© 1999 American Chemical Society.
Volume 29, No. 12, 28-34.
CHEMTECH, a phoenix
In which CHEMTECH's Founding Editor reflects on where it came from and why.
"But what was it supposed to do?"
That watershed question, asked 30 years ago, led to the creation of CHEMTECH. I don't know who raised that question, because it was asked in the confusion of everyone packing up after a long and agonizing meeting—the one that culminated in the recommendation that the old Industrial & Engineering Chemistry magazine be killed.
The question caught everyone by surprise. . .and was followed by
Silence.
Then everyone began responding, all talking at once; briefcases were reopened, ties loosened, and dinner sent for. A kind of epiphany:
Nowhere in the entire stable of ACS publications was there one dedicated to the industrial practitioner. I&EC (the monthly, not its quarterly spinoffs) was to be terminated because it had become just another academic research journal, despite its being one of the first two ACS publications devoted to "applied chemistry".
mentor to CHEMTECH
That meeting and a couple of subsequent meetings of the board of ACS's I&EC Division roughed out a plan for a publication made for the large percentage of ACS members not engaged in academics. When the late Joe Stewart, of Esso, and the late Leo Friend, of M. W. Kellogg, presented the plan to the ACS board, they came back with the message, "The board members said they couldn't start a publication for every division that wanted one." And Joe added, "They as much as said, 'What do you guys know? You're all engineers.'"
But Leo and Joe and Merrill Fenske of Penn State, then I&EC Division chair, were politically astute problem solvers. They invited 11 other ACS divisions with applied chemists to send representatives to discuss unmet information needs. The dynamics of that meeting were fascinating: At first, each rep focused only on how a new publication would serve his or her division, mainly by providing an outlet for its authors' papers. But by midday, it became clear that applied chemists needed means to gain information more than they needed means to disseminate their own work. And over a working lunch, it became eminently clear that the information really needed was access to what was happening in the other fellow's field.
Recall that this was 1970, when concerns were just developing about intellectual property, the environment, and global economics. With such common interests, it didn't take long for the group to decide not only to propose creating a multidisciplinary, didactic publication, but also to propose that the publication's board be appointed by the divisions represented there. And being industrial types, they insisted that the new board oversee not only editorial content but also financial performance. Finally, they decided that this board would report directly to the ACS board. Unprecedented.
When 12 ACS divisions combine forces to make a proposal, the ACS board listens. The result was the magazine you're holding, its very last issue. I was fortunate enough to have been put under contract to be its founding editor, and, as they say, the rest is history.
The recently appointed editor of CHEMTECH, Michael Block, graciously asked me to share some of that history with you. (Mike will also be the first editor of CHEMTECH's new incarnation, Chemical Innovation, which debuts next month.)
1. If you want to do something different, you have to do something different. 2. Before you you start doing research, find out what business you're in. 3. If two guys can't agree, remember that it takes three legs to hold up a milking stool. That's what consultants are for."
I learned long ago that you can't describe a magazine accurately, any more than you can describe a color accurately. So I'll let CHEMTECH's 348 issues speak for themselves. I'll confine myself to telling you of some of the mischief I got into while holding the best job I ever had. Because editors are supposed to pontificate, I'll conclude with some thoughts on how our profession has changed in 30 years, and, of course, prognosticate a bit.
The first issue—January 1971
I have what's purported, by its bound-in letter from the president of Mack Printing Company, to be the first copy of CHEMTECH off the press. But I know better.
My wife, Renee, and I were invited by Mack to visit the plant in Easton, PA, to witness the printing of the first issue. The press was immense; it looked to be a block long. (I think they figured that if I saw this monster I'd never keep it waiting for copy by missing a deadline.)
On signal, a button was pushed and the monster roared into action. We were standing where the bound but untrimmed issues were to make a sharp left turn into the unit where the covers were added. (I'll get to the covers in a moment.) Anyway, out poured these lovely labors of months of dedicated work by many—out they cascaded, hundreds of them, coming directly at us. But they didn't make that left turn! In seconds we were knee-deep in magazines. The button got pushed again, the monster relaxed, a worker showed up with a snow shovel and big trash cart, and Renee cried. Frugal housewife that she is, she began gathering her husband's handiwork into neat piles. I still have some of the copies the worker didn't take from her. Maybe one of them is really the first issue off the press.
