zeolyte catalyst
design. A fascinating feature of chemical engineering at the beginning of the new millennium is not just the diversity of
disciplines, but also the diversity of scale. Chemical engineers design, build, and analyze processes that range in size from
Angstroms (10-9 inch) to kilometers (104 inch), and in time from picoseconds (10-12 seconds) to years (104seconds). These
studies include atomic scale computers, immobilized cell reactors, full-scale chemical plants, and the ocean and atmosphere.
All of the different professions occupied by chemical engineers can be loosely grouped into several broad categories.

Biotechnology and biomedicine: Advances in molecular biology and medicine have spawned new technologies and
opportunities for chemical engineers. Chemical engineers have made contributions to human health through the design
and manufacture of artificial organs, diagnostic tests, and therapeutic drugs. In agriculture, the manufacture of human
and veterinary pharmaceuticals, and the scale-up of plant cell-culture techniques have been the result of breakthroughs
by chemical engineers. Other contributions include the use of genetically engineered systems for the synthesis of
chemicals and the biological treatment of waste. Chemical engineers have constructed mathematical models of
fundamental biological interactions, investigated interfacial phenomena important to engineering design in living
systems, expanded the scope of process engineering into biological systems, and conducted engineering analyses of
whole-organ or whole-body systems.
Electronic, photonic, and recording materials and devices: The information technologies on which modern society
depends would not be possible without integrated circuits, optical fibers, magnetic media, devices for electrical
interconnection, and photovoltaics. Chemical processes are the means by which the physical properties and structural
features of these materials and devices are established and tailored. Chemical engineers now play an important role
in process design, optimization, and control within the electronics industry. Their contributions to this field include
process integration, reactor design and engineering, ultrapurification, materials synthesis and processing, thin film
deposition, mathematical modeling, chemical dynamics, and process design and control for safety and environmental
protection.
Polymers, ceramics, and composites: Chemical engineers have long been involved in materials science and
engineering. This involvement has steadily increased as new materials have been developed whose properties depend
strong on their microstructure and processing history. Chemical engineers continue to probe the nature of

microstructure, that is, what the material looks like at the microscopic level, to learn how it forms in materials and what
factors are involved in controlling it. This study has provided a new fusion between the traditionally separate areas of
materials synthesis and materials processing. Chemical engineers also bring new approaches to the problems of
fabricating and repairing complex materials systems.
Energy conversion: Energy, minerals, and metals are three basic building blocks of our technological society.
Chemical engineering has long been a part of the technologies used to convert natural resources into energy and
useful products. The expertise of chemical engineers is needed more than ever to make progress on problems such
as enhanced oil recovery, shale oil production, coal conversion, electrochemical energy storage, solar power, pollution
controls, fuel cells, and turning waste into a useful source of energy and metals. Significant challenges exist in in
situ processing, solids processing, developing better separations, finding better materials for use in energy and mineral
applications, minimizing pollutant formation in combustion processes, and advancing the knowledge base for process
design and scale up.
Environmental protection, process safety, and hazardous waste management: Chemical engineers are helping
society to face important challenges associated with the imperative to protect and improve the environment. These
challenges include designing inherently safer and less polluting plants and processes, improving air quality through
research on combustion and factors leading to air pollution, managing hazardous wastes responsibly, developing new
approaches to the study of and control of pollutants in the environment, and assessing and managing chemical risks
to human health or to the environment.
Process and control engineering: Computers and computational methods have advanced to the point where they
are having a significant impact on the way in which chemical engineers can approach problems in design, control, and
operations. The computer's ability to handle more complex mathematics and to permit the exhaustive solution of
detailed models allow chemical engineers to model process physics and chemistry from the molecular scale to the
planet scale, to construct models that incorporate all relevant phenomena of a process, and to design, control, and
optimize more on the basis of computed theoretical predictions and less on empiricism. A major chemical engineering
contribution to the area of process control has been the design of control systems that "learn" the process over time.
This intelligent process control approach offers tremendous flexibility for application to new systems and processes.
Surfaces, interfaces, and microstructures: Surfaces, interfaces, and microstructures are key to an improved
understanding of fluid-solid chemical reactions, electrochemistry and corrosion, processes for the manufacture of
microcircuits, colloids and surfactants, advanced ceramics and cements, and membranes. Chemical engineers use
their knowledge of thermodynamics, transport phenomena, kinetics, and process modeling to explore a variety of these
research frontiers. These include the development of molecular-level structure-property relations for guiding the
production of materials with specified physical and chemical surface properties; the development of an improved
understanding of elementary chemical and physical transformations occurring at phase boundaries; and the integration
of fundamental knowledge to achieve realistic models of process operation that can be used for process design and
evaluation.

What comes next

Chemical engineers work in too many different fields to possibly cover all of them in the time we have. In the remaining six
topics we will break the discipline into three areas: (1) the environment, (2) technology, and (3) biological systems. For each of
these three areas we'll use two topics to look in more depth at some important problems, their impact on society, the role of the
chemical engineer, and notable successes and notable failures. Along the way we'll find that, although these fields appear
extremely different from one another, there is a relatively small set of underlying principles that governing the way things
behave. We'll see, for example, that the process that gives us hazy days in Rocky Mountain National Park also lets us produce
an important paint pigment; and that the basic process for filtering stream water while camping is the same as that used to help
kidney patients undergo dialysis; and that the process for detecting the presence of a skunk is the same as that which allows
a campfire to burn; and that the same process that allows us to put a very thin coating of gold on a cheap ring allows us to
produce state of the art semiconductor processors. In short, by recognizing that physical processes have to obey relatively
simple laws, we can turn our attention to systems of ever-increasing complexity, and in doing so, address issues of foremost
importance to society.

Bibliography
For anyone interested in reading more about the history of chemical engineering's birth, evolution, and rise, there are several
authoritative books on the subject.
1. J.-C. Guedon, in History of Chemical Engineering, edited by W.F. Furter, Advances in Chemistry Series 190, American
Chemical Society, Washington, DC (1980).

2. D.C. Freshwater, in History of Chemical Engineering, edited by W.F. Furter, Advances in Chemistry Series 190, p. 97,
American Chemical Society, Washington, DC (1980).
3. G. Astarita, in History of Chemical Engineering, edited by W.F. Furter, Advances in Chemistry Series 190, p. 205,
American Chemical Society, Washington, DC (1980).
4. J.T. Davies, in History of Chemical Engineering, edited by W.F. Furter, Advances in Chemistry Series 190, p. 15,
American Chemical Society, Washington, DC (1980).
5. H.C. Weber, The Improbable Achievement: Chemical Engineering at MIT, MIT, Cambridge, MA (1980).
6. T.S. Reynolds, Seventy-five Years of Progress, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, New York (1983).
7. O.A. Hougen, Fifty years of Chemical Engineering Education in the United States, printed by the Tokyo Institute of
Technology (1957).
8. A.D. Little, Twenty-five Years of Chemical Engineering Progress, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, New York
(1933).