The last thesis he has graded sits on the lower shelf of a bookcase in Herman Pines` spartan office at Northwestern University`s Technological Institute. Also near at hand are some of the things held dear by the 88-year- old professor emeritus-the books and technical journals he has written and edited, prizes and awards he has won as a research chemist during a long and productive career that has generated 145 patents.
”It`s about time to let the younger people do the work now,” Pines says in his thick Polish accent. He is a diminutive man, Old Worldly in manners and still radiating the energy and curiosity of a man half his age. When asked about his most historically significant accomplishment, he goes scurrying through his file cabinets to search out the few tidbits of literature that deal with it. For all the honors he has won, he has never been formally recognized for this particular achievement, a feat for which he deserves the gratitude of perhaps every democracy in the world.
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One of his earliest patents, awarded jointly to him and a fellow scientist, Vladimir Ipatieff, was for a chemical process the two men had discovered and which, by greatly aiding the Royal Air Force against the Luftwaffe during the desperate aerial Battle of Britain that began 50 years ago, effectively shot down Hitler`s hopes of conquering England.
Indeed, one of the things Pines holds dearest is an old black-and-white photograph, now hanging on his office wall, of the handsome and courtly Ipatieff. Like Pines, Ipatieff (pronounced ee-PAH-tee-uff) was an immigrant and a research chemist. Older than Pines, Ipatieff came to the United States in his later years and was already world-renowned for his brilliant work in chemical research. He was a minor Russian noble and ex-general in the tsar`s army who managed to become a key official in Lenin`s Communist regime before he had to flee for his life in 1930 from Lenin`s successor, Joseph Stalin.
In 1930 Pines was a 28-year-old doctoral student at the University of Chicago, struggling to support his wife and his studies by working in the research department of a small Chicago company, Universal Oil Products. One day in September of that year UOP officials told Pines and his fellow workers to clean up their labs in the company`s research facility in suburban McCook: A very important visitor was coming.
The visitor turned out to be the brilliant, magisterial, 63-year-old Ipatieff, who, having fled Russia with his wife a few months earlier, had just been hired by UOP to head a research program, even though he couldn`t speak a word of English.
Pines was a recent immigrant himself, having arrived in Chicago in 1928 after leaving his native Poland as a youth and then doing undergraduate studies in France, an opportunity he could not obtain in Poland because he was a Jew. Having spoken some Russian as a child in Lodz, Poland, and now fluent in French-the two languages Ipatieff was most comfortable with-he and Ipatieff were soon working closely together.
”At that time,” Pines recalls, ”there was a big concern about the world`s oil reserves. The great oil fields in Saudi Arabia and Texas had not been discovered, and the known reserves in the world were running out fast. Every industrial country in the world was worried about it, and there was much interest in the possible catalytic conversion of coal to motor fuel.”
Ipatieff was perhaps the world`s leading authority in the catalysis of hydrocarbons, and his coming was a great coup both for UOP and for America. And for Herman Pines.
”He was my mentor, my boss, my colleague and my substitute father all at once,” Pines says. ”I was assigned to his group in the lab. I was with him from the day he arrived at UOP until the day I buried him in 1952. We were as close as fascinated with a process Pines already was experimenting with when the Russian arrived at UOP. ”I recounted to Ipatieff my observation pertaining to the treatment of cracked (refined) gasoline with sulfuric acid,” Pines says. ”He was apparently impressed with what I told him because he decided that we extend this study.”
Within a year and a half, the two men discovered the alkylation of alkanes, a revolutionary process that allowed oil refineries, using a catalyst, to convert waste gases into high-octane gasoline. Some 60 years later, the process discovered by Ipatieff and Pines is still being used as the basis for the production of high-octane, lead-free gasolines needed to meet government environmental protection standards.
In the ominous days of the 1930s, however, their work had a different-and more urgent-kind of impact. As soon as Ipatieff and Pines came up with their discovery, UOP gave their data to another team of scientists, who began to explore various applications of the new gasoline and devise means of mass production. One of the applications was to create 100-octane fuel for military aircraft, says Dr. Herman Bloch, then a young chemist hired by UOP in 1936 and immediately assigned to the high-octane project and now, after retiring from UOP in 1977, a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Because of its military application, the high-octane project was made top secret by the U.S. government, Bloch says.
By 1939, when UOP had devised methods to produce the high-octane gasoline in large quantities, Hitler was sending his armies into Poland and World War II had began. In the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Luftwaffe, then the largest and most advanced military air force in the world, destroyed the small Polish air force in a matter of hours.
In the spring of 1940 the Luftwaffe, seemingly invincible, quickly and easily won superiority in the air during the invasions of Norway, Belgium, Holland and France and greatly aided the German military machine in overrunning most of Western Europe in a mere six weeks. When the French government capitulated to the Germans on June 25, 1940, Hitler immediately turned his eyes to England as his next conquest.
Preparing for a full-scale invasion of the British Isles, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to carry out a singular mission: Destroy Britain`s Royal Air Force by shooting its planes out of the sky and bombing its airfields and aircraft factories into rubble.
Buoyed by their spectacular lightning-quick victories of the previous nine months, the Germans felt sure they could subdue the RAF within 10 days. That done, they could then launch invasion boats across the English Channel. Hitler knew that Britain`s superior navy, without an air force to protect it, would be easy pickings for German dive bombers and be virtually helpless to stop the cross-channel invasion. He penciled in a tentative final assault on England for the autumn of 1940.
Such a plan looked fairly attainable for Hitler in those grim days. The Germans assembled an armada of nearly 3,000 airplanes, roughly half of them bombers and the other half fighters to provide cover for the bombers. The best Britain could muster in its defense was 700 fighter aircraft. In addition to their vastly superior numerical advantage, most of the German pilots were already seasoned veterans; only a few of the British pilots had seen combat. And though the British fighter squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes were magnificent machines, they were not as fast as their most dangerous counterparts, the German Messerschmitt 109 fighter planes.
July 10, 1940, marked the opening of the desperate struggle between British and German pilots for supremacy over the British skies. It was soon dubbed ”The Battle of Britain,” and the rest of the world looked on transfixed as history hung in the balance. The crucial factor was how the 700 British warplanes would fare against seemingly insurmountable odds.
But what Hitler and his pilots didn`t reckon with was the work that two immigrant research chemists had done in Chicago just a year ot two earlier.
Early in the war, British and American scientists and military men had been informally collaborating on strategies to beat the German military machine. Just before the start of the Battle of Britain, the U.S. began manufacturing and shipping 100-octane aircraft fuel to the RAF. It also gave the British the technical data needed to produce the fuel themselves.