Michael Willcox Perrin

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Sir Michael Perrin, 1971

Sir Michael Willcox Perrin (born September 13, 1905 in Victoria (British Columbia) , † August 18, 1988 ) was a British chemist who developed the first practical, industrially implemented method for the production of polyethylene .

Perrin had British parents (his father was the Anglican Bishop William Willcox Perrin (1848-1934)) and came to England with them from Canada in 1911. He attended Winchester College and studied chemistry at Oxford University (New College) and the University of Toronto . From 1929 he was at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), where he headed a working group on high-pressure polymerization and, at the end of 1935, developed the first practical industrial method for the production of polyethylene, which was patented in 1936. Perrin realized that small amounts of oxygen were necessary and that the heat generated during the polymerization had to be dissipated. At first it only produced a few grams. In 1939, polyethylene was first produced on a larger scale (25 kilograms in a 50 liter reactor). Polyethylene was discovered by accident at ICI in 1933 by Reginald Oswald Gibson and Eric Fawcett , but the reproduction of the experiments caused difficulties and Gibson and Fawcett turned to other areas (at that time there were hardly any possible applications for the new plastic). It took a few more years until Perrin achieved reproducible, safe production conditions. In the meantime, interest in it at ICI had waned and Perrin found the production method as part of a basic research project at ICI on organic reactions under high pressures. Shortly before, he had been at Antonius MJF Michels in Amsterdam, with whom ICI was working on high-pressure chemistry. The development of polyethylene was kept secret at the beginning of the Second World War, as it was used, for example, as an insulator for high-frequency cables in radar technology and gave the Allies a decisive advantage (another chemist at ICI found the similarity to the gutta-percha used in overseas cables ). Mass production after the Second World War (where it was used, for example, in the then popular Hula Hoops ) was made possible by Ziegler-Natta catalysts ( Karl Ziegler 1953), which allowed production under considerably less extreme conditions, as well as by using raw materials for the production of ethylene from oil refining instead of alcohol, as was the case with ICI in the 1930s.

He became Assistant to the Research Director of ICI Wallace Akers . With Akers he was in a leading position in the British atomic bomb program (MAUD Commission, Tube Alloy Project ) during World War II . In 1942 he visited the United States on this task and, with others, convinced the British government to work with the Americans on his return. Perrin was the coordinator of this collaboration. He was also responsible for the evaluation of intelligence information on the German atomic bomb project and was behind efforts to stop the production of heavy water in Norway. At the end of the war, he ensured that the German physicists involved, such as Werner Heisenberg, were secured and interned in Farm Hall. After the war, he supported Lord Charles Portal, responsible at the Ministry of Supply, in the expansion and control of civil and military British nuclear energy (from 1946 Deputy Controller of the Atomic Energy Authority). In 1950 he oversaw the handling of the espionage affair of Klaus Fuchs , whom he interrogated personally (Fuchs had refused to speak to an interrogator who did not have the highest level of secrecy clearance). But he was dissatisfied that nuclear energy in Great Britain was not being handed over to industry.

In 1951 he switched back to the industry at ICI and was chairman of the Wellcome Foundation from 1953 . In 1970 he retired. He was also on the boards of hospitals and museums as well as the Roedean School.

In recognition of his achievements in nuclear research, he was first honored as an officer and later as Commander of the Order of the British Empire and finally knighted in 1967 as a Knight Bachelor ("Sir"). He is buried in Hampstead .

literature

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Georg Schwedt: Plastic, elastic, and fantastic: It doesn't work without plastics . Wiley-VCH, Weinheim 2013, ISBN 978-3-527-33362-2 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  2. ^ Martin Sherwood: Plastic explosion , New Scientist, March 24, 1983, p. 836
  3. ↑ Anthony Travis: Nitrogen Capture , Springer, 2018, p. 354
  4. ↑ Christoph Laucht: Elemental Germans , Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012, p. 91
personal data
SURNAME Perrin, Michael Willcox
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British chemist
DATE OF BIRTH September 13, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Victoria (British Columbia)
DATE OF DEATH August 18, 1988