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J OE M A U K S M I T H
1916–2009
Elected in 1975
“For leadership in chemical reaction kinetics and
thermodynamics and teaching of these subjects.”
BY ALAN JACKMAN AND BEN MCCOY
SUBMITTED BY THE NAE HOME SECRETARY
J OE M. SMITH, professor of chemical engineering emeritus at
the University of California, Davis, died at his home in Davis
on June 7, 2009, at the age of 93. He was among a handful of
educators who truly blazed new trails for chemical engineering
in the 20th century. His groundbreaking textbooks on
thermodynamics and kinetics have had profound influences.
Joe was born in Sterling, Colorado, on February 14, 1916.
His family moved to Long Beach, California, when he was
very young, and he was educated in the Long Beach public
schools. At Long Beach Polytechnic High School, influenced by
two outstanding teachers, he excelled at math and chemistry.
Neither of his parents had a college education but his mother,
in particular, was eager for Joe to attend college. When he was
admitted to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech),
his parents moved to Pasadena so that he could live at home
and afford to attend college.
The decision to major in chemical engineering was the
result of a process of elimination. Joe was not interested in
mechanical drawing, civil engineering, or physics, but he
loved chemistry and mathematics. So in his junior year he
declared a major in applied chemistry, the name that Caltech
used for its undergraduate chemical engineering program in
those days, although it already offered graduate degrees in
chemical engineering. Joe remembered the Caltech program
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294 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
as having been difficult. All chemical engineering classes were
taught by either B. H. Sage or W. N. Lacey. They were the entire
Caltech chemical engineering faculty at the time. Joe said that
Lacey had a particularly strong influence on his career. It was
Lacey who first introduced him to thermodynamics. He was
also influenced by Lacey’s Socratic teaching style, a style that
Joe used for much of his career. He graduated in 1937 with a
bachelor of science degree in applied chemistry.
Joe then took a job with the Texas Company (later Texaco
and now Chevron) in its design department on the 21st
floor of the Chrysler Building in New York. There, among
other projects, he worked on the design of a “stabilizer” to
remove low molecular weight hydrocarbons from a gasoline
fraction. He was eager to return to California and moved to
the Natural Gasoline Department of Standard Oil of California
(later Chevron) in Santa Fe Springs. While there he worked
on distillation and absorption to remove other hydrocarbon
gases from methane. He spent about two years there before
moving to Chevron’s El Segundo refinery, where he worked
on thermal cracking.
At this time, with almost four years of industrial experience,
Joe found himself wanting more challenges and he decided
to return to school. It was February 1941, and the United
States was contemplating entering World War II. Some of his
colleagues questioned his sanity for leaving a safe, deferred job
to return to school and possible military service. Nevertheless,
he headed off for doctoral studies at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, the only school to which he applied.
Fortunately, MIT wrote a note to his draft board and he
received a deferment.
There were fewer graduate students during the war years
and MIT followed a shortened academic calendar, so things
moved very fast. Joe supported himself his first semester, after
which he received a fellowship and a teaching assistantship.
At the time, students sometimes had little choice on thesis
projects. In Joe’s case he was asked by W. K. Lewis to work
on a project funded by the Chemical Warfare Service to study
adsorption in gas masks, which became his thesis work.
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J OE M A U K S M I T H 295
Joe completed his dissertation in 1943 and accepted a position
as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. It was
there that he met and married Essie McCutcheon. During his
first year of teaching, a position opened at Purdue University.
Joe was attracted to Purdue by the opportunity to develop a
teaching program in chemical engineering thermodynamics.
He had taken advanced thermodynamics courses at Caltech
from Sage and at MIT from J. A. Beattie (of the Beattie-Bridgeman
equation of state) and was excited by the opportunity. So
he moved to Purdue University in 1945. In developing a
new course in thermodynamics for undergraduate chemical
engineers, he discovered that there was no appropriate
textbook for undergraduate chemical engineers and started
writing Introduction to Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949).
Joe spent 12 years at Purdue University, and he fondly
recalled this period as the most satisfying years of his teaching
career. It was during those years that he developed his teaching
style and an interest in reaction kinetics and reactor design
that would remain the focus of his research for the rest of his
career. He wrote another text, Chemical Engineering Kinetics
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956).
By 1957, Joe had become well known and was sought for
various positions. He decided that it might be interesting to
try his hand at administration, and so he accepted a position as
dean of technology at the University of New Hampshire. He
quickly realized that the role of a dean did not suit him well.
After a year in that post, he decided to move on. He accepted
a position as chair of chemical engineering at Northwestern
University, moving there in 1958. This was a period of rapid
change and Joe hired several new faculty members who would
profoundly change chemical engineering at Northwestern.
In August 1961, eager to return to California, Joe accepted
an offer from the University of California, Davis, to help found
a college of engineering. Because such a college did not yet
exist, Joe started his UC Davis career as a member of the Food
Science and Technology Faculty in the College of Agriculture.
In 1962 the regents authorized the College of Engineering, and
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296 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Joe’s appointment shifted to the new College of Engineering
almost transparently. He became the founding chair of the
Department of Chemical Engineering and remained at UC
Davis until he reached UC’s mandatory retirement age in
1986. He maintained an active research program long after his
retirement.
Joe was one of the most influential chemical engineering
educators in the history of the profession. He started his
academic career near the end of World War II, a time of great
change in chemical engineering. Shortly after arriving at
Purdue, he started writing Introduction to Chemical Engineering
Thermodynamics. Drafts of the text were used at Purdue until
1949, when the first edition was published. Hendrick Van Ness
joined him as coauthor of the second edition, published in 1959.
More than 60 years later and in its seventh edition, with third
coauthor M. M. Abbott, this volume is still in use and is by far
the best-selling textbook in the history of chemical engineering.
While still at Purdue, Joe wrote a second textbook, Chemical
Engineering Kinetics, which also became the seminal text in
the field, significantly changing the way chemical reaction
engineering is taught.
Over the years Joe won numerous awards and honors,
including most of the major American Institute of Chemical
Engineers awards: the R. H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical
Reaction Engineering, the Warren K. Lewis Award for
Chemical Engineering Education, and the William H. Walker
Award for Excellence. Joe was proudest of the American
Society of Engineering Education’s Union Carbide Lectureship
Award (1970) and his admission to the National Academy of
Engineering (1975).
Joe loved teaching, and students appreciated his
individualized approach to education. His teaching style was
greatly influenced by one of his professors at Caltech, and
many of his students are now professors and emulate his style.
Joe’s influential textbooks are testaments to his commitment to
teaching.
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J OE M A U K S M I T H 297
Joe was very humble about his accomplishments and
contributions. When asked to explain how he had become so
successful, he attributed it to his many very bright and hard-
working graduate and postdoctoral students who “did the
real work” and to his wife, Essie McCutcheon Smith, whose
flexibility allowed him the freedom to pursue his teaching and
research. With respect to Introduction to Chemical Engineering
Thermodynamics, as noted above, Joe thought that he was
simply in the right place at the right time. Could it be that some
people are able to define the right place and the right time?
Joe and his wife endowed the Joe and Essie Smith Chair
in Chemical Engineering in 1996 at UC Davis. The chair
is dedicated to the support of outstanding young faculty
members.
Joe is survived by his two daughters, Rebecca Conrad and
Marsha Torbert; six grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and
an untold number of academic children and grandchildren.
