Charles Herty

Charles Herty

Charles Holmes Herty Sr. (born December 4, 1867 in Milledgeville , Georgia , † July 28, 1938 in Savannah , Georgia) was an American chemist , known as a promoter of industrial chemistry in various key positions in the United States.

Life

Herty was the son of a drugstore owner and studied at the Georgia Military Academy and the University of Georgia in Athens with a bachelor's degree in 1886. He was born in 1890 at Johns Hopkins University with Ira Remsen with the work The Double Halides of Lead and the Alkali Metals is doing his PhD before going back to Georgia. In 1894 he became an associate professor there and in 1902 a full professor at the university. In 1892 he founded and directed the university's first football team. In 1899/1900 he was on a study trip to Zurich (with Alfred Werner , Georg Lunge ) and Berlin (with Walther Nernst , Otto Nikolaus Witt ). In 1901 he left the university in a dispute over the management of the faculty. From 1902 to 1904 he worked for the US Forest Service and in 1905 he became a professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. 1915/16 he was President of the American Chemical Society (ACS). In this role he promoted the national chemical industry and the cooperation between industry and universities. He then gave up his professorship and became the full-time editor of the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry at ACS in New York, which he remained until 1921.

From its founding in 1921 to 1926, he was President of the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (SOCMA) in Washington DC, which involved a lot of lobbying. From 1919 after the defeat of Germany sealed in the Versailles Treaty, the German dye patents expropriated in the First World War were administered by the Chemical Foundation, whose advisor Herty became in 1926 (he was friends with its director Francis P. Garvan ), as he had done since the First World War was an advisor to the War Trade Board on these issues (dye reparations from Germany). In this function he promoted the establishment of his own dye industry in the USA and was active in research funding at universities. From 1926 he worked with Senator Joseph E. Ransdell in founding the National Institutes of Health (Ransdell Act 1930).

From the early 1930s he was the founder and director of the Savannah Pulp and Paper Laboratory in Savannah and in this role revitalized the wood and paper industry in the southern states, favoring a method for newsprint production based on the cultivation of native pines. This initially met with great skepticism because of the resin content of the pines, but he found major newspaper publishers in Texas and Oklahoma who invested in it and saw the beginning of this project. He also had his own consultancy for the chemical industry in New York. He was particularly interested in local resins. After his return from Germany in 1900, he had already initiated a reform of the method of extracting turpentine from swamp pines (Herty method), which did less damage to the trees

In 1917 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 1932 he received the American Institute of Chemists Gold Medal .

In 1895 he married Sophie Schaller, with whom he had three children. His son Charles Holmes Herty Jr. (nicknamed Holmes) became Vice President of Bethlehem Steel.

literature

• Entry in Winfried Pötsch, Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists, Harri Deutsch 1989
• Germaine Reed: Crusading for Chemistry: The Professional Career of Charles Holmes Herty, University of Georgia Press 1995

Web links

• Herty Papers, Emory University, pdf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ biographical data, publications and Academic pedigree of Charles Holmes Herty at academictree.org, accessed on February 10 2018th
2. ↑ In Germany he had observed that Christmas trees were used for the same purpose (paper making).
3. ↑ Georgia History Society, Herty ( Memento of the original from September 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ He followed a suggestion by Witt in a lecture in Berlin.
5. ^ Member History: Charles H. Herty. American Philosophical Society, accessed September 29, 2018 .