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ERNEST W
.
1895-1993
THIELE
WRITTEN BY JAMES P. KOHN
SUBMITTED BY THE NAE EIOME SECRETARY
ON NOVEMBER 29, 1993, only nine days short of his ninety-eighth
birthday, Ernest W. Thiele died in Presbyterian Nursing Home
in Evanston, Illinois. His longest professional work experiences
were with the StandarcI Oil Company of Tncliana and the
University of Notre Dame. He retired as associate director of
research at Standard Oil (now the Amoco Corporation) in 1960
after thirty-five years there en c! then served as a visiting professor
of chemical engineering at Notre Dame until 1970. His name
was known to every chemical engineer trained after 1927, since
by then all departments of chemical engineering were teaching
the McCabe-Thiele method for determining clistilIation
parameters. After 1939, most chemical engineers interested in
designing chemical reactors employing solid catalysts became
familiar with the Thiele modulus and catalyst electiveness
factors, which were inventions of Thiele.
Ernest Thiele was born on December 8, 1895, in Chicago,
Illinois. He earned an A.B. degree from Loyola University
(Chicago) in 1916. While serving briefly in the U.S. Army, he
was stationed at the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he
was a student of chemical engineering. He received a B.S. in
chemical engineering at Illinois in 1919.
After graduation, he spent six months as a process analyst
for Swift and Company in Chicago and later in Baltimore. He
then was employer! as a chemical engineer with Peoples Gas,
269
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270
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Light and Coke Company in Chicago from 1920 to 1922. In
the fall of 1922 he started graduate study in chemical engi-
neering uncler Professor R. T. Haslam at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT). He obtained a master of sci-
ence degree in 1923 and a doctor of science degree in 1925.
While waiting for his doctorate reaclers to read his dissertation
on steam-carbon reactions, he clevelopecI the idea that result-
ed in the McCabe-Thiele method of graphical design of
fractionating columns. The paper was published in Industrial
and Engineering Chemistry (~E Chem.) in 1925. After leaving
MIT in 1925, he joined the StanclarcI Oil Company of Indiana
as a chemical engineer. He became assistant director of re-
search in 1935 and associate director of research in 1950.
During the wartime development of atomic energy, he was on
loan to the University of Chicago to work on the Manhattan
Project. In 1942 en cl 1943 he was in charge of process design
and start up of the heavy water extraction plant at Trail, Brit-
ish Columbia. In 1948 he server! on the Lexington Project for
the evaluation of nuclear propulsion of aircraft. In 1949 he
was a consultant for the Senate en c! House Joint Committee
on Atomic Energy investigating the apparent (disappearance
of uranium 235 from Argonne Research Laboratories.
During his thirty-five years with Standard Oil, he displayed
extraordinary creativity in development of new petroleum re-
fining processes. He cleveloped very efficient apparatus for
clistillation of hydrocarbon mixtures. His classic paper with R.
In. Gedcles on the methodology for stage-wise clistiliation com-
putations was published in ICE Chem. in 1933. He was active
in formulating efficient methods of solvent extraction of Ju-
bricating oils. His work on processing petroleum residue lecl
to the development of clelayed coking, which is still being
used in some refineries.
As catalytic techniques began to be employed in petroleum
refining, elusive problems arose in heat and mass transfer and
its relation to catalyst particle size. Dr. Thiele's salient analysis
led to the LEE Chem. paper "Relation Between Catalytic Activ-
ity and Size of Particle" in 1939. His theoretical treatment led
to many patents and extensions of his theory which greatly
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ERNEST W. THIELE
271
influenced modern catalytic processing cracking, paraffin
isomerization, alkylation, and reforming. His work between
1921 and 1960 resulted in seventeen publications, twenty-sev-
en U.S. patents, and two Canadian patents.
Thiele was a member of the Chicago Chemists Club and
the American Chemical Society and was a fellow of the Ameri-
can Institute of Chemical Engineers. In 1966 he received the
Founders Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engi-
neers. Election to membership in the National Academy of
Engineering came in 1980. The University of Notre Dame had
awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1971. The Department
of Chemical Engineering at Notre Dame established the
Thiele lectureship in Chemical Engineering in 1986. The lec-
tureship is intended to recognize outstanding contributions
by a younger member of the chemical engineering profession.
Dr. Thiele was very pleased to be present at the first lecture,
given by Professor D. Lauffenburger. A special symposium in
honor of Thiele's ninetieth birthday was held in Chicago in
1985 at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Chem-
ical Engineers. Thiele, who was in attendance, seemed as vital
and mentally alert as when I first met him in 1958.
After retirement from Standard Oil, Thiele came to Notre
Dame to teach. He was an energetic man who walked every-
where and spent much time in libraries. He taught four
undergraduate courses a year for the ten years he was at Notre
Dame. lie usually taught both of the thermodynamics cours-
es, a kinetics course, and an instrumentation course, which he
turned into a course in process control and simulation. He
designed and built a pressure controller, which he demon-
strated in class. Every student was assigned to do a self-
formulated experiment on the controller outside the class.
Thiele was a kind, gentle person who listened well to
everyone whether it was in a classroom, a seminar talk, a faculty
meeting, or in his office while advising a student. In fact, he
was the best listener I ever met and never interrupted a
speaker no matter what the occasion was. When he was finally
asked to speak, he would give a short statement or suggestion
which, upon inspection, was found to be invariably correct
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
en c! valuable. At our frequent department technical seminars
in which invited speakers delivered their seminar talks, Thiele
would always sit in the front row. The speaker, fifteen minutes
into his talk, might conclude that Thiele was asleep, because
he often hacI his eyes closed and rarely moved. However, when
the talk was over and the speaker entertained questions from
the audience, the last questions asked were by Thiele. Many of
the speakers had trouble answering Thiele's questions
intelligently because the questions were not only difficult but
showed that Thiele had cleeply probed into the elusive essence
of any technical shortcomings of a speaker's methodology.
After ten years of teaching at Notre Dame, Thiele returned
to Chicago and spent the next 27 years in the Skokie-Evanston
area. He returned a few times to Notre Dame to visit those of
us who had been his faculty colleagues. He always traveled by
the South Shore electric train and seemec! to greatly enjoy his
excursions to Notre Dame.
Thiele loved traveling in Europe and went many times, of-
ten concentrating his visits in France en cl Germany. He wrote
and spoke both French and German and felt comfortable in
those two countries.
In his last three decades, he walked to the libraries of North-
western University weekly. Occasionally, he rocle the "El" to
south Chicago to Crerar Library, where he would spend the
greater part of a day reading technical material.
By his passing from this life, the profession of chemical
engineering lost one of the premier mincis in our 100-year
history en cl a truly admirable en cl good person.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
chemical engineers
