Charles Herty

Charles Herty: crusader for science
and country

Born in 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, Charles Holmes Herty was the son of a Confederate army captain turned pharmacist in what was then the capital of Georgia: Milledgeville. Both father and mother died by 1878, leaving 11-year-old Charles and his younger sister, Florence, in the care of their aunt, a schoolteacher.

Herty attended the Georgia Military Academy and graduated from the University of Georgia in 1886 with first honors in chemistry. He received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1890. While at Hopkins, Herty sang in the university’s glee club and played the flute—but above all he played sports, particularly baseball, a lifelong passion.

Herty’s teaching career began at his college alma mater in 1891. He also headed the school’s fledgling athletics program, coached the football team and helped establish the sport’s tradition in the south, introducing his team to the modern elongated football.

He longed to study chemistry in Germany, however—then the world’s center of chemical research and achievement. In 1899, he took a year-long sabbatical in Berlin with his wife and two young sons. While there, he heard a comment that the technique then used to collect resin, a starting material for turpentine, was killing off America’s southern pine forests. Once back in Georgia, Herty developed and patented a new technique that collected the resin without scarring the trees and leaving them vulnerable to disease and weather. Promoting its use became his first entrepreneurial mission and success.

From 1905 to 1917, Herty headed the University of North Carolina’s chemistry department. Dubbed "Captain Charlie" by his students, contemporaneous accounts describe him as a logical, persuasive and enthusiastic teacher. At about that time, his interest in engaging broader issues of science and society emerged. When World War I threatened the United States, he helped organize chemical research to counter poison gas.

He was president of the American Chemical Society in 1915 and 1916 and became the first full-time editor of the Journal of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry, the predecessor of today’s weekly newsmagazine, Chemical & Engineering News. He was also the first president of the Synthetic Organic Chemicals Manufacturers Association, formed in 1921.

In a 1918 editorial, Herty called for the establishment of a "chemo-medical" research institute that would use chemistry to fight disease. Twelve years later, he was invited to the Oval Office to watch President Herbert Hoover sign the legislation that created the forerunner of today’s National Institutes of Health.

In 1932, he opened the non-profit Savannah Pulp and Paper Laboratory—today called the Herty Foundation—and served as its leader until his death in 1938. The Herty Award, a gold medal inscribed with the phrase "For science and country," is awarded each year to an outstanding southeastern chemist.

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