That early, too-creative cover
One wag called CHEMTECH the eccentric square silver bagel. Let me explain. Nobody told me that a magazine had to be designed. I learned that when I met artist Joe Jacobs (husband of Madeleine Jacobs, current Editor-in-Chief of Chemical & Engineering News). I was instructed to explain to Joe what the new mag was supposed to be. He listened without a word, not even a nod. Just alert blue eyes. (Later I told him that that "conversation" was like bouncing a BB off a plate glass window.) Joe may not be verbal, but he sure is visual: When I'd finished, he thought a minute and condensed my long discourse into one word.
Silver.
CHEMTECH couldn't be any other color and be CHEMTECH!
Ah, but how to create a silver cover? Why, just use the aluminized paper they use to box liquor. Possible, except the only press that could print on the stuff couldn't print fewer than 10 times the number we planned to use each month. Okay, let's print a year's worth of covers at once.
But how to distinguish one month's issue from the next? Simple: What you do is fold in a flap of the front cover, cut a hole in it so the white backing, on which we could print, is visible, and characterize that month's content with a picture and text that show through the window. Neat, especially because we could print the table of contents on that flap so it could be folded out to be continuously accessible when the magazine lay open in the reader's hands and folded in as a book mark when the issue was set aside.
It turned out that aluminum was too costly, but we liked the cover with the hole in it, so we printed the best approximation of silver we could and voilà, Volume 1.
Sadly, the eccentric square silver bagel didn't last long—it was costly, and librarians hated it. The hole's corners tore. (Damn! We should have used a round hole.)
Librarians hated the cover for another reason: The official name was Chemical Technology; but Jacobs had designed this dandy CHEMTECH logo and that's all that appeared on the cover. How was a poor librarian to know which name to use in the catalog? Because everybody called it CHEMTECH, we petitioned the ACS board to change the name, but it refused. The good folks at Chemical Abstracts fixed that. One month we inadvertently omitted the name Chemical Technology from the masthead. The only name the abstractor could find was CHEMTECH, so a new file was created, and that's the name CA used from then on. That did it. (N.B. If you're searching early issues, search both names.)
Another note about the name before we go on to more fun stuff (like the subscriber who kept getting empty wrappers and complained because they came late). Over the years, I have editorialized repeatedly on the mischief caused by the public and its government not appreciating the marked difference between the aims, methods, and cultures of science on the one hand, and technology on the other. (I titled these editorials "Scienceandtechnology". Get it? Like Damnyankee.) The title CHEMTECH evidently caused mischief among chemists, who seemed to confuse technician with technologist. Despite its subtitle "The Innovator's Magazine", they took the "tech" in CHEMTECH to imply that the magazine was for technicians rather than for entrepreneurs. I understand that the elimination of this confusion is one reason for renaming the magazine. So be it.
One day, many years ago, I was closeted in a room on the sixth floor of the American Chemical Society building with a man named Ben Luberoff to discuss a new magazine he would edit called CHEMTECH. Ben—a large, enthusiastic man—talked for what seemed like hours about his vision for the new magazine. Some of the information was useful to me. I told him, "Since you stress the word 'innovation', I will design a cover which in itself will be innovative graphically." I filled two layout pads with sketches—in those days, designers "thought on paper"—and presented the final cover sketch to Ben. It included a bold black logo across the top over a silver background, a gatefold, and die cut. Ben was at a loss for words!
Graphic Innovation
CHEMTECH's first Art Director
Can you believe . . . ?
So we had a new magazine; how were we to market it? Before the Internet, the most cost-effective marketing technique was direct mail. Our first mailing piece said "Another magazine. Who needs it?" (As if the answer weren't obvious, the mailer went on at length to explain.) It worked until readers who got early issues free were asked to pay for continuing. Funny how professional chemists don't feel responsible for paying for their tools.
