2003 Human Genome

The Human Genome Project announces completion of the DNA reference sequence of Homo sapiens.

1993 Mosaic Browser

Development of the Mosaic browser at the University of Illinois makes WWW available for general use, Marc Andreessen, U.S.

1939 - 1945 - World War II

World War II begins when Germany invades Poland August 31, 1939 and Ends when the Emperor of Japan foramlly surrenders aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. 40 million people were killed worldwide.

1914 - 1918 WW I

In just 4 years, 8.5 million people died in the war to end all wars.

1969 Apollo 11 lans on the moon

Neil Armstrong takes "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

1943 - Penicillin Production

The University of Wisconsin obtained a patent for making penicillin, and chemical engineers scaled-up the process, making 1000 times as much - just in time to use it to fight infections in wounded soldiers. Shown here are vats: 10,000 gallons scaled up from 50 gallons in under three years.

1942 – Nuclear Reactor, Richland

DuPont was asked to run the plant to make plutonium (in Richland , WA ). They did so, often having to design processes before the intermediates were made. At the end of the war, the DuPont engineers designed tanks in which to store the wastes from the process. They designed them with a 25 year lifetime, saying that the government had 25 years to figure out what to do with the waste. Naturally, the government did little, and 25 years later the first tank leaked. Now, DuPont is spending millions of dollars a year in legal fees over possible radiation damage. Their profit from running Hanford was one dollar. It’s a good deal for taxpayers.

1909 Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exhibition

Mt. Rainier is framed by the Court of Honor, the steps of water called the Cascades, and Geyser Basin (now Drumheller Fountain).

1914 Smith Tower, 42 stories and 522 feet tall opens to the public on July 4th.

1915 Snoqualmie Pass Highway opens

1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapses

1951 State ferry system begins

In 1951 the Puget Sound Navigation Company sold most of its terminal facilities and ferries for $5 Million to the new Washington Toll Bridge Authority, now known as Washington State Ferries (WSF).

1980 Mt. St. Helens erupts

On May 18, 1980, Mt. St. Helens was rocked by an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale.

1977 Seattle Slew wins the Triple Crown

Seattle Slew with jockey Jean Cruguet won the Kentucky Derby by 1 3/4 lengths, the Preakness by 1 1/2 lengths and the Belmont Stakes by 4 lengths.

1967 Interstate route I5 was completed through Seattle

1959 Boeing 707 flew from Seattle to London non-stop in 9 hours 44 minutes, 7886 km = 4900 miles

1962 The Seattle World's Fair
The Century 21 Exposition is best remembered for the creation of Seattle's Space Needle, Monorail and the Pacific Science Center.

1943 - Plutonium Production

DuPont began making plutonium in Richland , WA . They put waste products in tanks, told the government they would last 25 years. The government did nothing, and 25 years later they started leaking.

1937 ChemE moves into Bagley Hall

1909 ChemE moves to 'Old Bagley Hall', now Architecture Hall

1941: Jim Jensen, BS '37, MS '39 ran the heavy water plant for Stuart Oxygen Company in San Francisco.  At the time it was the only heavy
water plant in the U.S.  He also contributed to the design of the large plant built at Trail, BC to produce heavy water for use in making the atomic bomb.

2000 Eric Stuve

1998 Bill Rogers

1989 Bruce Finlayson

1977 Charles Sleicher

1967 Benson Hall opens

1953 Wells Moulton First Chair of the Chemical Engineering Department

1904 First ChemE class held in Denny Hall. Henry K. Benson hired

1964 Professor Baab builds the first home dialysis machine

1943 Synthetic Rubber

UW grads Waldo Semon and Victor Mills made a discovery how to use ivory soap in the synthetic rubber process and keep the catalyst working. Waldo had been Victor’s TA in school. The styrene was made in a vat with soap suds, which contained the catalyst. But the catalyst stopped working - it was poisoned after awhile. Waldo Semon went to Victor Mills to talk about the problem. Victor Mills thought it might be the perfume they added to Ivory soap, to overcome the soap smell. 99 44/100% wasn’t pure enough! For the rest of the War, Proctor and Gamble made “special Ivory Flakes” and sent it to B. F. Goodrich to use in the synthetic rubber process.

1923 The first chemical engineering textbook was written by William Walker, Warren Lewis and William McAdams of MIT.

1947 Part 3 of Chemical Process Priciples, Chemical Kinetics, published by Hougen & Watson

1960 Transpot Phenomena, by Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot, is published

1934 Perry's Chemical Engineers Handbook, 1st Edition is published

2000 Honda and Toyota introduce gasoline/electric hybrid cars to the
US; the hybrid technology is a stepping stone towards a fuel cell powered car.

1998 Ballard Power Systems of Burnaby, BC, produce full-sized, fuel cell buses for Vancouver, BC, and Chicago, IL.

1993 Partnership for Next Generation Vehicle (PNGV) formed by Department of Energy and Big 3 US Automakers to develop an 80 mpg car by 2004.

1970 Fuel cell powered car

Karl Kordesch builds fuel cell powered car (Austin A-40) and uses it for personal transportation for three years.

1961 Rear-engine Corvair appears

Ralph Nader achieves fame through his book "Unsafe at any Speed," a book about the design flaws and safety hazards of the Corvair.  Although Chevrolet eventually resolved the problems, negative publicity killed the model by 1969.

