William Schowalter

McKinley:

Today is January 25th, and we’re sitting here in the faculty common room, I guess, of the chemical engineering department at Princeton University. I’m speaking with Professor Bill Schowalter — or William Raymond Schowalter, to be formal — as part of the oral history project for the Society of Rheology. So, Bill, thank you for speaking with us today. Great pleasure to see you again. Let’s start by maybe talking a little bit about your very early years. I know you were born in December 1929, which actually is the same month that the Society of Rheology was founded. You grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Tell me about your early years.

Schowalter:

Very early, I gather, you’re thinking of?

McKinley:

Yes.

Schowalter:

One always wonders, well, what is it that got you started doing the sorts of things that you later did professionally. And I don’t think I have a clear answer to that. But somehow chemistry was something that I was fascinated with. And at that time, you bought these chemistry sets, or hoped you were getting them for Christmas. And at a fairly young age, I suppose about fourth grade, I got my start on these things, and spent an awful lot of time in the basement playing around with it, and expanding it, to the point where my father, who was a medical doctor, got a little worried. I recall him once saying, “Well, first you make colors, and then you make things that don’t smell so good, and then you blow up the place.” [laugh]

McKinley:

[laugh]

Schowalter:

Nevertheless, he encouraged me, certainly didn’t discourage me, until he was a little worried that I might be getting towards the “blow up the place” stage. And I do recall that you were given all these experiments to do with your set, and then you got an alcohol lamp, which didn’t give you nearly enough heat. And I had a bachelor uncle who… I don’t think he ever had a chemistry degree, but he had done some work in the chemical, pharmaceutical industry, actually. And so, he came home — because he was out of work; this was during the Depression — and kind of bouncing around in his family’s places, he had spent some time with us and decided I needed a Bunsen burner. And also, along came a Bunsen burner, and then he hooked that up to a gas line. And my father was — it was not his brother.

McKinley:

Horrified, I imagine.

Schowalter:

It was his wife’s brother. So, there was a little bit of tension there about that. But I got my Bunsen burner and learned how to blow glass and do all those other things. And that just kept going through, oh, middle-school years. I recall being thrilled when my older sister took chemistry, and I was able to read her high school chemistry book when I was in, I suppose, sixth or seventh grade. And that’s kind of how it developed.

McKinley:

Excellent. You were one of how many children?

Schowalter:

Three. Middle child.

McKinley:

Was there anyone else who was an engineer or a scientist in the family? You mentioned your father.

Schowalter:

Not in the immediate family. But something that’s probably worth knowing is I had an uncle — my mother came from a family of six children. She was the youngest. The oldest was a man named Otto Kowalke who was one of the early leaders in chemical engineering at Wisconsin, was chair of that department for [laugh] much longer than anybody could possibly stand it today. But if you read Bob Bird’s history, you’ll see my uncle’s name there. But the truth of the matter is I knew that he was a chemical engineer, and I thought, “I don’t want to be like that.”

McKinley:

[laugh]

Schowalter:

“He’s one of these nerdy academics.” And obviously that all changed with time.

McKinley:

Yes. What seems like a good thing to do in high school can change dramatically, right?

Schowalter:

Exactly, exactly.

McKinley:

Excellent. So, I guess chemistry and chemical engineering kind of runs in the blood a little bit, then?

Schowalter:

A little bit, I think.

McKinley:

What about your children, after that?

Schowalter:

One majored in religion. The other one majored in field hockey, with a sideline in sociology that got her through college.

McKinley:

[laugh]

Schowalter:

And those are the two girls. And the youngest, a boy, went to Cornell in engineering and excelled at it and got a PhD, and actually did a thesis at UCSD in fluid mechanics, and then spent a good bit of his time in industry working on CFD.

McKinley:

Wow, OK. So, it did carry on, then.

Schowalter:

It is carried on somewhat.

McKinley:

Wonderful. So, at the end of high school, you graduated and then you went off to Wisconsin, to Madison, as an undergraduate.

Schowalter:

Yes, and my uncle figures in there, too, because this was 1947, shortly after the war. Most of the people who were undergraduate students at that time were a lot older than I was. They had had battle experience—

McKinley:

Coming back from the war.

Schowalter:

—and all kinds of things that I hadn’t had, and indeed, got preference in terms of university housing and so on. We were at the very bottom of the priority list. And I recall pushing doorbells around with friends from high school in Madison, looking for a place to live. And turns out my aunt, Otto Kowalke’s wife, had died suddenly the previous summer. He still lived in a pretty nice house, and so I ended up spending my freshman year living in his home. From all the stories I heard, I was extremely fortunate that he retired just before I entered the department courses, because he would have been a terror on me. [laugh]

McKinley:

[laugh] A demanding lecturer, or would have just had a special attention for you?

Schowalter:

He liked to find out where the holes were in people’s knowledge and if he — if everybody knew that I was a relative of his, he’d have been merciless.

McKinley:

[laugh] So did you go straight into chemical engineering or how did it work then? Did you do chemistry and physics, or…?

Schowalter:

I did. There again, why chemical engineering? I talked to you about my interest in chemistry, but I was told that you’ll get a much better job if you’re a chemical engineer than a chemist. And the truth is that’s probably the main reason that I decided to go into chemical engineering.

McKinley:

That’s a pretty good reason. And so, you got interested in fluid mechanics there? I mean, you were already interested in chemistry, but was there a class called transport phenomena at the time, or this was before that existed?

Schowalter:

No, didn’t exist. You had courses in finding friction factors. It was pretty basic. If you go back to McCabe and Smith and the unit operations courses, you’ll find out that friction factors were about [laugh] as elegant as fluid mechanics was in the standard ChemE curriculum in those days.

McKinley:

Did you have a Moody chart then? Was it already called the Moody chart? I think that was in the 1940s?

Schowalter:

It was called the Moody chart, but usually we just called them friction factors or f-factors or something like that.

McKinley:

So, I guess after that — so you finished your bachelor’s degree in, I guess, 1951?

Schowalter:

Correct.

McKinley:

And tell us what happened after that summer.

Schowalter:

Interesting in that I still did have an interest, a particular interest in chemistry, but a growing interest in mathematics and applied mathematics. And physics. And knew about an organization called the Institute of Paper Chemistry, which was in Appleton, Wisconsin — still in the state. And it was a graduate program associated with Lawrence University, so they could give degrees. Took in about a dozen students every year from backgrounds in chemistry and chemical engineering primarily. And since I knew about the paper industry from growing up in that state, I thought this might be an interesting thing to do — learn more about natural products. So, I ended up in the fall, after I graduated from Wisconsin, as a student at the Institute of Paper Chemistry.

McKinley:

And so that was, I guess, fall of ’51?

Schowalter:

Correct.

McKinley:

And you made a good friend there that had — we were talking at lunch about how friendships can lead to large career changes and so on.

Schowalter:

[laugh] Yes, indeed.

McKinley:

There was a colleague there that was in the same class as you.

Schowalter:

Arthur Dreshfield was a graduate of chemical engineering at the University of Illinois. You know how these things happen — it just turned out that we liked the same jokes and to do the same things, and so we struck up a very close friendship. And there was one faculty member at the Institute who came from a PhD in Caltech who taught the physics course. And it was really the first time I had seen some reference to things other than mass point mechanics. Even though his course was almost entirely classical physics, he talked about viscosity in a realistic way [laugh] that we hadn’t had earlier. And I think that’s probably what generated my interest in fluid mechanics. And also, as I looked at the faculty at the Institute and where they came from, decided that I should have a degree from a major research university, not from the Institute of Paper Chemistry, even if I became a paper chemist someday.

McKinley:

So, they were dealing with slurries and things like that — I guess cellulose slurries, and so on.

Schowalter:

Absolutely.

McKinley:

Did you start to see things like rheometers or viscometers or anything there?

Schowalter:

I probably did the previous summer, where I — to prepare me for this, I took a job at Kimberly-Clark Research Labs, which was a major paper company in those days, right next to Appleton, Wisconsin, and learned about research in the paper industry from an engineering point of view, meaning you took big buckets of pulp around and were trying to figure out how you can take poplar, which grows very fast, and make reasonable newsprint out of it. And so viscometers did come in.

McKinley:

Fantastic. So, you decided to go back and get a PhD at the University of Illinois.

Schowalter:

Yes, thanks in large part to my friend Art Dreshfield, who said, “It’s a great place. You’ve got to go there.” [laugh] On that basis, I decided to choose Illinois.

McKinley:

And so you headed there — when would that have been, then?

Schowalter:

That would have been, actually — because I was a little upset with myself for having “wasted” a year…

McKinley:

A semester or a whole year?