Years later, when I inquired about the cost-effectiveness of direct mail, I learned about "white mail". White mail is "over the transom" subscriptions that just drop in with no association with any particular mailing campaign. When I asked what fraction of our subscriptions were gained by white mail, I was told it was about 75%.
"Huh? We don't know the origin of 75% of our subs?" I went back to my office in Summit (NJ) and dictated an incensed letter about the uncontrolled white mail problem in Washington and pleaded for control of this white mail. Copies to everyone!
I wish I had proofread that letter. As posted, it was all about Washington's white male problem.
Circulation management in those days created lots of other laughs. ACS president-to-be Bill Bailey of the University of Maryland, who represented the Polymer Division on my advisory board, was concerned that CHEMTECH hadn't found its way into the academic community, despite the fact that most grads went into industry. He figured that faculty needed an incentive to see what CHEMTECH was, so he suggested that we award a free subscription to a student chosen by every department that had a student chapter of ACS. He guessed that before selecting the awardee, the professors would have to look at the sample copy sent them. Good idea.
Then the letter came. Its writer said it wasn't fair to ask him to name the awardee in his school. He was a student—ouch! It seems that instead of sending the solicitation to 300 department heads, “the computer” had sent offers of free subscriptions to more than 8000 ACS Student Affiliates.
Another of Bailey's antics was his rebuttal to a criticism of an ACS reader survey. One board member said the results were meaningless because 88% of respondents said the magazine was interesting, but only 79% said it was useful, and that was inconsistent. Bailey said, “I disagree. I find Playboy interesting, but I don't find it the least bit useful.”
“How big's your staff?”
As concerned as I was with circulation, I soon learned that although you can have a magazine without subscribers; you cannot have one without authors. Often I was asked, “How big's your staff?” My answer was, “About a hundred and fifty thousand.” I figured every member of ACS had something to offer the other members. My job was to find out what it was and get it into print. That's how I came to meet so many wonderful people I never would have met otherwise.
I recall a conversation I had with der Geheimrat, Herman Mark, granddad of all polymer chemists. He'd written a fine review for us, but had omitted the bibliography, on whose inclusion I always insisted (“CHEMTECH's job is to generate awareness and interest; the bibliography leads to whatever expertise is needed,” said our author's guide). Professor Mark said, “I cannot publish a bibliography. I would certainly omit many of my friends and that would hurt them.” (He did offer to send anyone who asked for it a reading list.)
Well, I'm going to risk what Professor Mark was too much the gentleman to risk. Let me share just a few of the relationships I developed.
We did a series on thinking (yup, CHEMTECH was even concerned with that). The author, Carl Pacifico, sent me a box full of reprint requests he'd gotten with a note: “I sure got a lot of reprint requests, but how come so many came from abroad? Doesn't anybody in the States read CHEMTECH?” (The answer is that few institutions abroad had copying machines.)
With surprising frequency, authors said they'd gotten more reprint requests for their CHEMTECH articles than for anything else they'd ever written. I'd concluded that maybe my authors hadn't written much before. Then Professor Carl “Speed” Marvel, another polymer pioneer, called. “Would you send me more reprints? I don't know what you're doing but I never had so many requests.” Wow! That from a chemical celebrity.
See, every editor has a Tree Test. Each issue demands that the editor judge whether producing it justified cutting down all those trees.
Another celebrity who fascinated me was Emmett Reid. I knew him as an organosulfur chemist, but I didn't know that he was about to be 100 years old. I wrote and asked him if he was up to sharing some reminiscences about changes he'd seen in the practice of chemistry. He said he'd be happy to—as soon as he finished his autobiography. In due course, I got an inscribed copy of My First 100 Years: An Interim Report, with a note from Professor Reid saying this was his personal autobiography and that he and his young assistant (age 86) were at work on his scientific autobiography for CHEMTECH. His was the only manuscript I ever got in a box; it was extensive enough to fill an issue and a half and far too good to serialize. He remembered everything and related it eloquently . . . at 100. With funds from his consulting clients, we ran an issue with an article whose opening contained a photo of Volume 1, Issue 1, of what's now called JACS. Its lead article was by Ira Remson and Emmett Reid.