1942 – Fluid Catalytic Cracking

Fluid catalytic cracking was introduced to make high-octane gasoline, again getting more gasoline out of a barrel of oil. This process provided constant stirring of the catalyst and oil, which kept parts of the vessel from overheating.

The first fluid one was in Baton Rouge , LA. The need was to ‘crack’ the oil more than could be done in a thermal cracker (in 1925) and the Houdry process (in 1925-1935). The problem is that catalysts are used to do the cracking, and they remain active for only a few seconds before being covered with coke (black carbon).

The catalyst was to be moved in a cycle from cracker to regenerator and back to the cracker. The fast moving gas kept the particles of catalyst suspended for a few seconds. The reaction would happen, and the catalyst would be moved to another vessel to be heated and purified before starting the cycle again. By the end of the war, there were 34 fluid catalytic crackers, and after the war they were used to make high-octane gasoline for automobile transportation.

1947 – Platformate

Platformate was introduced as a catalyst, making more high-octane gasoline. The innovation was in making this possible without using up the world’s supply of platinum.

All these improvements in processing oil to make gasoline made possible engines with higher compression ratios after WW II, and fueled the growth in automobile transportation.

1974-1980 - Catalytic Converter

invented to convert exhaust from your car from carbon monoxide (which would kill you) to carbon dioxide, and unburnt fuel to carbon dioxide. Oxides of nitrogen are treated, too (they help form ozone if untreated).

The three way catalyst - operating under oxidizing conditions some of the time and under reducing conditions other times - was a marvel of chemical ingenuity. The device itself encompasses almost all of engineering - the ceramic substrate from materials science, the catalyst from chemical engineers, the flow geometry constrained by pressure drop from the mechanical engineers, and the control system by electrical and chemical engineers. The catalytic converter reduced pollution from automobiles by 95%. Currently, 80% of the hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions are produced in the first 8 minutes of operation. The rest of the pollution (half of the total) comes from old cars.

1937 - Houdry Catalytic Cracker

Houdry developed a catalytic cracking plant for making high-octane gasoline, again getting more gasoline out of a barrel of oil; catalytic cracking made high-octane fuel for airplanes which helped win the Battle of Britain. (British planes could go higher than the German planes, giving the Brits an advantage.)

1924 – Vacuum Distillation
Vacuum distillation was introduced in petroleum industry, thus obtaining even more gasoline from oil. Under vacuum, chemicals can be broken without burning them, and the smaller fragments provide better gasoline.

1912 – Thermal Cracking
Heat the oil and some chemicals break in two. A patent was issued to Standard Oil of Indiana (which became Amoco, then BP) for thermal cracking of hydrocarbons. This made it possible to get more gasoline out of a barrel of oil, for cars.

1904 - First Service Station in the United States

A Chevron station in Seattle on East Marginal Way . Before that, car drivers used buckets and funnels and obtained their gasoline at grocery stores. The pumps shown here were a big improvement.

A few gasoline filling stations across the country opened for business around 1906-1907, but dispensing at that time was still done mostly by buckets and funnels. Some stations advanced into metered or graduated measures soon after 1911. Gilbert & Barker, a firm which manufactured storage tanks, brought out a line of curb pumps with measuring devices in 1911 (Hidy & Hidy, 1955), and the Beman Auto Oil Can Co. of Meadville, Pennsylvania, was already selling their New Improved Automatic Tank by that year.

1908 - First model T, which made fuels important

1900 – The automobile is welcomed as bringing relief from pollution. New York City , with 120,000 horses, scrapes up 2.4 million pounds of manure every day.

1983 - PBI

Celanese begins commercial production of polybenzimidazole (PBI) fibers as a replacement for asbestos

1973 - PET

Biaxially oriented poly(ethylene terephthalate) or PET was made, now used in soda bottles, and in the 1980s for audio and video tapes

1959 - Polycarbonate

Bayer and General Electric begin commercial production of polycarbonates, now used to make CDs

1953 - Polypropylene

Polypropylene was invented by Phillips Petroleum.  The first product was the Hula Hoop.

1921 - Ethylene and Polyethylene

Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) begins commercial cracking of natural gas, producing ethylene for making polyethylene, which  is the first of the petrochemical industry

1914 - Ammonia process for fertilizer

First ammonia process, at 220 atmospheres pressure, for making fertilizer - this invention feeds the world

1930 Polystyrene

Accelrys

1910 Bakelite

1943 Synthetic Rubber

The Philippines and Indonesia were the principal source of raw materials for the US rubber industry before World War II. With those natural rubber supplies cutoff, the US had to increase its production of synthetic rubber. They made it from butadiene and styrene. The plants were designed, built, and operated within two years, a miracle of engineering planning and construction.

1943 –Teflon

poly(tetrafluoroethylene) was invented and used to supply corrosion -resistant gaskets to the gaseous-diffusion complex at Oak Ridge . Later teflon was used in Gore-Tex jackets.

1945 - Polymethylmethacrylate - PMMA

During the war, many gunners sitting behind plexiglass bubbles had shards of plexiglass blown into their eyes. An alert doctor after the war noticed that the small bits of plexiglass were still in the eyes, with no infection or interaction with the eye. He realized that materials could be made that were biocompatible, and this started a revolution in medical devices. Contact lenses were one of the first uses.