Schowalter:

So, I went there in the summer. Paid my own tuition. I wanted to catch up. And got started there — I actually minored in physics and physical chemistry along with a major in ChemE — and got started on a research project in chemical kinetics.

McKinley:

Right, so you were telling me… so, your thesis advisor was, his last name was Johnstone.

Schowalter:

Fraser Johnstone, who was not at all a specialist in fluid mechanics. His real contributions were in aerosols and the chemistry of aerosols and atmospheric chemistry. He was way ahead of his time, was not particularly recognized in the department or, except in certain circles nationally, for the work he was doing. Of course, he would be a leader today. One of his students, by the way, is someone who went on to have a huge career in that field: Sheldon Friedlander, whom you might have heard of.

McKinley:

I have indeed heard of. Yes. So, this was atmospheric chemistry, and I guess initially, at least, you studied kinetics of hydrazine.

Schowalter:

Yes. Hydrazine was a possible propellant, and there was some government money in the chemistry department, and chemical engineering was associated with chemistry, and so this was the way Dr. Johnstone, or “Doc” as we called him, then could support me. So, I did work on kinetics and catalysis of hydrazine chemistry for a year.

McKinley:

And I guess it is used as a propellant, right?

Schowalter:

Yes.

McKinley:

It is a dominant rocket propellant, still, right?

Schowalter:

Yes.

McKinley:

Fantastic. But in the middle of that — so, you just got your master’s degree, and then you had an interlude.

Schowalter:

I did indeed. The interlude you’re not talking about was that I got engaged and decided to get married.

McKinley:

I didn’t mention that one, no. That’s kind of an important one. So how did you meet Jane?

Schowalter:

Oh, we won’t spend a lot of time on that, but in short words, a blind date on New Year’s Eve when we were both undergraduates at Wisconsin. But she was working for the telephone company at that point in the Milwaukee area, and I was one of the unlucky ones who drew the wrong number from the draft board and was told that summer that not only was I going to get married, but I was going to go into the army for two years. And my then-to-be wife figured out a way to get my physical exam postponed for a month so that I could get married and not go in the army until ten days after the wedding.

But she, beyond that, through a colleague of hers, said, “You know, there’s something called scientific and professional personnel, where they take draftees and use their scientific knowledge in a productive way, and you should try to get into that.” And that’s where Fraser Johnstone became important again. Because of his aerosol background, he was a major consultant to the Chemical Corps of the army. I actually ended up meeting General Creasy, who ran the whole Chemical Corps, [laugh] when I was a private, and got into scientific and professional personnel.

McKinley:

Oh, that’s pretty good, then. Yes. Otherwise, the other option was Korea.

Schowalter:

It would have been Korea. [laugh]

McKinley:

Yes, yes. So, instead of Korea, it was Maryland, right? You spent a few years in Maryland?

Schowalter:

Yes — Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, which is just south of Aberdeen, which is where Aberdeen Proving Ground was, and still is, I think.

McKinley:

Right, right. I think you said they are even merged now, or you think that they might be.

Schowalter:

I think so. I think so. You go through the place on Amtrak if you go to Washington from here. [laugh]

McKinley:

Right, right. And I learned an acronym that I didn’t know, which was KP.

Schowalter:

Ah, yes.

McKinley:

So, what was it — Kitchen Police?

Schowalter:

Kitchen Police. Which — one of the blessings of being an enlisted man is that you get to mop up floors and work for about 18 hours once a month in the kitchen. And I’ll just tell you one of many, many stories. We were the bane of the career enlisted personnel, the sergeants and so on.

McKinley:

You were a private, at the time?

Schowalter:

I was a private, I think for about two weeks I was a corporal, and then they made us a specialist of some sort. But I remember one day when I was on KP, and we had all these people at the Chemical Center — chemists or chemical engineers — one fellow was taking his tray out after he had eaten, and somebody in the line of the non-commissioned officers (NCOs: sergeants, etc.) said, “You haven’t eaten your Jell-O.” The private said, “Of course not! It’s polymerized!”

McKinley:

[laugh].

Schowalter:

[laugh] The Sergeant didn’t know how to handle that, so the private got through the line without eating his Jell-O. [laugh] We were not very good to the NCOs.

McKinley:

Yeah. [laugh] I like it. So, amongst other things, in addition to Kitchen Police and being a scientific member of staff, you also were a driver, from time to time.

Schowalter:

Yes, Staff Duty Driver was another job you pulled. And you, most of the time, had nothing whatsoever to do, so you’d bring books to read and so on. And I was pulling duty when I was told, “You’ve got to go down to the airport in Baltimore and pick up this returning captain.” Which I did. And so I picked him up, and it turns out he was someone I knew. He was a captain in the unit that I worked with — the Chemical Corps Board, it was called. And he said, “What’s that book on the front seat next to you?” And I said, “Well it’s Sokolnikoff’s Tensor Analysis. That caused quite a stir — his driver was learning tensor analysis. But I learned quite a bit of applied mathematics and other things during those two years.

McKinley:

So overall, it worked out to be pretty useful time, then, I guess?

Schowalter:

You could say that.

McKinley:

So, after two years in the army, back to Illinois?

Schowalter:

Back to Illinois, with now some reasonably crystallized ideas about what I wanted to do. And Fraser Johnstone was just finishing advising a brilliant student by the name of John Romano, who had come from City College, which had nothing but brilliant students in those days. And John was measuring turbulence with homegrown hot wire anemometers. And you have to understand, this was before transistors. These were all vacuum tubes that blew out. And I had a rack of electronics at least as tall as I was. And I inherited that from John, and I measured turbulence levels in cyclone separators and Ranque-Hilsch tubes and things like that.

McKinley:

Was it a single wire?

Schowalter:

No, cross wires. Cross single wires.

McKinley:

So, did you have to put together your own wires, or solder your own wires on, and so on?

Schowalter:

Yep. In a microscope, with solder. If you dropped a hair, it looked like something thick when it hit the microscope stage. [laugh]

McKinley:

Yes. Do you remember what the wire was made of in those days? Platinum? Or tungsten?

Schowalter:

They were an alloy, tungsten something, I believe.

McKinley:

Right, right. So, it was really an experimental thesis, then.

Schowalter:

It was highly experimental, yeah.

McKinley:

How did things work? Did Johnstone have a big group?

Schowalter:

No.

McKinley:

Did you have like group meetings or anything? Or it was…?

Schowalter:

This preceded that. And I’m maybe not being quite fair to him — very happy to do a thesis in that area, but I was the only one doing that kind of thing. And he was doing it because a man named Tom Baron — who was legendary at Illinois, came over from Hungary, preserved his accent even better than Eugene Wigner did here — told Fraser that turbulence is very important, especially in process things, and we should be learning something about it. And then Tom went off to Shell Development Company and became president of the whole company.

McKinley:

Really? OK.

Schowalter:

And he was brilliant. Died at an early age. But that’s how I got into turbulence, by working with someone who was a specialist in aerosols. [laugh]

McKinley:

So, you published papers or went to conferences during that time?

Schowalter:

Published papers. I didn’t go… in those days… well, first of all, support was very, very different. My support came from the DuPont company — this would never work these years either [laugh] but DuPont had a fellowship which was doubled if you were married. And so here I was with a wife who had supported me all through my two years in the army, and we were living very well indeed, because she continued to work while I was at Illinois, and I got this DuPont fellowship, plus the GI bill, so we took quite a cut when I came to Princeton. [laugh]

McKinley:

[laugh] That’s a difference to these days. You definitely don’t take a pay cut when you go from a graduate student to — yeah.

Schowalter:

So, no research groups, no anything. But Tom Hanratty, whose name you will know, had just received his degree from Dick Wilhelm here.

McKinley:

And was coming the other way.

Schowalter:

By total coincidence had gone to Illinois and was interested in fluid mechanics. And Tom had a research group, and he was my de facto advisor, really. We got to be very good friends.

McKinley:

Oh, that’s great. And someone that I guess has been heavily involved in fluid mechanics and rheology ever since.

Schowalter:

Absolutely. Not so much rheology — a little bit. We published some papers together when I came back.

McKinley:

So, you graduated in ’55. Or ’57…?

Schowalter:

Graduated from the army in ’55. Yeah, I got my PhD in ’57.

McKinley:

And so, tell me a little bit about looking for jobs. Because you came to Princeton — no postdoc in those days, straight after graduate school.

Schowalter:

Oh, it was so different. It was so different. You’ll envy us, [laugh] because — I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to industry or teaching. I pretty much thought I’d like… In spite of the fact that I thought my uncle was a nerd, I now was ready to do exactly what he was doing. [laugh]

McKinley:

Now you wanted to be a nerd yourself.