Later, I visited Professor Reid to give him the portrait we'd commissioned to accompany his article, and he told me this story. Professor Remson said that only once in his career did he make three discoveries in a single day. When he was a lad, he cleaned a physician's office. One day he spied a bottle of nitric acid and recalled reading that nitric acid acts on copper. To find out what “acts on” meant, he poured some nitric acid on his copper penny. As Remson related it, “That was my first discovery: ‘acts on’ means bubbles and biting, brown fumes. They frightened me, whereupon, as I endeavored to throw the penny out the window, I made my second discovery: Nitric acid acts on fingers. And that discovery led to the third: Nitric acid acts on knickers.”
Others of my most cherished authors provided the quotations that accompany this article.
That's funny
Not so well known as these contributors, but instrumental in shaping CHEMTECH, was Jan van Wessum. I discovered him in the wastebasket of the managing editor of Analytical Chemistry, a young fellow named John K Crum (currently ACS Executive Director). Van Wessum had had the effrontery to send a bunch of cartoons to the staid American Chemical Society. The opinion of Dr. Crum's minions was that there was no place in serious journals for cartoons. I asked, “Why not?”
We rescued the batch from the wastebasket and bought them all. I paid for them in U.S. postage stamps because van Wessum worked in Amsterdam and was trying to penetrate the U.S. market. He needed U.S. stamps so his clients could mail back drawings they didn't buy. Once others recognized CHEMTECH as a market for humor, we learned that lots of chemists were part-time cartoonists.
Over time we had more requests to reprint our cartoons than our technical papers. Every year, Pfaltz & Bauer bought 26 to use as alphabetic separators in their catalog. Even the National Enquirer bought a cartoon—for 20 times what we paid. (We sent the “profit” to our cartoonist.) Our most popular cartoon was drawn by “Sandy” in Florida.
At one point, we published bumper stickers like “GCs in by 9 out by 5”, “Se habla Fortran”, and “The bottom line starts here”. At a semiannual meeting of my advisory panel, Ed Buras, chief scientist at Gillette, and Fred Owens, head of information services at Rohm and Haas, both said, “Don't ever do that again!”
When I asked why, Buras said that such foolishness was beneath the dignity of chemists, and Owens complained that nobody could find an intact issue of CHEMTECH to send to the bindery. Chemists had torn the bumper stickers out of every copy.
Then there were all those April Fool articles, one every April during my tenure. The most memorable was the one Dietmar Seyferth's “perpetual graduate student” reputedly wrote. In great, rigorous scientific detail he described a vacuum line synthesis that yielded a yellow liquid that could be accounted for only as “pure d orbitals”. We thought it was pretty funny until ACS President Al Zettlemoyer called, furious, about our refereeing policy. It seems one of his students had, unsuspectingly, selected this spoof as the subject of the term paper he did for a course Al was teaching at Lehigh University.
The last of the light stuff was The Last Word. It was specifically designed, at my wife's suggestion, as a way for the technologist to grab the interest of significant lay folks. She especially liked the instructions on how to intimidate the meeting's projectionist. She was present when one dropped the 90 slides I'd prepared so that as I spoke I could sort of flip pages of a typical issue for the audience. That kid found nine wrong ways to put a slide into a projector.
Only long after the fact did I appreciate why humor was essential to CHEMTECH's mission. Just as innovation requires intimate interaction among disparate stakeholders, I'm convinced it also requires close interaction between both halves of the individual brain: the scientist's linear, logical, disciplined left hemisphere and the holistic, playful, artistic right hemisphere. CHEMTECH seemed to be able to engage both halves.
The best articles
An excellent way to get a snapshot of the ways chemical technology developed over the past 30 years is to browse most March issues of CHEMTECH. There you'll find the nominees for, and winner of, the Leo Friend Award. Recall that Leo got the magazine accepted by ACS. Sadly, he died in an auto accident during his tenure as first chair of its advisory panel. His friends, family, and employer funded an award to recognize the most significant CHEMTECH article published each year.
Awards I recall most vividly include two for major process innovations first exposed in CHEMTECH. One award was given to Jim Roth, then of Monsanto, and colleagues for a process to carbonylate methanol to acetic acid; the other, to Sy Meisel and colleagues, of Mobil, for the conversion of methanol to high-octane gasoline.
