50 Fun Facts About Chemical Engineering

Which supermodel won a chemical engineering scholarship to Northwestern but left after one quarter to model?

Cindy Crawford had graduated as valedictorian of DeKalb High School in Illinois in 1984. Her first cover, shot in her junior year there, was for a local weekly.

Which actor who played Soviet boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV holds a master's degree in chemical engineering?

Dolph Lundgren earned the master's at the University of Sydney in 1982, after a first degree at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Which drug did engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau scale up in deep fermentation tanks for Pfizer in World War II?

Penicillin reached large-scale production through her deep-tank fermentation of the mould. In 1945 she became the first woman accepted as an active member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Which diaper brand did chemical engineer Victor Mills invent after tiring of changing his grandchild's cloth ones?

Pampers was the world's first widely marketed disposable diaper. Mills also improved the production of Ivory soap and oversaw the development of Pringles for Procter & Gamble.

Which material, later used to seal uranium pipes in the Manhattan Project, did Roy Plunkett find by accident in 1938?

Teflon appeared as a whitish powder inside a pressurised gas cylinder that seemed to have emptied itself. Chemists found the waxy material oddly slippery, which is why it now lines frying pans.

Which That '70s Show star studied biochemical engineering at Iowa, hoping to cure his twin brother's heart condition?

Ashton Kutcher chose the major because his fraternal twin, Michael, had needed a heart transplant as a child. A model scout approached him in an Iowa City bar during his time there.

Which life-saving treatment did Dutch doctor Willem Kolff pioneer in 1943 with a machine built from sausage casings?

Dialysis cleans the blood by letting waste pass through a thin membrane, here the sausage casing. Kolff's machine, also made of juice cans and car parts, first saved a patient in 1945.

Which astronaut, the first African American woman in space, left Stanford with a degree in chemical engineering?

Mae Jemison entered Stanford at 16, later qualified as a doctor at Cornell, and flew aboard the shuttle Endeavour in 1992.

Which fibre from Wallace Carothers's lab debuted in toothbrush bristles in 1938, then became a hit in stockings?

Nylon stockings sold 64 million pairs in their first year on the market. The first 4,000 pairs offered to the public, in Wilmington, Delaware, were gone within three hours.

Which gas, squeezed until it acts partly like a liquid, do decaf producers use to wash caffeine out of coffee beans?

Carbon dioxide held above its critical point becomes a supercritical fluid, midway between a gas and a liquid, which dissolves the caffeine. Kurt Zosel of the Max Planck Institute developed the method.

Which metal, also prized in jewellery, is the most active catalyst in the honeycomb of a car's catalytic converter?

Platinum coats a ceramic core inside the converter, where it helps turn poisonous exhaust gases and unburned fuel into less harmful ones. Its high cost is one reason it does not suit every design.

Which Indian city suffered the world's worst industrial disaster in 1984 when a pesticide plant leaked toxic gas?

Bhopal saw more than 500,000 people exposed to methyl isocyanate, a gas about twice as dense as air that sank toward the ground. Union Carbide paid $470 million in 1989 to settle the claims.

Which separation process, also used to make whisky and rum, splits crude oil into fuels by their boiling points?

Distillation works because each hydrocarbon boils at a different temperature, so outlets at intervals up a refinery column draw off different fuels. Before World War II most American refineries did little else.

Which compound, the basis of most nitrogen fertilizers, does the Haber–Bosch process make from air and natural gas?

Ammonia made this way accounts for 1–2% of the world's energy use. Fritz Haber won a Nobel Prize for the chemistry in 1918, and Carl Bosch won one in 1931 for the high-pressure engineering.

Which microorganism do brewers and biofuel plants alike rely on to turn sugar into ethanol in fermentation tanks?

Yeast carries out the conversion without oxygen, which is why fermentation counts as an anaerobic process. Louis Pasteur proved that living cells, rather than a chemical catalyst, do the work.

Which process, patented by Charles Goodyear in 1844, made natural rubber tough enough for tyres and shoe soles?

Vulcanization was named after Vulcan, the Roman god linked with heat and volcanoes, at the suggestion of a friend of Goodyear's English rival. It works by forming cross-links between the rubber's long chains.