Schowalter:

And so, I interviewed companies. Took my first airplane trip ever, all the way from Champaign to Saint Louis, and talked to a number of companies, but also, without bothering to count, I’ll bet visits to half a dozen universities, and decided then ultimately to come directly to Princeton. This will blow a young postdoc’s mind today. No postdoc necessary, or you’d have thought something was wrong if you had one. And in chemical engineering of course, no seminar. You’d come — and I can remember talking here to Dick Toner about how beautiful the leaves were in the fall in Princeton.

McKinley:

OK, very different, then. Yeah. No seminar, even. So how did…

Schowalter:

No seminar.

McKinley:

You just talked to faculty one-on-on about research?

Schowalter:

Yes. You spent the day talking about them and getting an idea about them, and them getting an idea about you. And by golly, in terms of my decisions and my feelings about the universities I interviewed at, and my knowledge of them later on, I was pretty much dead on. [laugh]

McKinley:

Yeah, I’d say so. I’d say so.

Schowalter:

Hopefully, they were, too.

McKinley:

But one of the other ones that you had at least written to — I don’t think you visited — was going back to Madison, Wisconsin.

Schowalter:

Oh, I visited. And I did get an offer, and the whole works, yeah.

McKinley:

You did get an offer?

Schowalter:

Oh, yes. But by that time, Bob Bird was there, and he was going to be a lot more fun to be a distant colleague of than to be on the faculty with, I decided. And we’ve become very, very close friends over the years.

McKinley:

Fantastic. So, when you came to Princeton, who else was on the faculty that was doing fluid mechanics or rheology?

Schowalter:

No one. No one. That’s why they decided it was time to get someone in fluid mechanics. And that goes back to, do you have a big group and seminars and so on. This was it. [laugh] Which was good, in a way.

McKinley:

Right, yeah. I guess it was certainly a greenfield, right? You were ready to start from…

Schowalter:

And to digress for just a moment, validated the kind of advising that Fraser Johnstone did, which was very hands-off. I had come — because he was department chair and involved in a lot of things, I’d sit outside his office, get very angry, because I was having to wait for him, and we’d talk for ten minutes, and I’d tell him what I was doing, and he said, “Sounds great, go back.” [laugh]

McKinley:

Was this weekly meetings, or was it — how often did you get to see him?

Schowalter:

Whenever, whenever. But probably biweekly or something like that. And that kind of independence turned out to be huge positive training ground for me.

McKinley:

So, were there weekly department seminars, then, in Illinois?

Schowalter:

Yes, there were. That’s where I first met Bob Bird. In fact, he came and gave a seminar — we’ve talked about it together — that I’ve never forgotten, because it was about the Bernoulli equation. And he has a marvelous paper in ChemE Science — you ought to look at it if you don’t know —

McKinley:

I don’t know it, no.

Schowalter:

…that explains the Bernoulli equation for the first time where it made sense to me.

McKinley:

Fantastic, OK. So, you’re starting to get interested in certainly rheology, then, I think?

Schowalter:

Yes.

McKinley:

And your first couple of papers were then on boundary layer theory?

Schowalter:

That’s right. And I have given some thought, “OK, how did I get into this area of rheology?” And one of the things that certainly didn’t start it, but that I remember distinctly, was another place I interviewed was Delaware. That’s where I met Art Metzner. And I remember walking around Art’s lab, and it was a typical engineering lab. There was water on the floor everywhere and stuff going around, and big pipes, and he was measuring friction factors…

McKinley:

With maybe a student or…?

Schowalter:

…which I understood. [laugh]

McKinley:

A student called Dodge, maybe? Was Dodge there?

Schowalter:

Yes, probably. I wouldn’t be surprised. I can’t remember specifically, but it was that era. And I thought, “Wow, this looks pretty interesting.” And besides, I had been learning all this tensor analysis and fluid mechanics and “maybe I can do something here.” And with Tom, back at Illinois, we were going through Schlichting’s book, which was all new information to most chemical engineers. And so that’s where I put the two together and started the boundary layer stuff.

McKinley:

Right. And Schlichting’s book, had it already been translated at that point?

Schowalter:

Yes.

McKinley:

It was an English version? Yes, OK. That is wonderful. So, I think that paper still actually turns out to be — there’s a 1961 paper on boundary layer theory for pseudoplastic fluids that’s still very well cited.

Schowalter:

And there’s something else, too, that we haven’t talked about, that you’re probably not aware of. If you look in that same volume of AIChE Journal, you will see a paper by Acrivos, Shah, and Peterson from Berkeley, looking at boundary layer theory and solving the Blasius equation for power-law fluids. And it turns out that Andy and I were working on the same problem at the same time. I was working for American Cyanamid. It was a summer working in their engineering production division in New York. Coming home at night, I remember borrowing a huge, heavy desk calculator from the department here and trying to solve the equations for boundary layer theory past a flat plate.

McKinley:

For a shear thinning fluid? For a pseudoplastic fluid?

Schowalter:

For a pseudoplastic or dilatant fluid. I was having a terrible time getting numbers to converge. Andy and a couple of his colleagues were doing the same thing, and he knew more about how to make equations converge than I did. And so — I can’t remember if this was actually what caused me to look at similarity solutions or I was doing that anyway, but he then published the right result for the Blasius equation [laugh] for pseudoplastic fluids and dilatant fluids. I published the result for similarity solutions.

McKinley:

In the same journal?

Schowalter:

We were both on the same track.

McKinley:

That’s fantastic. And they both turned out to be somewhat influential, I guess you would say.

Schowalter:

I hope so, yeah.

McKinley:

That’s fantastic. So, did you go to Society of Rheology meetings, then, to present this kind of work, or…?

Schowalter:

I remember doing probably — well, my first paper was an AIChE meeting and that was the one on my thesis. Tom Baron, by the way, was in the audience, and asked some very interesting questions. And then there was something called the Christmas Symposium that — I think it was part of the I&EC division of ACS. And there was a meeting at Delaware. Again, rheology was active there. And it was on fluid mechanics. Bob Pigford was the organizer of it. And I gave a paper there that was really inspired by G.I. Taylor’s work on bubbles and drops deforming in shear fields. And we had done some of the same stuff with a master’s student, but it never got published. So, that got started. And the first rheology meeting I remember going to, and it was very influential, was the Brown Congress.

McKinley:

In ’63, I think.

Schowalter:

That made a huge impression. And because I knew this interview was coming up, I checked back, and I think I went to every international Congress between then and sort of the late — the Acapulco Congress, whenever that one was.

McKinley:

That was ’84, I think.

Schowalter:

Yeah.

McKinley:

Fantastic. I think Truesdell got the Bingham Medal at that one [ed. the 1963 Congress in Rhode Island].

Schowalter:

Yes, yes.

McKinley:

So, were you there for his big lecture?

Schowalter:

I was. And it’s also where this whole era of continuum mechanics turned out to be having sway over rheology. And so that also was an impetus for me to learn more about continuum mechanics and think about it. I’m sure at that Congress I met — not only did I get to know Truesdell; Reiner gave a talk, I think an after-dinner talk, but he was still around. And one time I saw him. But it’s where I met Anthony Pearson. I’m sure it’s where I met Ken Walters. It’s probably where I met Roger Tanner.

McKinley:

Probably. I think he was a postdoc or a lecturer at Brown, at the time.

Schowalter:

Yeah. And Brown was a hotbed for applied mathematics. And Rivlin I think was involved in the whole meeting and organizing it. I don’t recall any antagonism at the meeting between Rivlin and Truesdell, but I certainly do later on. [laugh]

McKinley:

Right. Well, maybe that’s a good time to talk about that. I certainly have heard things about that. And as you said, with continuum mechanics, there was a huge sway in the ’60s on that.

Schowalter:

And I think to some extent they felt it was incumbent on them to put on a show, and both of them were show people. Get me back to this, but I want to digress for just a minute because I think it’s relevant. I brought some books I want to show you afterwards, and one of them relates to this. This would be around 1962. We moved into this building, the engineering quadrangle, in 1962. And a colleague of mine in mechanical engineering, Donald Leigh, D. C. Leigh, was interested in continuum mechanics, and we started talking and reading papers and books together. And in the summer of 1962, when they were just beginning to fill this building up for fall classes, we had gotten some money from NSF to have a conference on — I don’t even know what it was called, but just let’s say rheology or modern rheology. And NSF must have supported us pretty well, because it was at least one week, maybe two weeks. We probably had more than 10 and fewer than 20 enrollees. And talk about diversity — at least two people in the class could have been teaching it. You probably remember the Caswell and Schwarz paper?

