Volume 1, Number 2

To encourage readers to attend the spring ACS national meeting in Washington, DC, editor Neil Gordon pointed out that members of the new section on chemical education would need to "decide many fundamental questions". Among these was whether to approve an outline for high school chemistry that had been circulated to all the states. Like current national standards, this outline was intended to be suitable for students who were not going to attend college.

An article by A. P. Sy of the University of Buffalo, titled "A Plea for a Pedagogical Scrapheap in Chemistry", strikes a resonant chord with current calls for pruning back the curriculum. Sy reported that in 1921 the number of high-school students taking chemistry was about half the number taking physics and less than a fifth of the number taking biology. Sy attributed this mainly to the fact that "we teach a more or less obsolete and unnecessarily difficult content of the subject." He quotes another professor as saying that introductory textbooks "shoot far over the head of the average student, leaving behind stupefaction and discouragement." After a lengthy criticism of confusing and misleading terminology, most of which we still use today, Sy concludes that one reason for the tortoise-like pace of change in chemical education is that young college teachers, who have no training in pedagogy, initially "follow tradition, and later...can't break away".

Volume 25, Number 2

Editor Norris Rakestraw discussed the effects of UMT (universal military training - the draft) on higher education, an issue that some 20 years later would become much more contentious - even explosive. A continuing series on chemical education in American institutions featured the University of Rochester with an article by W. A. Noyes, Jr. In his view, "With a good faculty and good students this problem [teaching] solves itself almost automatically. Methods should, of course, be studied and changed and experimented with. Whenever a department feels perfectly satisfied with its system the department chairman and at least half the staff should be fired."

The next paper was on ammonia as a solvent, by J. H. Hildebrand of the University of California, Berkeley. Its Figure 1, taken from the fifth edition of Hildebrand's general chemistry textbook, graces most current textbooks in nearly the same form. Hildebrand introduced his discussion of liquid ammonia by saying that "it combines a variety of properties to a degree that makes it a remarkably versatile solvent, taxing, therefore, all the resources of our present theories of solubility." That textbooks have not yet assimilated all of Hildebrand's insights regarding the solution process was pointed out by Silverstein in our most recent issue (J. Chem. Educ. 1998, 75, 116).

Both in 1924 and 1948 the Journal dealt extensively with industrial applications of chemistry. Volume 1, Number 2, listed 12 films from the U. S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, on subjects such as coal, petroleum, sulfur, iron, and oxygen. In 1948 there were papers by authors from Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation, Hercules Powder Company, Standard Oil Company (Indiana), Abbot Laboratories, and Bausch and Lomb Optical Co. Several reported how laboratory notebooks were handled in industry, and one celebrated the 100th anniversary of the discovery of cellulose. "A Summary of Recent Developments in Cellulose and Cellulose Derivatives", by John Tinsley, included electron micrographs of cotton fibrils at magnifications up to 22,000X.

Volume 50, Number 2

The cover article, by M. R. V. Sahyun of 3M Company, was about photochemical imaging processes. It described the use of photopolymerization to create printing plates and the use of photoresists in the fabrication of printed circuit boards.

Like every issue during W. T. Lippincott's tenure as editor, this one featured an excellent editorial. Its thesis was that the curriculum for chemistry majors needed a stronger ethical and behavioral component, and it argued that "our spectacular successes in improved training of science majors have not been matched by corresponding successes in their education." Looking toward the end of the century, by which time the students of 1973 could be expected to have made major scientific contributions, Lippincott suggested that students' knowledge needed to be broader, their attitudes more flexible, and their ability to work with others and "to appreciate and assimilate knowledge from other disciplines greater." Also, "Students could be required to apply successful experimental and theoretical approaches in entirely foreign contexts even to problems in other sciences." As they said in those days, "Right on, Tom!" There is no question that our experience over the 25 intervening years has reinforced these arguments, though we still have a long way to go before they will be fully put into practice.