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PETER VICTOR DANCKWERTS
1916-1984
BY JOHN DAVIDSON
PROFESSOR PETER VICTOR DANCKWERTS, G.C., M.B.E., F.R.S.,
F.Eng., Shell Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Uni-
versity of Cambridge from 1959 to 1977, and fellow of Pem-
broke College, diecl on October 25, 1984, at the age of sixty-
eight. The son of Vice Admiral V. H. Danckwerts, he was
educated at Winchester and Ballio} colleges, Oxford.
His war record! was ctistinguishecI. As a sublieutenant in
the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, he was awarded the
George Cross in 1940 for disarming land mines that had
fallen on London. The boIcI, imaginative approaches needed
for this work for example, lengths of string were used to
extract fuses from the mines were characteristic of his sub-
sequent scientific endeavors. He was wounclect cluring the in-
vasion of Sicily and later joined the staff of Combined Oper-
ations Headquarters. In 1943 he was appointee! Member of
the Order of the British Empire.
Danckwerts's engineering education began after the war
when he used a Commonwealth Funs! (now Harkness Fund)
fellowship to study chemical engineering at the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology (MIT) for an M.S. This educa-
tional period at MIT (from 1946 to 1948) was a turning
point in Danckwerts's career: He often spoke of the rigors of
the course and the value of the MIT Practice School. While
at MIT, he met T. R. C. Fox, who had just been appointed
~3
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114
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Shell Professor of Chemical Engineering at Cambridge anc!
was also learning the subject at that time. Fox recruited
Danckwerts to become a member of Cambridge's original
chemical engineering team, and it was there in the early
1950s that Danckwerts established an international reputa-
tion with a few remarkable papers.
The best known of these is his paper on continuous flow
reactors, which gives basic theorems about the distribution
of residence times. During the early 1950s, when Danckwerts
was a junior faculty member at Cambridge, he began work
on gas absorption into liquids, a topic that preoccupied him
for many years and led to his ~ 970 book Gas-Liquid Reactions,
a standard work on the subject.
Danckwerts's early scientific efforts were a mode} for what
academic research shouIc! be in that minimal funds were
needed and there was no necessity for the plans or proposals
or grant applications that now constitute the administrative
millstone we have come to associate with research. In his
Autobiographical Note, which gives a far better impression of
the man than these poor phrases, Danckwerts described his
early research period as one of"academic indolence."
Yet like so many of his remarks, this is not to be taken
literally: Like Englishmen before him but to a lesser extent
now, he cultivated the notion of effortless achievement; only
cads should be seen working. In the same style, Danckwerts
professed an antipathy toward mathematics, even though his
own discoveries on residence times, gas absorption, and
mixing depended on the imaginative combination of
simple mathematics and acute insight into physical and
chemical realities.
His work anticipated what might be called the Bird, Stew-
art, and I~ightfoot era of chemical engineering; he was one
of the first and most outspoken critics of an education based
on the assumption that all problems can be solved by striking
out terms in generalizecl equations. Moreover, he believed
that a highly mathematical education dicl not promote indus-
· · .
tr~a Innovation.
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PETER VICTOR DANCKWERTS
115
It was with industrial innovation in mind that Danckwerts
left Cambridge in 1954 to work under Lord (then Sir Chris-
topher) Hinton at the Atomic Energy Authority, but he soon
returned to academic life. In 1956 he was appointed profes-
sor of chemical engineering science at Imperial College; in
1959 he returned to Cambridge as Shell Professor of Chem-
ical Engineering. While there, he established a flourishing
research school that inclucled an active group continuing his
earlier work on surface renewal at gas-liquid interfaces.
Danckwerts prover] to be an effective department head at
Cambridge, notwithstanding his distaste for administration:
He regarded university committees as "politbureaus." Again,
however, it is necessary to distinguish between off-the-cuff
comments and his conduct of affairs. While affecting to de-
spise elaborate calculations, Danckwerts ensured that the
Cambridge department was the first in the United Kingdom
to have its own computer an IBM 1620. In the same way,
he established a departmental electronics service. Although
he dicl not care for the minutiae of teaching, he initiated cle-
sign projects as a regular feature of the course, in line with
the Institution of Chemical Engineers' requirements.
Danckwerts was active in this group and served as its pres-
ident from 1965 to ~ 966. He formed, with a characteristically
open-ended! title, the Exploratory Committee, whose inno-
vative function was to award industrial fellowships to enable
faculty members to spenct a year reporting on research topics
that were likely to be useful to industry.
From 1958 to 1982 Danckwerts was executive editor of
Chemical Engineering Science and cluring his tenure created
one of the leacling journals in the fielcI. In this work, Danck-
werts not only helped promote the welfare of chemical engi-
neering, but in a modest way also contributed to the rise of
one of our latter-day press barons, Robert Maxwell, who was
one of the first to recognize the commercial opportunities in
publishing scientific research.
In his clay, Danckwerts was a great traveler. In addition to
maintaining contact with the United States, he visited India,
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Australia, anc! the Soviet Union. During the early 1960s, a
Russian research stuclent now heat] of an institute spent
a year in Cambridge. Always an acute observer of humorous
paradoxes, Danckwerts remarked that the visitor had saicI,
after discussions about British government inertia, "In Rus-
sia we also have bureaucracies."
Danckwerts retained an affection for the United States and
tract a successful year in North Carolina in 1976, forming a
link that endures—the Cambridge Chemical Engineering
Department has permanently establishect the North Carolina
State University Prize, which is given for the best student re-
search project.
Danckwerts's election as a foreign associate of the U.S. Na-
tional Academy of Engineering in 1978 greatly pleasecl him.
It was fitting that his last honor, the year after retirement,
shouIc! come from the country that had provided his formal
education in the subject to which he had made such brilliant
contributions.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
shell professor