Then there was “Use the Second Law First”, a particularly timely paper for the 1970s, written by a pair of mechanical engineers. The fascinating part here was that an ACS book resulted from the weeklong symposium that these chaps arranged to accompany the award presentation. Then there was Barry Arkles's award-winning “Look What You Can Make Out of Silicones”. Despite a good deal of controversy, I put a photo of a silicone breast implant on our cover and details of the penile implant in the text.
An ad in CHEMTECH's August 1976 issue read,..He or she...will be working with authors,...art staff,...production staff, ...and be encouraged to innovate..." Two months later my conversion from an organicker to a generalist began. My first assignment—what else?—was editing an article on the history of the Garvan medal given "To honor the American Woman for Distinguished Service in Chemistry". I quickly learned how to reduce a voluminous manuscript to five and a half pages that included 11 photographs. In the next 17 years, as I went tonumerous diverse lectures and read innumerable manuscripts, I ended up knowing less and less about more and more, leaving me today with a monomolecular layer of sci--tech knowledge. I used my husband, Herman, to act as a surrogate reader. He stumbled over "hepatotoxin" and "cardiac infarct". And I couldn't get hooked reading his papers on wide- and small-angle X-ray diffraction of polymers. So I looked for the common denominator of CHEMTECH readers and decided that all probably at one time had passed p-chem. That's how I became a translator of jargon-rich manuscripts. With the authors' approval, nephrotoxins became kidney poisons and anthropogenic effects became man-made ones. No manuscript left my desk unless I understood it. When I joined CHEMTECH, the 100% male editorial staff of one was reduced to 50%. After that, our cartoons no longer showed women merely as sex objects. A series of fillers titled "The Rub" (1981) featured actual events caused by real or imagined slights experienced by women. Coming to terms with the gender problem helped to firm up our sensitivity toward other groups, whether in humorous or serious articles.
CHEMTECH's Associate Editor
1976–1993
Another article that took a lot of soul-searching to publish was the one that described separating male-producing sperm from female-producing sperm by passing a mixture down a Sephadex column on the kitchen table of a Dow chemist. The results of his experiments on rabbits scared me. But I felt obligated to publish them—nobody else would. Now, a quarter-century later, such research is common in animals and even in humans.
Another of our articles that no one else would publish described medication that could not be verified by double-blind experimentation. Physician Robert Cathcart had found that although healthy humans get diarrhea if they ingest more than 10 to 15 g of vitamin C a day, their bodies can utilize, literally, hundreds of grams a day when they have a viral infection. The amount needed (before diarrhea sets in) depends on the severity of the illness. The symptoms disappear just before the unpleasant side effect occurs! Each illness has to be titrated to what Cathcart called bowel tolerance. Therefore double-blind testing wasn't possible. Despite our policy that authors be intimately involved in the innovation being presented, I wrote this piece based on interviews with Cathcart. His experience with scientific journal editors gave him such a distaste for their rigidity that it was years before he'd write for them again. I titled the article “Symptomectomy with Vitamin C”.
There was our “Sell Thyself” series, which illustrates the scope of CHEMTECH. Written by a member of the Sales Executives' Club of New York, it's the best handle I've seen on how to get a job. Longer series that were especially influential were the 12 articles written by world-class innovators and a prescient series called “The Next Limiting Resource: Water”. The most fun I had was working with the late Henry Hass to select the articles for two year-long series, one encompassing the best articles published in the old I&EC and the other covering the most significant U.S. chemical patents.
And then there were our continuing articles opposing nuclear energy. They won for CHEMTECH the Olive Branch Award of the National Editors Conference. Two especially timely pieces were the first detailed analysis published popularly about the costs of decommissioning a nuclear power plant and my risk-benefit analysis of nuclear power, which the Senator from Alaska read into the Congressional Record.