McKinley:

Yes.

Schowalter:

Well, Bill Schwarz was involved in it. And then there was another person whose name will come to me later who also — John Slattery. John Slattery was the other one, who taught at Northwestern, was a student of Bob Bird’s. From there, to people from industry who might or might not know what a partial derivative was. But we had money to have guest speakers in the evening. And it was a day-long-plus-evening thing. They stayed in the dormitories. We had Truesdell, Noll, Coleman, some others I haven’t thought of. And one of the humorous things about it is that these students stayed in one of the dorms. We would of course have dinner down at the dormitory with a tray. You’d go through the line. So, when Truesdell came, before his talk, he appeared with his tray for dinner, in black tie and white coat…

McKinley:

[laugh]

Schowalter:

And Don was the one who actually invited him, so you’re going to have to talk to him, [laugh] not me. And so, Don said, “Professor Truesdell, this is an informal affair.” I’m sure people were in Bermuda shorts and whatnot. “Well, I always dress for dinner!” [laugh]

McKinley:

[laugh] I can’t imagine him staying in a dorm. Did he stay in the dorm?

Schowalter:

I think he did. I think he did. So, that’s one of the stories about Truesdell that’s worth recording, I think. And then I do remember rheology meetings where he and Rivlin got into big set-tos. And Rivlin was talking — and as I say, it was partly a show, I’m sure — and Truesdell got up and said, “I’m sure that what you just said is very important, but I’ve never read it.” [laugh]

McKinley:

Interesting, very interesting. And I think — retrospect, hindsight and so on — you mentioned that maybe it was more of a storm in a teacup, or it’s not quite as…

Schowalter:

Yes, I think so. And some of the other people — Coleman was a terrible, terrible lecturer, and couldn’t finish a sentence, but wrote extremely lucidly. Walter Noll was a wonderful gentleman and a very thorough mathematician, and I learned a lot from him, both in person and from his writings. And I don’t think you can give enough credit to Hershel Markovitz as being the person who pulled all this together. And that little book on viscometric flows made it all accessible. It’s a beautiful short book. And I think this whole move for continuum mechanics was a huge and necessary advance. And there were many ways to do it. Oldroyd, Noll and company, and Rivlin and company. And as we all know, they were all headed in the same direction. Their notation and ways of doing things were very different. But that’s a kind of physics that I think engineers ought to know something about, because we deal with continua most of the time, [laugh] not with molecules. So, point mass mechanics is what you get in physics, and it’s only partly going to do you some good.

McKinley:

Was Markovitz also someone who dressed for dinner?

Schowalter:

Oh no, no. He was a regular—

McKinley:

Because I’ve seen… I think my first exposure to him was the NSF movie that was…

Schowalter:

Oh, yes!

McKinley:

…which is very formal with him standing there in a bowtie, actually.

Schowalter:

Well, he always wore a bowtie. Always wore a bowtie. Absolutely, yeah.

McKinley:

So, this was not formal?

Schowalter:

No.

McKinley:

[laugh] OK, right. And it seems to be a tradition that’s preserved in Society of Rheology meetings, actually, I think. Seems to be norm—

Schowalter:

Well, with Jeff Giacomin, I never thought — maybe that’s the reason for the connection. [laugh]

McKinley:

[laugh] Yeah. Wonderful. So, I guess maybe during that time, or maybe it was a little after that, I guess you had a student, Gordon, or R. J. Gordon, who…

Schowalter:

Oh, yes.

McKinley:

…certainly when people think of your name, one of the places where it comes up most commonly is indeed in the Gordon-Schowalter derivative. So, that is certainly in continuum mechanics and this was late ’60s or very early ’70s, I guess, with…

Schowalter:

Right.

McKinley:

He was a student of yours, or collaborator?

Schowalter:

Yes. And you’ve probably learned there’s no such thing as a short answer to your question, but this one, it’s incredible you picked up Ron. This is going to go a while. [laugh]

McKinley:

That’s fine.

Schowalter:

Very good student. Almost all my students were. And I tried to gauge students as to how much like Fraser Johnstone could I get, and then we’d still get a decent thesis out of it. And I got most of them right. Not all of them. But Ron was one who was quite independent and able to read papers and understand them. And this idea of the Ericksen model of director vectors — where you throw it into the pot, then describe the rheology, and then coupling with that some of the more molecular notions of what that vector might be — was pretty much what he did. And the truth of the matter is, we had no idea we were developing the Gordon-Schowalter model. I think we can thank Ron Larson for that. He might be the first one who publicized it that way. But the reason it’s so ironic that you brought up Ron’s name is — I said he was very capable. He finished here, took a teaching job at Gainesville, University of Florida. And the way it has come back to me is that while teaching a full load, he decided to go to medical school.

McKinley:

Good grief! OK.

Schowalter:

And did both. And slept in his office most of the time. [laugh] And eventually he became an anesthesiologist, moved I think to Nashville and had a practice. Kind of eased into retirement. His children were in the San Diego area and so he moved out there. And we’ve kept in touch through Christmas cards, this sort of thing. But I have a daughter who lives in the San Diego area, and so Ron and I still communicate. And it gets even better than that. Because he’s the kind of guy he is, he’s very interested in having anesthesiologists do more than just administer anesthetics. And he’s got all kinds of data on the reason people are readmitted to hospitals after surgery and how much this costs in terms of health costs and so on. And a lot of it has to do with blood clots. And blood is a rheologically interesting fluid.

McKinley:

Yes, certainly.

Schowalter:

And he would like to do something about this. And so, since I’ve moved back here, he has gotten in touch with me about doing something. I said, “Ron, I don’t have students anymore. We don’t have senior theses that I advise on.” And I’ve even gotten him in touch with some other people. Nothing has really come of it. But he has written a huge review article on this. Now, I’m not over. So, I had some health problems myself, developed a blood clot that they found in my lung after some surgery after, actually an injury, and oh my gosh, the meds — the docs wanted to do all kinds of stuff. They’re very worried about this. And so I got in touch with Ron. [laugh] “No, no,” he said, “You don’t want to do that. All you need is aspirin. You don’t need a blood thinner.” And so I went to the doctor I had finally gotten, who pulled some of these other people away from me, and we followed Ron’s protocol, and I’m fine. So, that’s the Ron Gordon story! [laugh]

McKinley:

So, you’re here to tell it — yes, yeah, wow.

Schowalter:

[laugh]

McKinley:

Yes, little do you know when you’re training a graduate student that this is…

Schowalter:

So, I call him my consulting (medical) — concierge.

McKinley:

[laugh] I like it. So, he never did any more rheology, then, published at least?

Schowalter:

No, not after he got into medicine. But he’d like to.

McKinley:

Well, that’s fantastic. So, he’s still someone you keep in touch with?

Schowalter:

Yes.

McKinley:

Excellent. So, during those days, I guess you were also starting to become more and more involved with Society of Rheology, and starting to get involved with the, kind of the executive committee side of things, and so on, as well, right? And AIChE as well, so…

Schowalter:

Yeah. I guess it means that I do enjoy working with people and looking at longer-range influences that you might have on a field. And there’s no question — I think all of us say this — that the Society of Rheology is unique. We talked a little earlier about the fact that it’s all done by volunteers who somehow go ahead and do this, and I think that’s one of its strengths. It has been for me, first of all, an incredible professional experience because of the bright people you talk to, and ideas you get from going to meetings. But also many, many friendships — I’ve mentioned several already — that are solidified by seeing people at these meetings. And I think that’s what professional societies need to be healthy and to propagate. They need to be professional, but not too professional.

McKinley:

[laugh] I like it. Yeah, so you were in the executive committee first — I think ’77 to ’78 — and then became elected to vice president, and finally President ’83 to ’85. So, what are your memories of the key issues of the day? What were the kind of things that people were corresponding about or arguing about at annual meetings?

Schowalter:

Well, I think we had gotten over arguing about “is continuum mechanics going to be around, should we let them run the society, or should we kick them out?” and all this sort of thing.

McKinley:

How did that resolve? They still came, or did they move off to their own…?

Schowalter:

The more reasonable ones came. Truesdell kind of fell away, but I think he was probably becoming less active, too. The age distribution was such that he was probably on his regular path. And the other ones as well. Coleman hung around for a while. Markovitz really hung around, as you know. He has been very influential. I suppose we did wonder about finances and growth and as the bloom would come off the rose of rheology, and what’s really happening to rheometers. And thankfully, people whose origins were here, about whom we don’t have time probably to talk about — Bryce Maxwell and Chris Macosko and Joe Starita — are all Princeton people, really. and their creativity in developing rheometers and then improving them through that period — I think I’ve never thought about it this way before — probably had a significant influence on keeping the Society healthy, and keeping it connected to industrial problems. And that certainly is continued through today.

