The Polymer Research Institute

Herman Mark was starting over – yet again.

When Mark arrived at the Polytechnic Institute he was assigned to the Shellac Bureau, under the directorship of William Gardner. Sponsored by the U.S. Shellac Import Organization, the bureau’s purpose was to oversee the testing of imports of shellac from Indonesia and India. Those imports were likely to diminish or be cut off in the near future because of the threat of war with Japan, so emphasis shifted to searching for a replacement, either natural or synthetic. Because of his tenure at I.G. Farben, Mark was familiar with synthetic resins that resembled shellac.

The needs of the Shellac Bureau provided Mark with an opportunity to introduce the study of polymers into the Institute. In addition, Mark found a faculty receptive and helpful. Most important was Isidor Fankuchen, a renowned X-ray crystallographer, Donald Othmer, a chemical engineer, and Harry Rogers, president of Polytechnic. With the support of Rogers and Raymond Kirk, head of the chemistry department, Mark began immediately teaching a course in general polymer chemistry.

Mark’s early years in Brooklyn were war years, and as such he became involved in a number of military projects that had little to do with polymers. Much of the research for these projects were done in the basement – called affectionately “the mines” - of the original Polytechnic buildings on Livingston Street in Brooklyn.¹

Mark‘s first wartime project was to work on the Weasel, an armed snowmobile intended for use in military action in snow-covered mountains, such as northern Scandinavia and the Alps. Mark’s assistance was solicited to test the Weasel because during his years in Vienna Mark had done some research on heavy water in glaciers in the Alps and the Caucasus. Along with a colleague form Polytechnic, Turner Alfrey, Mark traveled to the Canadian Rockies to perform tests on snow and its impact on the Weasel, research that proved valuable when the vehicle was put into use in the European War.²

Similarly, Mark and Alfrey worked on an amphibious landing craft, code-named “Ducq,” that was even more important for the war effort than the Weasel. They performed tests at Cape Cod on the effect of wind and waves on the landing craft before the Ducq was put into mass production.

The third project that Mark worked on was an “ice craft carrier.” This was an attempt to fashion a solution to the problem created by German U-boats, which were sinking cargo ships at an alarming rate. Airplanes could threaten the U-boats, but because of the shortage of aircraft carriers, there were few places for planes to land in the north Atlantic. The idea was to use icebergs as landing craft, but to do this a solution to the brittleness of ice had to be found. Mark’s son Hans worked on this project as an adolescent and helped discover that wood pulp was the best substance for strengthening ice. A prototype was built and light aircraft landed on it, but the increasing steel production for aircraft carriers and the construction of faster cargo ships made the project unnecessary.

During the war years and right after, Mark was involved in the founding of the Chaim Weizmann Institute of Scientific Research in Palestine. Weizmann, who was born in Russia but became a British subject, was a scientist and ardent Zionist. As a cap to a long and distinguished career, he became the first president of the independent state of Israel. Prior to that, in 1942, a number of wealthy Americans and Englishmen agreed to celebrate Weizmann’s 70th birthday by creating a research institute in his honor. Mark was enlisted in the project, to which he devoted his customary enthusiasm. He organized many of the operational functions of the Institute, and purchased, through Polytech, much of its initial equipment, some of which was housed for a time in Brooklyn because of the outbreak of war when Israel gained its independence.³

Simultaneously with the war effort, Mark was working to strengthen polymer education at “Brooklyn Poly.” In 1942, he became director of the Shellac Bureau and he used that post to introduce research in synthetic coatings and polymers. In addition to teaching an introductory course in polymer chemistry, Mark organized a series of weekly symposia on Saturday mornings at which leading scientists spoke. These were widely attended, exposed students at the school to the latest in polymer research, and served over the years to give polymer education at Brooklyn Polytechnic international recognition. Mark also organized intensive summer courses for the study of macromolecular science to which he invited outside university scholars and industrial researchers. And Mark’s mere presence in Brooklyn served as a magnet, drawing five professors and sixty graduate students during the war years to work under him.

In effect, a polymer institute was being created ad hoc at the Polytechnic Institute. That was the situation when in 1946 Dean Kirk took Mark into President Rogers office and said “Why don’t we simply give a name to something that has grown upon us? Let us call it our Institute of Polymer Research.”⁴ Mark says Rogers seemed initially excited, but then asked what university presidents always ask: how much will it cost? Mark replied about $200,000 a year. Rogers was mortified, until Mark added that would be the cost if they started from scratch, which they were not doing. Instead, the Institute would be staffed with the school’s professors, the equipment was already in place, and, Mark said, in essence they would continue to do what they were doing, just giving it a new name. The only cost would be a new letterhead with “Polymer Research Institute” on it.⁵

Mark explained: “By naming it, we gain legitimate recognition without any expense whatever, aside from those letterheads. We also become known as a place to which industry can turn for advice and instruction, and we become the nerve center of polymer science.”⁶ Mark believed the time was propitious, since polymer chemistry was becoming a recognized scientific field. An institute devoted to teaching and research would further that recognition. Moreover, he had experience: it was similar, though on a much larger scale, to what he had done at the University of Vienna in the 1930s.