Which term describes fluids such as ketchup, which runs when shaken, and cornstarch paste, which stiffens when struck?

Non-Newtonian fluids change how easily they flow when a force is applied, unlike water. Custard, toothpaste, paint, blood and shampoo all belong to the group.

Which fluid property, measured in pascal-seconds or poise, explains why honey pours far more slowly than water?

Viscosity is often quoted in poise, a unit named after Jean Poiseuille, a French physiologist who studied how blood flows through narrow tubes.

Which phase change does freeze-drying rely on to remove frozen water from instant coffee and astronaut meals?

Sublimation turns ice straight into vapour without melting it, which happens once the frozen food is put under low pressure. Freeze-dried meals became a staple of astronaut and military rations.

Which gas, the main ingredient of natural gas, is chilled to about −162 °C so tankers can carry it as a liquid?

Methane cooled into liquefied natural gas takes up about 1/600th of the space it fills as a gas, which is what makes shipping it across oceans worthwhile.

Which yellow-green gas, used to disinfect pools and make PVC, do factories produce by passing electricity through brine?

Chlorine leaves the brine cell alongside hydrogen and caustic soda, two more products industry wants. The method first worked on a commercial scale some 90 years after the reaction was seen in 1800.

Which law of thermodynamics, the basis of every plant energy balance, says energy can be neither created nor destroyed?

First law reasoning lets engineers account for all the heat and work crossing a reactor's boundary. It is the principle of conservation of energy applied to thermodynamic processes.

Which General Electric chief executive, in charge from 1981 to 2001, held a PhD in chemical engineering from Illinois?

Jack Welch joined GE in 1960 as a junior chemical engineer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and nearly quit a year later over a small raise. He went on to become its youngest chairman.

Which director of It's a Wonderful Life graduated in chemical engineering from the college now known as Caltech?

Frank Capra paid his way through college by playing banjo in nightclubs and cleaning engines at a power plant. After leaving Hollywood he made educational science films with his old university.

Which plastic, the most commonly produced of all, was found by accident at an ICI works in Northwich, England, in 1933?

Polyethylene took two more years to tame. ICI chemist Michael Perrin turned the 1933 fluke into a repeatable high-pressure recipe in 1935, and industrial production began in 1939.

Which chemical company built and ran the Hanford plutonium works for the Manhattan Project without taking a profit?

DuPont insisted on receiving no payment, so that it could not be labelled a merchant of death as it had been after World War I. The Army chose the firm for its record of building explosives plants.

Which metal's smelting process did Charles Hall and Paul Héroult, both born in 1863, discover independently in 1886?

Aluminium is freed by passing electricity through its oxide dissolved in molten cryolite. Hall's cheap method made it the first metal to come into widespread use since iron.

Which chemical, known in antiquity as oil of vitriol, is made by the contact process and used mostly for fertilizer?

Sulfuric acid output was long treated as a gauge of a nation's industrial strength. The contact process that makes it was patented in 1831 by a British vinegar merchant, Peregrine Phillips.

Which refinery process, patented by Russia's Vladimir Shukhov in 1891, breaks long hydrocarbon chains into shorter ones?

Cracking lets a refinery turn the heavy, low-value end of a barrel of oil into smaller, more useful molecules such as those in gasoline. Shukhov's 1891 patent was one of the first for a thermal version.

Which membrane process, best known for making drinking water from seawater, forces water through under high pressure?

Reverse osmosis applies enough pressure to overcome water's natural tendency to flow toward the saltier side of a membrane. The salt stays behind on the pressurised side.

Which measure of disorder in a system did Rudolf Clausius name in 1865 from a Greek word for transformation?

Entropy began as Clausius's way of explaining the usable heat that is always lost when work is done, for example to friction. He first called it transformation-content.

Which process, described by physiologist Adolf Fick's laws of 1855, moves molecules from high to low concentration?

Diffusion comes from the random motion of the molecules themselves, with no pumping needed. Fick based his laws largely on the results of experiments.

Which dimensionless quantity, named after a Belfast-born engineer, predicts whether pipe flow is smooth or turbulent?

Reynolds number was introduced by George Stokes in 1851 and only got its present name in 1908. Engineers also use it to scale results from a wind-tunnel model up to a full-size aircraft.