In my experience in elected positions, whether it’s the Council of AIChE or something else, as a rule of thumb, around every two years, you’re going to have some — bombshell would be the current use in the newspapers today — but something will come up that you don’t solve overnight, that keeps you awake a little bit. And we had one of these during my tenure. There had been an editor of the journal, and before that The Transactions of the Society of Rheology, as it was called for a number of years, and the field was definitely getting more technical, more mathematical, and a number of people felt it was time for some sort of a change in the editorship. And I was thrilled that we were able to persuade Art Metzner to take over that job as editor of the Society, and the previous editor decided to retire. And all you have to do is look at the thriving of that journal during Art’s period of stewardship, and it’s something I feel very proud of, and I think Art’s legacy has benefited from it, too.

McKinley:

I think so. I think that’s very true. Yeah. So how did you do that? Did you form a subcommittee, or was it something the executive committee took on?

Schowalter:

Pretty much the executive committee. You might know better than I what the membership was back in the ’80s and what it is today, but it’s certainly a lot larger today than it was then. And so it — we talked earlier about how it was called the British Rheology Club — it might not have been called the club over here, but to a large extent, it was. You knew most of the people. And so the executive committee pretty much handled things.

McKinley:

Well, I think it worked out very, very well indeed. But you were telling me as part of that, that actually you got the Princeton machine shop involved.

Schowalter:

[laugh] Yes. So, it was decided during this period that we wanted an award for distinguished service. And what do you do? The idea came to one of us — I can’t recall if it was I or someone else — that, well, how about a real nice hourglass? After all, that’s our iconic [laugh] our iconic symbol. And then I think we should all be proud of the fact that at the Houston meeting, I came home with a bag with an hourglass on it, and our cleaning woman has found that just perfect for keeping her rags together. So, I see it every Monday at home.

McKinley:

The Houston organizers will be very happy to know, yes!

Schowalter:

[laugh] So, it’s getting big distribution. Well, the end result of this, we had a wonderful machinist at the department here at Princeton, and I engaged him. I’m sure I showed him one of the duplications of our logo, and out of that came a wonderful, oh, about a ten-to-twelve-inch, I would say, high brass replica of an hourglass, with sand, in a brass enclosure. And I guess that has been continued over the years.

McKinley:

It still continues, and I think the design is, if not identical, it’s essentially unchanged, I think.

Schowalter:

Well, I wish I could tell Walt McKee the lasting influence he has had.

McKinley:

And the first one was awarded, I think, to Ray Meyers, who was the…

Schowalter:

The retiring editor, exactly.

McKinley:

So, that’s wonderful. So, I guess a couple of years later, you actually won the Bingham Medal yourself, from the Society. So, what do you remember about that meeting? That was a couple of years after you had stepped down as president.

Schowalter:

It was 1988. Now, that would have been a year of…

McKinley:

A Congress.

Schowalter:

…international conference.

McKinley:

Yes, Sydney.

Schowalter:

So, would this have been in the spring of ’89?

McKinley:

Probably would have been, then, yes. So, I think the Sydney meeting was ’88.

Schowalter:

Yeah, because I sort of remember it was in Gainesville, I know. And I took my wife. But that probably means I had just moved to Illinois, had been there a couple of months, and that sort of fits in my memory. If you asked me exactly what I talked about, I wouldn’t do a very good job of telling you, but it was a wonderful affair. The part I do remember is that my very close friend and colleague, Bill Russel, was good enough to stand up and tell stories about me for a while, and about all the places on Nassau Street where I bought clothes, and how none of them are in business anymore. [laugh]

McKinley:

[laugh] So you remember your roast then, yes?

Schowalter:

I remember a couple of things about it.

McKinley:

And you were telling me you got to return the favor, though.

Schowalter:

I did, because a few years later, Bill got the prize, and I was able to get back at him. I do recall — might be of interest — saying that I worked pretty hard on this because it isn’t easy to talk about Bill Russel. And I said the funniest thing I can think of about Bill Russel is that there’s nothing funny to think about. To talk about for him. And Norm Wagner came up to me after I had said that and said, “Why didn’t you come to us?” His graduate students.

McKinley:

Right. His graduate students would have known all the things. Yes, yes. Wonderful. That’s great. Come back to one name that you mentioned here that I don’t know much about — Bryce Maxwell. So, he was a colleague of yours, here.

Schowalter:

Yes. Very important figure.

McKinley:

I remember reading papers about the orthogonal rheometer.

Schowalter:

Yes, yes. When I arrived here, there was something called — this was before Dustin Hoffman — called the Plastics Program. And it was in a little temporary building about two blocks away from here. And a mechanical engineer by the name of Louis Rahm — R-A-H-M — ran it. Arthur Tobolsky, who was in the chemistry department, polymer chemist who many will remember, was sort of in and out of that. But Bryce Maxwell, also a mechanical engineer, was involved in it, as sort of the machiney — machines type. But very clever mind. Had a master’s degree; that’s all he needed.

So, the mechanical engineering department went through some ups and downs, and eventually merged with aeronautical engineering, and the chair of the department decided, “Polymers? Who wants polymers, much less plastics, in a department that’s concerned with combustion and rockets and ionic propulsion and all that?” And Dick Wilhelm, who was chair of this department, said, “OK, we’ll take them.” And so, I think it was a win-win situation, and then we had an official polymer program here, as sort of a sub-unit of chemical engineering. It’s when John Gillham was hired, and then after that, a number of other people — Garth Wilkes, other names, mostly more on the polymer chemistry side than rheology.

McKinley:

So, when was this transition?

Schowalter:

This would have been before I became chair, so it would have been back in the ’70s, mid-’70s, probably. But Bryce just had — he would be the last to claim he knew any formal mathematics, but he would invent things, and then the rest of us would try for a long time to figure out what it was [laugh] that he had done. And the orthogonal rheometer is a very good example of that. And Bryce had students, such as Chris Macosko, who have gone on to have their own wonderful careers.

McKinley:

Fantastic. So, at the time also, I guess new journals were starting, so Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics was one that got started in the mid-1970s — ’76, ’77, I think — and you were one of the inaugural editorial board members, I think.

Schowalter:

Yes. And since we talked earlier that I had done a sabbatical in Cambridge in 1970 and became quite close to the Department of Applied Math and Theoretical Physics, there was this feeling in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics — which anybody who has been associated with DAMTP or George will understand — of, “Well, is this really fluid mechanics? And do we want it in the JFM or not?” And I think Ken felt there was room for such a journal. And I can remember somebody of authority saying, “Well, we’ll give it five years, and see how it does.” Well, it has done very well indeed, I think, over time, and served the profession extremely well.

McKinley:

Excellent. Well, you were talking about Cambridge, and that brings us to the subject of sabbaticals, I guess, which as you said over lunch, kind of important things that you remember. So, Cambridge was your second sabbatical, I guess, right? First one was—

Schowalter:

Actually—

McKinley:

Was Minnesota your first?

Schowalter:

Minnesota, right. It’s the second one. Minnesota would have been the first. Each one was very important to my career. I met fascinating people. It’s a little bit like doing your graduate work at a different place than you were an undergraduate. You get a different slant on things. And so there was Minnesota, and Cambridge, and Caltech, and then one of the Grandes Écoles outside of Paris. And each one had its influence. We’ve talked about the book of Mechanics of Non-Newtonian Fluids, and that got proofread and finished off really at Caltech. The colloidal dispersions — a certain amount of that was done while I was in Paris. Cambridge was where I really learned about applied math and how you apply it to problems of two-phase flow with solid particulates and so on. And that had a lot to do with rheology, ultimately.

McKinley:

So, when you were there in 1970, I guess G. I. Taylor was there? Batchelor was there?

Schowalter:

Yes, Taylor was of course at an advanced age, but he would come to seminars in fluid mechanics. I hope I still have it someplace, because I can’t remember what I wrote him about, but I wrote him about something and got a very polite handwritten note back. I learned a little bit about Cambridge etiquette. I remember someone saying, “Well, why don’t you just call George?” Meaning George Batchelor. “Oh, no, I would never do that. I will write him a note.” [laugh] I wish more people behaved that way now, instead of email. [laugh]

McKinley:

Yes, yeah. And you’d get a note back, right?

Schowalter:

You’d get a note back, exactly. And so G. I. wrote back to me and thanked me kindly and duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, whatever it was he said. That was a marvelous experience at Cambridge.