A surprise portent of the future was Rufford Harrison, of DuPont, calling to ask if we'd be interested in an article about table tennis. Huh? It seems that Ruff was International Secretary of the U.S. Table Tennis Association, and he'd just received an invitation to play against China—the China the United States didn't recognize, the one we hadn't heard from for 30 years! We didn't report on table tennis, but we did publish Ruff's report of his visit to China, another on the first chemical trade at the Canton trade fair, and later a piece on my invited visit to lecture in China.
The staff
During the earliest days of CHEMTECH, I was the only visible presence. That led my board to worry, “What'll we do if a truck hits Ben?”, to which one wag responded, “The damn truck will just have to worry about itself.”
In fact, it takes a lot of people to make a magazine. I'd love to acknowledge the contributions of each of them, but ask their indulgence as I recall just a few. The only help we had on the editorial side in the beginning was from Dave Gushee. As Assistant to the ACS Director of Publications, he'd recruited me. When he left ACS to join the Library of Congress research staff, I enlisted him to give me some breathing room while I learned my job. My strongest in-house support came from Bace Guiley, who headed the production crew for all ACS publications. On more than one weekend, he and I put together an issue on the floor of his den.
We engaged the brain's right hemisphere with a variety of artwork, another way to set CHEMTECH off from ACS's other publications. After Bace let go of that aspect, the readers and I got to enjoy the creative efforts first of Norm Favin and then of Amy O'Donnell (née Hayes).
Charlotte Sayre reined in the language and decorum of CHEMTECH's early issues, bless her. She and Bace both worked in Washington, so it was Dorit Noether who became the real civilizing presence. She signed on as Associate Editor, and for 18 years we shared an office in Summit, NJ. Of course, we both recognized that the real power there was wielded by our secretary, Ruth Tallamy. Whenever anyone criticized her magazine, she'd threaten to scratch out their eyes, all 97 pounds of her “with two coats of nail polish”, as she'd say.
In due course the center of gravity moved to Washington. Amy Yanagi served as the first Associate Editor there and established the Summit-DC interaction. Art Director Alan Kahan's creativity added essential oomph to our articles and covers. Finally, Managing Editor Marcia Dresner dragged us into the computer age.
So where to now?
Whereas science can be subdivided exquisitely and still fascinate, CHEMTECH got its start by recognizing that for innovation to happen, for a product to survive in the marketplace, we had to bring together a variety of stakeholders for prolonged, continuing discourse. When we inaugurated CHEMTECH , there was no accessible, informative place to read about energy (read “alternative energy”), materials (aggregations of atoms that do something), microelectronics (molten metal was used to set our type for years), or biotechnology (what you do after the Petri dish), much less a source of tutorials on project evaluation, on discounted cash flow analysis, on patents and licensing, on product introduction, or on environmental management. Now there is at least one periodical devoted to each of these, many published by ACS.
Is that progress? Alvin Toeffler once told me he was concerned that the specialization of our information sources would lead to a new Tower of Babel. (He envisioned a Handbook for Left-handed, Retired, Southern California Red Rose Growers.)
Yet, as the circle of what's known grows, the perimeter, the cutting edge, grows relentlessly. And there will be new gaps in that perimeter as it grows. CHEMTECH tried to fill the gaps it could. We were seeking better processes for commodity chemicals, new energy sources, and other capital-intensive innovations. Although “God is in the details,” industry has now pretty much settled broadly on its tonnage process and materials needs.
But during most of CHEMTECH's life, there was no combinatorial chemistry, and DNA manipulation had gotten little farther than fear of its environmental impacts. Many researchers had become fascinated with the interaction between electromagnetic radiation and materials, but directions were still being sought.
Recall, as I once taught students: The chemist's domain encompasses whatsoever has mass, or its equivalent.
Things are different now. Where are the gaps in information transfer sufficient to support a generic magazine? I look forward eagerly to the answers to be generated by Mike Block and his colleagues as they and Chemical Innovation sally forth into the future. But because CHEMTECH was pretty good at anticipating new journals, I wouldn't be surprised to see Mike competing with J. Chem. Patents, J. Chem. Regulations, J. Chem. Microelectronics, J. Chem. Law, and J. Chem. Economics.
So maybe Chemical Innovation will fill the humanistic gap 'til we see J. Psych. of Chemists, J. Anthropology of Chemists....
Bye for now!
