George E. Davis (1850-1907) is regarded as the founding father of the discipline of Chemical Engineering.


Davis identified broad features in common to all chemical factories and wrote the influential A Handbook of Chemical Engineering. He also published a famous lecture series of 12 lectures, given in 1888 at Manchester Technical School (which became UMIST). These lectures defined Chemical Engineering as a discipline.


His lectures were criticized for being common place know-how since it was designed around operating practices used by British chemical industries. At this time, however, in the United States, this information helped initiate new thinking in the Chemical Industry, as well as spark Chemical Engineering degree programmes at several universities in the US.


Davis was born at Eton on 27 July 1850, the eldest son of George Davis a bookseller. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a local bookbinder but he abandoned this trade after two years to pursue his interest in chemistry. Davis studied at the Slough Mechanics Institute while working at the local gas works, and then spend a year studying at Royal School of Mines in London (now part of Imperial College, London) before leaving to work in the chemical industry around Manchester, which at the time was the main centre of the chemical industry in the UK. He worked as a chemist at Brearley and Sons for three years. He also worked as an inspector for the Alkali Act of 1863, a very early piece of environmental legislation that required soda manufacturers to reduce the amount of gaseous hydrochloric acid released to the atmosphere from their factories. In 1872 he was engaged as manager at the Lichfield Chemical Company in Staffordshire. In this job his capacity for innovation flourished. His works included what was at the time the tallest chimney in the UK, with a height of more than 200 feet.


Davis was also instrumental in the formation of the Society of Chemical Industry (1881), which he had wanted to name the Society of Chemical Engineering.

In the entrance to Jackson's Mill, the building that houses the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Sciences, University of Manchester, there is a display and memorial to Davis. The 'George E. Davis Medal of the Institution of Chemical Engineers is named in his honour.


Robert H. Perry (1924-1978) was the second editor of the popular reference work "Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook", originally edited by his father, John H. Perry, with the first edition published in 1934. He taught at the University of Oklahoma from 1958 to 1964, and was department director of Chemical Engineering from 1961 to 1963. He supervised the production of the 4th and 5th editions in 1963 and 1973, but was killed in an automobile accident in 1978 before the 6th edition could be published. He was also the PhD adviser of the current editor of Perry's Handbook, Don Green.


Octave Levenspiel is an Emeritus professor of chemical engineering at Oregon State University. He is recognized by the chemical engineering community as the father of chemical reaction engineering, a branch of chemical engineering studying the application of chemical reaction kinetics to the design of chemical reactors.


He was born in Shanghai, China, in 1926, where he attended a German grade school, an English high school and a French university. He studied at U. C. Berkeley and at Oregon State University where he received a Ph.D. in 1952.


He is the originator of the Octave Levenspiel's fountain, which is a special kind of a diffusion machine.


Books

All of Levenspiel's books indicated with a * have been translated to several other languages.

• Chemical Reaction Engineering*

• The Chemical Reactor Omnibook*

• Fluidization Engineering (coauthored)*

• Engineering Flow and Heat Exchange*

• Understanding Engineering Thermo*

• Rambling Through Science and Technology


Awards

• R.H. Wilhelm award (AIChE)

• W.K. Lewis award (AIChE)

• Founders award with gold medal (AIChE)

• ChE Lectureship award (ASEE)

• P.V. Danckwerts award (IChE)

• Honorary doctorates from France, Serbia, and the Colorado School of Mines

• Elected into the National Academy of Engineering (2000)

• Amundson award (ISCRE/NASCRE) (2001)


John Metcalfe Coulson, born 1910, died 1990, was a UK chemical engineering academic particularly known for co-writing a textbook on chemical engineering with Jack Richardson (published in 1954), which became an established series of texts now known as Coulson & Richardson's Chemical Engineering. He did his first degree at Cambridge, then a postgraduate course in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College followed by research, achieving a PhD in 1935. He joined the academic staff, achieving the status of Reader. In 1954 he became the first head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Newcastle University, where he remained until his retirement in 1975. He was awarded the George E. Davis Medal of the Institution of Chemical Engineers in 1973.


John Francis Richardson, is always known as Jack, born 1920, is a UK chemical engineering academic, particularly known for co-writing a textbook on chemical engineering with


John Coulson (published in 1954), which became an established series of texts now known as Coulson & Richardson's Chemical Engineering. He continued editing the series after the death of the latter in 1990. He achieved a BSc (Eng) in chemical engineering at Imperial College, London, in 1941 and a PhD at the same institution in 1949. He joined the academic staff and rose to Senior Lecturer. In 1960 he was appointed Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at University College Swansea, where he remained till his retirement in 1987. In 1969 he was awarded the Arnold Greene Medal of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, and he was its President from 1975 to 1976.

His research was mainly concerned with multi-phase flow and rheology.


Bosch was born in Cologne. He studied at the Technical College of Charlottenburg (today the Technical University of Berlin) and the University of Leipzig from 1892-1898. In 1899 he started to work at BASF. From 1908 until 1913 developed the Haber-Bosch process together with Fritz Haber. After World War I he was working on petrol and methanol synthesis via high pressure chemistry. In 1925 Bosch was one of the founders of IG Farben and from 1935 chairman of the board of directors. He receives the Siemens-Ring in 1924 for his own contributions to applied research and his patronate support to basic research. In 1931 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Friedrich Bergius for the introduction of high pressure chemistry. He died in Heidelberg.


He was also an amateur astronomer and the asteroid 7414 Bosch was named in his honour.


What celebrities tell about Chemical Engineering?

· Cindy Crawford is noted supermodel who was valedictorian in her high school and had a full chemical engineering scholarship at Northwestern University. Spent a semester there before leaving for New York and a modeling career.

· Sharon Stone, who is known to have one of the highest IQ's (154) of females the film industry, told Playboy magazine (in reference to her high school days): "I had a high IQ and was predisposed to do technical things, science, engineering, math. I'm sure a career as a chemical engineer would have been appropriate for me, though my personality is more fitting for a lawyer."