McKinley:

And who were students and postdocs at the time? Who was there at the time?

Schowalter:

That was a remarkable coincidence. I was there at the invitation of Anthony Pearson, who was in chemical engineering, but had sort of one foot in DAMTP, as it was called. And George Batchelor was just becoming seriously interested in suspension rheology. He said, “I don’t understand diffusion. I don’t understand that.” And after he asked you a few questions, you understood that you didn’t understand it either. [laugh] So, he had this by-invitation-only seminar, and by coincidence Anthony and I would walk over, and there was Andy Acrivos, who happened to be there on sabbatical. Gary Leal was there as a postdoc. John Hinch was there as a graduate student. Blake — I forgot his first name — he was in and out of that. But the people who have gone on to distinction was just enormous.

McKinley:

Fantastic. Yeah, that’s really influential. And to take a quick aside, would you like a break? Do you need to take a break, or you’re good?

Schowalter:

You can take one.

McKinley:

I’m fine. Yeah, no, I’m great. That coffee at lunch...

Schowalter:

[laugh]

McKinley:

That was great. So, you alluded to books a little bit. And we haven’t really talked about that so much, but suddenly sabbaticals and book-writing kind of go together. And your first one was this book Mechanics of Non-Newtonian Fluids, which you have very kindly just signed for me. So, tell me about the act of writing that. So, what made you decide — it’s one of the very earliest books in the field, really.

Schowalter:

Well — and this goes back to why 1962 is important as the time we moved into this building — I had mentioned in passing Don Leigh, and I brought his book so you can have a look at it. And we did this summer study or whatever you want to call it — summer school — and Don and I decided, “Let’s write a book.” I said, “Great idea.” Well, I would dabble a little bit, and Don, meanwhile, decided to go off to the University of Kentucky, and he wasn’t going to wait for me, so he went ahead and finished his book. I continued to dabble. And then one day, got an inquiry from a person you may or may not know of — passed away recently — Si Ostrach. [ed. Professor Simon Ostrach (1923-2017), professor at Case Western Reserve University.]

McKinley:

Yes.

Schowalter:

Oh!

McKinley:

I interacted with him throughout NASA microgravity research, actually.

Schowalter:

Of course! Wonderful! Well, then you know his personality and everything.

McKinley:

Yes, I do indeed. [laugh] Yes.

Schowalter:

Great. “Bill, I’m heading up this new series for Pergamon Press. I want you to write a book.” Well, I had a few notes and I said, “Great, OK.” And I signed the contract with Pergamon Press. But as any author learns, you don’t finish a book if you write and work on it when you have time. [laugh]

McKinley:

Right, right. You never finish it.

Schowalter:

It can’t come at the end of everything else. And I’m afraid I tried for several years to do that, and then finally realized, “This is not going to happen.” Meanwhile, I hadn’t communicated with Pergamon, and Pergamon hadn’t communicated with me. But now I was going to get serious and finish this book. So, I wrote — I think Si was long gone as whatever he was.

McKinley:

As editor, yeah.

Schowalter:

And I wrote to the person working for Pergamon, and they said, “Oh, well, we’re not interested in doing that book anymore.”

McKinley:

[laugh]

Schowalter:

And I was both crestfallen and livid. And so I — you have to remember, it’s before email, text messaging, and all that. I wrote a letter to Robert Maxwell, who was a huge publishing mogul. I’m trying to remember the name of the guy who might be the equivalent to him. Rupert Murdoch. He was almost the Rupert Murdoch of his day. And I said, “They can’t do this to me. I’m going to the top!” I actually got a letter back from him, and he said, “Of course we’re going to do your book.” [laugh] And so I was back on the roster and decided I’d better be serious.

So, what I did for two summers — my wife’s family had a little cottage, and it was a cottage, about 40 miles north of Milwaukee on Lake Michigan — and we had young kids, and she would go out there for the summer, and I would come out for maybe two or three weeks during the summer. And this will answer one of your questions that you asked, wrote to me about. So, the drill was: my parents, who a little bit later moved to a retirement center in Madison, were still living in the home in which we all grew up, but the house was empty. And so I would stay there during the week. And again, no hookups with electronic publishing and any journal you wanted. I had my sister’s bedroom just filled with all the reprints and everything else that I could possibly need, and occasionally had to go to the Marquette Milwaukee Library to look up things. Worked hard all week long, and then spent the weekend with my family out in Lake Michigan. And that’s how the book sort of got finished. But 1836 is the address of my parents’ home.

McKinley:

I see, yes. So, what I had asked Bill, just for the record, is that there’s a last sentence of the preface that says, “Finally, there is the quiet room at 1836 and all it connotes.”

Schowalter:

It was quiet.

McKinley:

It was quiet. The kids were not allowed in that room, I imagine?

Schowalter:

They weren’t even there. They were up in the cottage.

McKinley:

That’s fantastic. Excellent. So, there was another book that came out at the same time, which was the very first version or first edition of Bird, Armstrong, and Hassager. Did you guys — did you correspond with Bob about the content of his book or how…?

Schowalter:

No, we didn’t, and the foci are quite different. But the thing that was a surprise — that Astarita and Marucci, because…

McKinley:

Ah! Yes.

Schowalter:

…that book is very close to ours and came out about the same time. I can’t even — I think maybe this came out a little sooner than theirs, but I’m not sure. But they were heading in more of the same direction.

McKinley:

Did you know them? Did you know both of them at the time?

Schowalter:

Yes, both. In fact—

McKinley:

Probably from the Congress, I guess.

Schowalter:

Well, the Congress, and then — this goes back to why professional and personal relationships are so important and a lot of fun. They knew I was in Cambridge, and so Gianni had invited me to come down to Naples for a month…

McKinley:

Oh!

Schowalter:

…and give lectures, which I did.

McKinley:

I’m sure! [laugh]

Schowalter:

And that’s how I got to know Pino and Gianni very, very well.

McKinley:

Was Pino a student at the time, or was he just starting…

Schowalter:

I think he was still a student, but obviously headed for great things.

McKinley:

The other thing I noticed about the book is that you acknowledge Roger Tanner a lot for this thorough review. So, you had met him, I guess through Brown as well?

Schowalter:

Probably through Brown and then other subsequent meetings. I think he even spent not a full sabbatical, but he would have spent a little time here. And then he was a faculty member at Brown. I gave seminars there. He gave seminars here. That sort of thing.

McKinley:

How did he get so directly involved in the book?

Schowalter:

I recall telling the publisher — at this point, I guess we were on decent terms again [laugh]…

McKinley:

[laugh]

Schowalter:

…that I did want someone whom I respected to go through the book and make comments before it got into final print. And my recollection, which I believe is correct, is they engaged Roger. And I obviously suggested him. And he did a wonderful job of making suggestions.

McKinley:

Fantastic, that’s great. So, let’s turn to Colloidal Dispersions. Probably a very different experience, I guess, because it was a jointly co-authored book, and a different publisher, Cambridge.

Schowalter:

Yes.

McKinley:

I guess they were enthusiastic throughout. But that has been extremely well-cited. When I looked before coming down here, it’s got over 5,800 citations.

Schowalter:

Oh, I didn’t know that myself.

McKinley:

Yeah. So that’s as of January, and of course it constantly changes. But it’s certainly one of the definitive sources in the area. So, that was later. That was in the 1980s.

Schowalter:

Right.

McKinley:

But what was it like writing with three people?

Schowalter:

Well, I remember having a conversation with Bob Bird, where he said, “I can’t—” Probably after this book came out, after the first book came out, he said, “I can’t imagine writing a book by myself.” And I said, “I can’t imagine having co-authors.” [laugh]

McKinley:

[laugh]

Schowalter:

But this worked out just fine. The three of us knew each other extremely well. They’re very close colleagues and professional friends. And I think also, we had compatibility without more than a certain amount of overlap, and the complementarity — just a lucky accident — worked out extremely well, both in terms of our personalities, and in terms of what we knew, what to write. And Bill Russel, no doubt — the authors are alphabetical, but they’re also in that order of how much they contributed to the creativity of the volume — Bill was the pilot of the whole thing. He did 90-plus percent of the connections with Cambridge Press, with the editor there. We would meet every Friday afternoon. This was mostly after I’d stepped down as chair, but I can’t remember — but we had a meeting room we would go to off the chair’s office, and spend Friday afternoon talking with each other, and then there would be assignments for the next Friday afternoon. And I still have some question about [laugh] how I fit into the three, but as far as the first two are concerned, Bill would do the writing, and Dudley would say why that won’t work [ed. Dudley A. Saville (1933-2006), professor of chemical engineering at Princeton].