Which plant equipment, with a car radiator as its classic example, usually takes shell-and-tube form in oil refineries?

Heat exchanger designs with a bundle of tubes inside a large shell are the most common in refineries. One fluid runs through the tubes while the other flows over them, so the two never mix.

Which chemist, guillotined in the French Revolution, confirmed the conservation of mass behind every material balance?

Antoine Lavoisier showed by careful weighing that matter may change its form while its mass stays the same. He was condemned over his share in a tax-collecting company, not over his science.

Which Swedish chemist's 1889 equation tells engineers how much faster a reaction runs as the temperature rises?

Svante Arrhenius became the first Swedish Nobel laureate in 1903. He was also the first to estimate how far a build-up of greenhouse gas in the air would warm the Earth.

Which Yale professor gave his name to the free energy that shows how much useful work a chemical reaction can deliver?

Josiah Willard Gibbs was awarded the first American doctorate in engineering, in 1863. He then spent almost his whole career at the same university, as professor of mathematical physics.

Which gas law, formulated by an English chemist in the early 1800s, explains why soda fizzes when the bottle is opened?

Henry's law says the amount of gas a liquid can hold is proportional to the pressure of that gas above it. Opening the bottle drops the pressure, so the dissolved gas escapes as bubbles.

Which equation, written PV = nRT, combines the older findings of Boyle, Charles and Avogadro into a single rule?

Ideal gas law predictions are a good approximation for many gases under many conditions, though they have their limits. Émile Clapeyron first stated the equation in 1834.

Which future president of Israel devised a bacterial process that made acetone for British explosives in World War I?

Chaim Weizmann is considered the father of industrial fermentation. His acetone was vital for making cordite, the propellant that the British war industry depended on.

Which Cornell-trained engineer played a major role in developing both leaded gasoline and the first CFC refrigerants?

Thomas Midgley worked for General Motors, and both of his inventions were later banned for the harm they did to health and the environment. He insisted in public that leaded fuel posed no hazard.

Which university introduced the first four-year chemical engineering degree programme in 1888, taught by Lewis Norton?

MIT went on to grant the world's first bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering in 1891. Norton, who created the programme, died only two years after that, in his thirties.

In which English city did George E. Davis, seen as chemical engineering's founding father, give his famous lectures?

Manchester was then the main centre of Britain's chemical industry. Davis saw that very different factories had broad features in common, and wrote an influential guide to the new subject.

Which term did Arthur D. Little introduce for basic process steps such as filtration, evaporation and crystallization?

Unit operations stress how alike seemingly different factories are, so a lesson learned about drying in one industry carries over to another. The idea dominated university courses until the 1960s.

Which reference work, first published in 1934, is nicknamed The Chemical Engineer's Bible?

Perry's Handbook is named after John H. Perry, the physical chemist and chemical engineer who edited the first edition. Many engineers shorten the title to a single word, his surname.

Which Caltech chemical engineer won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using directed evolution to engineer enzymes?

Frances Arnold began in mechanical engineering, which she called the easiest way into Princeton at the time. In 2016 she became the first woman to win the Millennium Technology Prize.

Which chemical engineer and drug-delivery pioneer helped found more than 40 biotech firms, Moderna among them?

Robert Langer has written more than 1,600 scientific papers and ranks among the most cited researchers in any field. Much of his work is on drug delivery systems and tissue engineering.

Which term, from Greek for 'no change on boiling', names a mixture like 95.6% ethanol in water that boils unchanged?

Azeotrope mixtures give off vapour with the same make-up as the liquid, so simple boiling cannot purify alcohol beyond about 96%. English chemists John Wade and Richard Merriman coined the word in 1911.

Which graphical method, published by two engineers in 1925, counts the theoretical trays a separation column needs?

McCabe–Thiele diagrams are commonly used to model the separation of two liquids, with each step drawn on the graph standing for one tray. Warren McCabe and Ernest Thiele published the method in 1925.

Which reactor type, pioneered by Fritz Winkler in 1920s Germany, suspends solid particles in a rising stream of gas?

Fluidized bed reactors make a powder behave as though it were a liquid, which mixes it thoroughly with the gas. Standard Oil of New Jersey built one of the first American units at Baton Rouge in 1942.