Herman Bloch

Herman Samuel Bloch (born June 15, 1912 in Chicago - † June 16, 1990 ) was an American chemist and inventor .

Bloch was the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He went to school in Chicago with top marks in 1929, studied chemistry and physics in Chicago with a doctorate in organic chemistry from Julius Stieglitz in 1936. He then carried out research at Universal Oil Products (UOP), a petrochemical company (refining processes, etc.), which had its Riverside Laboratories in a suburb of Chicago and from 1956 in Des Plaines. The company played a pioneering role in the petrochemical industry at the time. UOP was later acquired by Signal, who merged it with Allied to form Allied Signal in the early 1980s .

Bloch and colleagues at UOP developed processes to obtain higher quality (higher octane) gasoline from petroleum by using catalytic methods instead of simple thermal cracking . For example, paraffins that were neglected as slow reacting were unlocked. The acid catalysis developed at UOP was an early example of carbocation chemistry (called carbonium at the time) and became important in the Second World War for gasoline with a higher octane number (with a corresponding advantage in aircraft over the Axis powers). The platform process developed by Vladimir Haensel at UOP also led to a new source (besides coal tar) of aromatic compounds and Bloch developed the Udex process for separating aromatics from non-aromatics.

Bloch also played an important role in the degradable bad in nature, spread as a cleaning agent alkylbenzenesulfonates (ABS) with degradable linear alkyl benzene (LAS) to replace (LAB process at UOP for linear alkyl benzene ). In these there were linear instead of branched alkyl chains on benzene (see also sulfonic acids ). One problem was to find a source for linear alkyl chains, but this had already been prepared by the Molex process developed for the petrochemical industry, which separated linear paraffins (a subsequent dehydrogenation process (Pacol) provided the desired linear olefins ). That became a major source of income for UOP.

Finally, Bloch headed the development of vehicle catalysts at UOP .

In 1975 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences . In 1989 he received the Chemical Pioneer Award , 1974 the EV Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry , he received the Eugene J. Houdry Award in Applied Catalysis in 1973 and the Richard J. Kokes Memorial Award from Johns Hopkins University (1975). He was a Robert A. Welch Lecturer in 1975 and received the IR-100 Award from Industrial Research Magazine.

He was a chairman of the Chicago section of the American Chemical Society and served on the ACS Council, including five years on the board. Because of problems with racial discrimination at meetings of the ACS in the former southern states, he initiated an unofficial decision in the 1950s not to hold any more meetings there. His social commitment was also reflected in his membership in the Cook County Housing Authority (Chicago is in Cook County (Illinois) ), which he chaired in 1971. He was also active in the municipality where he lives in Skokie .

In 1940 he married Elaine Judith Kahn, with whom he had three children. His son Aaron was also a successful industrial chemist (at Exxon ) and was vice provost at Columbia University and provost at the State University of New York in Buffalo. His daughter Janet became a history professor in Miami and his daughter Merry Jones became a writer.

The family donated the Bloch Lecture of the University of Chicago, held for the first time in 1992, an award for industrial scientists and especially industrial chemists.

Web links

• James Shoffner, Biographical Memoirs National Academy , Volume 87, 2005

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In 1995 they became the USA's National Historic Chemical Landmark.
2. ↑ The petrochemical sector was organized into a new UOP in 1988 with the corresponding savings from Union Carbide. In 1999 it became a joint venture between Honeywell (which had acquired Allied Signal) and Dow Chemical (which had acquired Union Carbide).
3. ↑ Bloch Lecture