Under Mark’s active leadership, the Polymer Research Institute, or PRI, grew and attracted many first class scientists to its facilities in a converted razor blade factory. Mark made PRI a magnet for anyone in the United States who wanted to study or teach polymer chemistry. Polytech attracted students and postdoctoral fellows from all over the world, including Great Britain, India, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Among those who came to study, teach, or do postdoctorals were Turner Alfrey, Herbert Morawetz, Charles Overberger, Gerald Oster, Murray Goodman, Paul Doty, Bruno Zimm, Frederick Eirich, Robert Simha, Arthur Tobolsky, and Eli Pearce. PRI educated undergraduates and graduate students, granting M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in polymer chemistry.

PRI was not the first institution to teach polymer chemistry in the United States. Carl “Speed” Marvel, another early giant in the field of polymer science, taught synthetic polymer chemistry as part of his organic chemistry courses at the University of Illinois and he trained about 150 doctoral students in organic polymer chemistry. But Mark’s program at PRI was different; it stressed all areas of polymer science: organic chemistry, physical chemistry, and biochemistry as well as industrial applications.⁷

Mark became an indefatigable champion of polymer chemistry in the United States and around the world; in doing so, he helped enhance the reputation of the Polymer Research Institute and the growing influence of the Institute in turn aided the growth of polymer education. As part of this process, Mark oversaw a number of publications devoted to polymers. His interest in this area grew out the difficulty of getting the Journal of the American Chemical Society to accept papers on polymers. The Polymer Bulletin, which contained mostly reports on work done at PRI, was launched in 1945. It was well received, so Mark began the Journal of Polymer Science the following year. In these years Mark also played a major role in getting the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry to establish a polymer section. He served as its first chairman and characteristically welcomed German scientists to attend meetings.⁸

Mark’s work, and the presence of the Polymer Research Institute, helped make polymer chemistry an important scientific branch. When Mark began the Institute, there were only a handful of chemists working with synthetic polymers at U.S. universities: among them were such important scientists as Speed Marvel and Paul Flory. But none succeeded in creating a facility like the Polymer Research Institute. When the Institute was founded in 1946 there were few polymer chemists in U.S. schools. That number rose to over 1100 by 1992. Today, many prominent universities either have polymer institutes or offer polymer programs of some kind.

As Mark said in an interview in 1986, “we [PRI] had our peak in the late fifties and early sixties. Then many of our best professors went other places and we shrank.”⁹ But PRI remained influential, as other universities, including Illinois, where the impact of Marvel was strong, Case Western Reserve, Massachusetts, North Carolina State, and Akron, established polymer institutes. In industry, where DuPont had dominated the field, now Dow, Phillips Petroleum, Rohm and Haas, Shell, and the major rubber manufacturers developed polymer programs. Many were started by scientists who had studied or taught at PRI and all were influenced by the work of Herman Mark in establishing polymer chemistry in the United States.

Herman Mark may not have been the only impetus for the expansion of polymer education in the United States, but he clearly played a critical and formative role. As Norbert Bikales, formerly of the National Science Foundation, put it, Mark “was an agent of change. He was future oriented until the end. More than any other person, he was responsible for spreading the gospel of macromolecules.”¹⁰

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¹ Telephone interview with Hans Mark, conducted by Judah Ginsberg, June 6, 2003.
² Mark details work on this and other wartime projects in his autobiography. Herman Mark, From Small Organic Molecules to Large: A Century of Progress, in Profiles, Pathways, and Dreams: Autobiographies of Eminent Chemists, ed. Jeffrey Seeman (Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1993), pp. 96-101.
³ Interview with Eli Pearce, conducted by Judah Ginsberg, May 27, 2003.
⁴ Mark, From Small Organic Molecules to Large, p. 115.
⁵ An excellent account of the origins of the Institute can be found in Morton Hunt, “Profiles: Polymers Everywhere,” Part one of two parts in The New Yorker, September 13, 1958.
⁶ Quoted in ibid.
⁷ Yasu Furukawa, Inventing Polymer Science: Staudinger, Carothers, and the Emergence of Marcromolecular Chemistry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 199.
⁸ G. Allan Stahl, “Herman Mark: The Continuing Invastion,” in G. Allan Stahl, ed., Polymer Science Overview: A Tribute To Herman F. Mark (Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1981), p. 117.
⁹Herman Mark interview conducted by James Bohning and Jeffrey Sturchio, February 3, March 17, and June 20 1986, The Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, p. 71.
¹⁰Norbert Bikales, “Herman Mark’s Children,” in Sheldon Atlas, Eli Pearce, and F.R. Eirich, eds., Polymers to the Year 200 and Beyond: A Memorial Symposium for Herman F. Mark (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993), p. 142; see also, C.E. Carraher, “Polymer Education and the Mark Connection,” in Stahl, ed., Polymer Science Overview, pp. 123-142.

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