From Past Issues

The More Things Change

Volume 1, Number 7

An important issue in 1924 was "Should the Electron Theory Be Included in High School Chemistry?", the title of a paper by Roland B. Hutchins of Haverhill, MA, High School. About 75% of the teachers surveyed replied in the affirmative, the same percentage who said they were including the electron theory in their classes. An approximately equal percentage indicated that they believed that instructors would have difficulty dealing with the subject.

An apparatus for measuring the vapor density of steam was described by Evans, Day, Pease, and Bland of Ohio State University (see figure). Students used it to determine the molecular weight and then the molecular formula of water.

The report of the Committee on Chemical Education of the ACS noted that the September 1924 issue was being sent to all members of the ACS and to 15,000 chemistry teachers who were not members, giving a total circulation of 30,000. Readers were invited to respond to a set of questions that would be quite useful today: What topics would you omit from the standard high school outline? What topics would you add? What topics would you omit from the college outline? What topics would you add? What topics would you change from the high school outline to the college outline or vice versa?

As a memorial to the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Francis P. Garvan, the ACS held a Prize Essay Contest. In each state prizes of $20 in gold were awarded to the six best essays "evidencing an understanding of the importance of chemistry to our national life." The national committee that judged the essays included Herbert Hoover, Charles H. Mayo, Jane Addams, J. C. Merriam, George Eastman, Edgar F. Smith, Robert A. Millikan, and Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser.

Volume 25, Number 9

A symposium on lecture demonstrations began with a paper by T. H. Daugherty of Calgon, Inc., who described how the company's product, Calgon, could be used to demonstrate sequestration (producing soap suds in hard water as shown in the figure), dispersion, and dilatancy (increased resistance to deformation upon rapid application of an external forceas when wet sand hardens and dries underfoot).

Other demonstrations included one on colloidal phenomena using egg albumen, several using a divided cell for a lantern-slide projector, and one that demonstrated the rate of approach to equilibrium in a reversible reaction by dipping colored liquid back and forth between two crystallizing dishes. (A closely related experiment appears on page 1176* in this issue.)

Mary L. Sherrill, Mt. Holyoke College, wrote on "The Relation of Research to Teaching in a Liberal Arts College." She argued that research in liberal arts colleges had an important role to play and quoted the ACS Committee on Professional Training in support of her position. She also suggested that collaboratory research involving other institutions was an excellent model.

Volume 50, Number 9

Robert C. Brasted of the University of Minnesota was the 1973 recipient of the ACS Award in Chemical Education (now the George C. Pimentel Award).

His award address, "Have We Innovated the Chemistry Teacher Out of the Classroom?," was printed in the September issue and his photograph adorned the cover. Bob cautioned against overreliance on technology but concluded that it could provide more time for teachers to deal with individualization of instruction and a better way for students to learn specific techniques and skills.

Including materials science and solid-state chemistry in the curriculum is not entirely a new phenomenon. A paper by Companion and Schug, Illinois Institute of Technology, titled "A Course for Engineering and Science Students: Materials Science in Freshman Chemistry," described how a semester of descriptive inorganic chemistry had been transformed to include the theme of molecular designing of materials, thereby enhancing students' enthusiasm for chemistry. Also on a solid-state theme was a paper by A. W. Mann, Flinders University of South Australia, that showed how to construct inexpensive models of close-packed crystal lattices such as the wurtzite (ZnS) structure shown here.

A brief note announced that the Third Biennial Conference on Chemical Education would be held the week of July 30, 1974, at Penn State University and would include a visit on August 1 to Joseph Priestley's house and laboratory. Exactly 100 years before, in 1874, the centennial of Priestley's discovery of oxygen, the first U.S. National Chemistry Conference was held at Priestley House. That meeting was the origin of the committee that eventually founded the ACS.