McKinley:

[laugh]

Schowalter:

And maybe I was the referee. But these weren’t arguments. They’re incapable of arguing.

McKinley:

So, you didn’t divide the book up chapter by chapter?

Schowalter:

No, no, no.

McKinley:

It was a much more collaborative…

Schowalter:

This was very definitely — we were all in for all of it. But obviously, the electrochemistry part would be done by Dudley, and then we’d talk about it. But all three of us felt that we were part of a whole book and took responsibility that way. But Dudley is — was, passed away a few years ago, unfortunately — a huge intellect, very careful about everything he does. Bill clearly knew colloidal dispersions better than the other two of us, and probably knew more about the rheological aspects of it and the fluid mechanics aspects. And so, it worked out extremely well. And I think we got the book finished about the time we expected to, which was a good thing.

McKinley:

How long did it take?

Schowalter:

Without knowing exactly, let me just say four years.

McKinley:

Four years, OK. Wonderful. I think that might be your phone.

Schowalter:

That will go away.

McKinley:

Is that OK? That’s OK, right? So yeah, as you mentioned, Dudley passed away from cancer, I think, in 2006.

Schowalter:

Lung cancer, yes.

McKinley:

So yes.

Schowalter:

Very — I came back here in 2003, so I had three years with him, but very, very tough.

McKinley:

Very tough. And there’s an annual Saville Lecture.

Schowalter:

Saville Lecture in his memory. If I can digress just a little bit about [the Lecture?] from an administrative point of view — so Dudley passed away, and he was, as I said, he was so careful. He never had a huge corps of graduate students, but they did singular work. And so now what can we do in Dudley’s memory? Well, his wife and some of us had fairly grand ideas about something like a lectureship, and so the development office stepped in and said, “Well, this always happens. The survivors want to do something big, but one has to be realistic. And maybe some books in the library that have a plaque in his memory.” And this sort of thing. And we said, “No, this isn’t gonna work.” Well, it turns out that…

[ed. A short section of this transcript, and the accompanying audio, has been redacted at this point to protect the privacy of an anonymous donor to the lectureship.]

McKinley:

Super. So, you mentioned a couple of times getting involved in department administration. You became department head here at Princeton, and then went on to leave Princeton and become dean of engineering at Illinois. So, you really enjoy the academic — the challenges of academic administration.

Schowalter:

Yes, as well as I’ve enjoyed a lot of other things about university life. But I finished my third term as chair here, and I’m sure they were ready, and I was ready, for a change, and so I got a sabbatical. I had the Guggenheim — that’s when I went to France. And I got this, might have been a phone call from Tom Hanratty going way back. And I — people say I returned to Illinois, but I had no particular attachment to it. And Tom said, “We’re looking for a dean of engineering.” Now mind you, engineering at Illinois does not include chemical engineering. Chemical engineering is part of the School of Chemical Sciences. And Tom said, “I want to nominate you for the deanship.” And I said, “Tom, that’s very kind of you” and so on. He said, “Send me a CV.” I said, “I don’t think I’m interested.” He said, “Well, if you don’t send me a CV, I’m going to make one up!” [laugh]

McKinley:

[laugh]

Schowalter:

So, I said, “OK.”

McKinley:

You said, “I’d better send him one.” Yes, yes.

Schowalter:

So, that was probably sometime in the fall. Because my mother-in-law was ailing, we were coming back to Milwaukee over Christmas time. And they said, “We want to fly up and have an offsite interview with you — the dean’s committee.” That all fell apart because of a snowstorm. They did end up interviewing me at O’Hare on my way back to France. And I remember after about an hour coming out, and Jane had been waiting, and she said, “Well, how did it go?” I said, “Oh, it was fun. [laugh] Let’s go back to Paris.” And one thing led to another, and then in the end, it was, you know, do I ever want to be a dean? And the clock was ticking. If I do want to be one, this is the time. And is it likely that I would be a dean at a place in engineering better than Illinois? And that was no, and so I ended up going. And so I was dean of a college to which I did not belong, which was just fantastic, because I was a professor of chemical engineering.

McKinley:

Probably in some sense, a little easier, right?

Schowalter:

Oh, absolutely.

McKinley:

You’re not going to be accused of being biased or anything.

Schowalter:

No. I had a postdoc over in ChemE, and I got together with him once a week and it worked out wonderfully.

McKinley:

Wonderful. Going back to earlier, when you were at Princeton, I noticed looking at your resume that you started as an interim head, and then actually you became associate dean of the whole School of Engineering and Applied Science before you became department head. So, kind of an interesting trajectory, there.

Schowalter:

Yeah, the interim has to do with that fellow, Leon Lapidus, whose lounge this is named after. He went on sabbatical while he was chair, and so I stepped in for him. And then the associate dean’s job was — it was a relatively minor affair. I had another office around the corner, but this is a pretty small place compared to MIT or Illinois or anyplace like that. But it was actually a very good training ground. I learned a lot about how you get along or don’t get along with the upper administration.

McKinley:

And I can take a little biased personal aside here — so Jimmy Wei must have been on the faculty here for part of that time.

Schowalter:

Let’s see if I’ve got the dates right. I think no.

McKinley:

No?

Schowalter:

That’s — I’ll try not to make this too long. Jim came to give a seminar a couple of years after I was hired on the faculty. Dick Wilhelm, the chair of the department, consulted with Mobil. Jim was working for Mobil. I didn’t know it, being a lowly assistant professor, but Dick very much wanted to hire Jim, and that’s why he was giving the seminar. The Wei-Prater stuff on reaction kinetics was at its height right then. And I guess Jim — my understanding is Jim was given an offer, thought about it carefully, and decided to stay at Mobil, but then of course subsequently went to Delaware and to MIT and so on, and then became dean here. So, when we moved there [to Illinois], he moved here as dean.

McKinley:

So, he came as dean.

Schowalter:

And I would have been at Illinois at that point.

McKinley:

So, while you were at Illinois, I know one of the big things was another move, like engineering here moved to a quadrangle. And you were involved in raising money or developing plans for the engineering quadrangle in Illinois as well, right?

Schowalter:

Yeah. That was great fun. And I have to give most of the credit to one of the associate deans I had. It’s just on such a different scale [laugh] than this place, that I had a staff and some very, very talented and dedicated people. And there were some things in the works when I arrived, but it was a lucky time to be there, because it kind of came together, and we did develop a whole, what they call North Engineering Campus, and that was a lot of fun. Well, you remember the good parts, of course. [laugh] But it was very gratifying.

McKinley:

And the outcome [came together?]

Schowalter:

It really did. And David Grainger has been a wonderful philanthropist for Illinois and had a lot to do with making it happen.

McKinley:

And Chip Zukoski was on the faculty at the time?

Schowalter:

He was on the faculty in chemical engineering. For a while, he was my putative boss, because I had a chemical engineering faculty appointment. And as you know, he has now gotten involved in administration.

McKinley:

Well, that’s what I was going to say — he became dean of engineering maybe right after you, did he, or…?

Schowalter:

No, he never became dean of engineering at all, no. He became vice chancellor for research.

McKinley:

Ah, right.

Schowalter:

You know, the money person.

McKinley:

Yes, yes. And then moved on, yes.

Schowalter:

Yeah.

McKinley:

So, after becoming dean for I guess twelve or fourteen years — thirteen years, something like that — 1989 —

Schowalter:

Eleven, and we stayed eleven or twelve, eleven-and-a-half, maybe, and then we stayed on for about three more years.

McKinley:

But you then had a very interesting career move to become involved on an academic administration side or advising side, at least, with Singapore. So, tell me how that came about.

Schowalter:

I guess the real hook that started it all was Singapore would send us some incredibly capable undergraduate engineering students every year, and pay us to take care of them, and they got a free ride. It was a little bit like ROTC because then they were indentured to go back. And the Singapore government is very smart and wise, and they — it’s a little bit like going into a big law firm. They work these people very hard, and if they’re doing something in a government office, they’ll pluck them out and they’ll pay them a very high salary for government workers. And that’s why Singapore has very smart leadership. They know how to do it.

McKinley:

They reward them, yes.

Schowalter:

I wanted to make — most of this money came back to us in engineering, and I used that to fund our international program, which was substantial. And so I would go to Singapore periodically to make sure everything was working well. And you know how it is: they invite you to give a lecture, and then a couple other things. And then when I was stepping down at Illinois, Philip Yeo, who was head of the Economic Development Board in Singapore and also ran A*STAR eventually, said, “Well, come on over and think about doing some things here.” And so I thought, “Oh, OK,” and met Shih Choon Fong, who was the brand new president of NUS, National University of Singapore. He had come from Brown, Singaporean, but an American citizen. And we just had dinner together and seemed to click. And he said, “I want you to come over here and help me turn this very good national university into a major international research university.” The thing I remember about it is, I said, “Yeah, sounds like a good idea. I’ll get out of the hair of my successor at Illinois, be here for maybe a year or six months, and we’ll do this.” And I think he wanted to take the offer back. He said, “You mean you’ve been in academics all your life, and you think anything will happen in six months?” [laugh]

McKinley:

[laugh] Well, maybe he turned out to be right, because you were there for quite a lot longer.

Schowalter:

Yeah. So, we eventually iterated to that I would spend three months there per year, I think it was over two years. I was there for 11 years. I’m now on my third president [laugh] at the National University of Singapore.

McKinley:

You must have interacted or crossed paths with Bob Brown.

Schowalter:

Absolutely, absolutely. Bob, as you know, spent a lot of time there, with NUS, to be sure, but also at a much higher level of the deputy prime minister. But was very, very able and helpful to Singapore. We would have periodic phone conversations with committees and so on. I can remember one day going into this room where the Singapore team was located, and Bob got on and said, “Well, let’s see, you haven’t yet had your coffee, and I haven’t yet had my martini.” [laugh]

McKinley:

[laugh]

Schowalter:

Because there’s a 12- or 13-hour time difference, depending. But he was very helpful. And I think he enjoyed it as much as I did.

McKinley:

You were there for a number of years. But you then followed Shih Choon to Saudi Arabia, I guess, as well.

Schowalter:

To KAUST, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. And he — this is another standard ploy, as many of us know — they put him on the search committee to find the founding president, but I think all along they had him in mind. And eventually he agreed to do it. And that’s a whole interview in itself, because it’s such an unusual place, I’m afraid placed in some jeopardy, maybe, now, with the current political situation. But I think the king — King Abdullah at that time was sincere. He wanted to create a new “house of wisdom,” as he put it, and got Western consultants and people to tell him what to do and engaged places like MIT and Stanford and others to help him kickstart the whole thing. And it was very exciting.

McKinley:

Yeah, and I hope it’s as successful as the NUS one was.

Schowalter:

Oh, we all do. We all do, yeah.

McKinley:

So, contrast those two. They’re very different places, right? But both NUS and I guess other — and Nanyang Technical University are now ranked 11^th and 12^th or at least certainly top in the world. So, something A*STAR did, they did right.

Schowalter:

Absolutely. And I think, sure, they made mistakes. Let me talk about Singapore first. They made mistakes and I think allowed some Westerners, primarily from the U.S. and the U.K., I think, to take advantage of them. And that has had a backlash which probably has relaxed again now, and they’re much more realistic in their hiring. And I think people who go there are more realistic in what’s expected of them. So, I look at that long-term as a good thing. And in many respects, as you mentioned, similar to KAUST, and the top decided, “We’re going to do this.” So, it came top-down.

McKinley:

Top-down decision, yeah.

Schowalter:

“We want to do it quickly.” We thought Singapore did things quickly [laugh], but the king just said to Aramco, “Send a crew over there, and build me a university in the sand pile in so many months.” And they did. So, there were creaks and cracks and all of that, that Choon Fong had to take care of. But the big difference of course is obvious. In Singapore, there’s a fundamental foundation on which to build. Saudi Arabia, there’s this hope that maybe it would do something permanent. And maybe it still will. To give you an idea of how some people were hoping that would happen, Shirley Tilghman was president of Princeton at the time, she is a feminist if you’ve ever known one. She was on two boards, Google and KAUST, and so she was there to make it happen. I have kind of lost touch with them, so I’m not quite sure how things are today.

McKinley:

I guess I don’t really know myself, but you’re not in touch with them very much anymore?

Schowalter:

No, no.

McKinley:

Shih Choon is still there?

Schowalter:

Oh, no. No.

McKinley:

He has gone back to Singapore?

Schowalter:

He said, “I liked your title so much,” that he’s now senior advisor… [laugh]

McKinley:

I see. [laugh]

Schowalter:

…to the Chinese Academy, but also still on the faculty at NUS. He goes back there in an advising capacity. I was told he was chair of the search committee to try to find a new head for chemical engineering.

McKinley:

So, in the last few years, you’ve written articles about globalization and about maybe concerns or opportunities for U.S. universities as they try to compete in global research environments. So, what are your thoughts on that? When I look, the top-ranked universities are still all U.S., but maybe that’s going to change.

Schowalter:

Well, it’s a moving target, of course, because we’re all swimming in a political sea over which we have very limited, if any, control. So, who knows? Extrapolation is always difficult; it may be impossible now. But I think Tom Friedman’s idea about a flat world long-term is correct. We don’t know what long-term means yet. Of course, we are going to become less singular, if that’s a possible word, than we used to be, as these other places come up. But yes, you want to be conscious of that, but it isn’t necessarily a threat to your existence. And it’s going to happen whether we’re engaged with the rest of the world — I’m talking about now academically — or not. So, I think, sure, it’s a concern, that, gosh, these people come over, we educate them, and then they go back. Aren’t we just giving them what they want? Yes, we are in a sense, but when you travel globally as you have — and I have and most academics have now — you realize the importance of the soft power that comes back to you from that. When I used to, as dean, go to Japan and Taiwan and Singapore and other places and have alumni meetings of engineers, they have an affinity, an affection for their home institution here that you just can’t buy. And if they don’t have it to the U.S., they’re going to have it to somebody else. And so we might as well be there.

McKinley:

We might as well be the ones, yes. A rising tide lifts all boats, I think.

Schowalter:

Yeah.

McKinley:

So, well, as we reach the end of this discussion, I’m just going to come back to the SoR, I think. So, I saw you at the annual meeting last October, and that’s what nucleated this discussion. So that was in Houston. It was our 90^th meeting. And they’re bigger than ever, I think. This was the largest ever. What are your thoughts? Does it still have the same feel? Has it changed dramatically?

Schowalter:

Well, it has certainly changed. Happily, you know. If it doesn’t, we’re in trouble. In fact, when I go to those Sunday receptions — I don’t know if everybody else has the same feeling I do — you’ve been on an airplane, you get your stuff in your room, you have a chance to go to the reception and have a drink and a little supper before you go to bed, and you go into this room, and you hear all this noise, and you see all these people — it’s a wonderful, uplifting experience. You don’t see many people you know, when you’re my age, and that’s a good thing. [laugh] So, that was very gratifying to me, since I had missed a couple of meetings the last couple of years.

The part that gave me pause was when I went to the business meeting and found out that the membership hasn’t reflected that huge attendance. And so, you ask yourself, “Well, what’s going on here?” And you are closer to it than I; you might have your own ideas. But I wonder if we’re caught up — because I know similar things are happening to other societies, in terms of where are we going, and what do we do with membership. Let me sound like a concerned editorial writer now, that can write with no responsibility and say, “Oh, maybe it’s the millennials, and they want to come and go. They want to pick and choose and table hop,” let’s say. It reminds me a little bit of the companies which I think are now getting away from it, that used to have hotel desks. You know, you didn’t have an office, you hotelled it. And that was all the thing for a few years. But the consequence of that is, you don’t own anything. But they don’t own you. [laugh] It’s mutual.

And I think what society and other societies have to do is see, is there a way we can somehow maintain the equity and ownership idea? Somebody has to take ownership of the society. It can’t just be there for the person who wants to give a paper occasionally. How do you do that? I don’t know. But that seems to me — maybe the executive committee is already spending a lot of time on this. But I think we’re in a sea now, where that kind of thing is happening. And is there something we can do that will ensure the future success of the society? Because it’s because people like yourself and many others, we all know, have taken ownership of the society and agreed to volunteer, because they think it’s important for them and important for society. And if we can communicate that to these people that come to give papers, then I think all will be well.

McKinley:

Fantastic. Well, that’s certainly something the executive committee is really actively trying to think about it, and it’s — we don’t have any easy answer.

Schowalter:

I don’t think there are easy answers.

McKinley:

No, no. Well, Bill, thank you so much for the time this afternoon.

Schowalter:

Thank you for sticking with me. I’m going to look at my watch for the first time.

McKinley:

[laugh] That’s a good sign.

Schowalter:

I might have beat Bob Bird, I don’t know.

McKinley:

[laugh] Well, thanks very much. It’s — what is it? It’s 3:35. So, on a Friday afternoon, I think that’s a good time to stop.

Schowalter:

I do, too.

McKinley:

Thank you. I’m going to hit pause, then.

[End]