Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 247
THOMAS KILGORE SHERWOOD
1903-1976
BY HOYT C. HOTTEL
THOMAS KILGORE SHERWOOD was by any standards one of Ameri-
ca's great chemical engineers. His energy, research contributions,
applied engineering achievements, and influence on chemical en-
gineering education were prodigious. He was admired and re-
spected by his peers, and countless numbers of them called him
friend. He had warmth, charm, orderliness, and a conscience that
drove him to use his talents to the fullest to advance chemical
engineering in theory and practice.
Tom Sherwood was born in Columbus, Ohio, on July 25, 1903;
he died on January 14, 1976. He was the son of Milton Worth-
ington Sherwood and Sadie Tackaberry Sherwood and spent
most of his early youth in Montreal. There he received his
Bachelor of Science degree from McGill University in 1923. That
fall he came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for
graduate work in the Chemical Engineering Department. During
an assistantship under W. H. McAdams in 1924-25 he picked up
Mac's habit of intense concentration on a problem until it was in
shape for safe engineering use. His first paper, coauthored with
McAdams and published in 1926 in Mechanical Engineering, was
"The Flow of Air and Steam in Pipes." His doctorate thesis under
Warren K. Lewis, entitled "The Mechanism of the Drying of
Solids," was completed in 1929, a year after he had accepted an
Assistant Professorship at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In 1930
he returned to MIT as Assistant Professor and became Associate
Professor in 1933 and Professor in 1941. In 1966 he was honored
247
OCR for page 248
by a first appointment to the Lammot duPont Chair in Chemical
Engineering. On retirement from MIT, in 1969, he became Profes-
sor of Chemical Engineering at the University of California (Berke-
ley).
During his thirty-nine-year period on MIT'S faculty, Tom's activ-
ity included, in addition to a full-time load of teaching, research,
and writing, the generation of new subjects in the chemical en-
gineering curriculum, membership on several committees related
to improvement of the educational process, and twelve years of
primary responsibility for graduate students in chemical engineer-
ing. In 1946 he was appointed Dean of Engineering, in which
position he faced the difficult early postwar problems of the
Institute and, characteristically, worked hard to raise the standards
of excellence of MIT'S engineering departments. In 1952 he chose
to return to his teaching and research.
Tom's primary research area was a logical development of his
early stimulation by McAdams and Lewis mass transfer and its
interaction with flow and with chemical reaction and industrial
process operations in which those phenomena played an important
part. His rapid rise to the position of world authority in the mass
transfer area was accelerated by the appearance of his book,
Absorption and Extraction, the first significant text in this area,
published in 1937. Revised in 1952 with R. L. Pigford, and com-
pletely rewritten with Pigford and C. R. Wilke for publication in
1974 under the title Mass Transfer, the book has had enormous
influence. The worldwide use of the Sherwood Number is a small
memorial to that effort. In 1939 Tom's prior introduction of a new
subject, applied mathematics in chemical engineering, into MIT'S
chemical engineering curriculum culminated in a book of the same
name, coauthored with C. E. Reed. An almost completely rewritten
edition, coauthored with H. S. Mickley, appeared in 1957. In 1958,
The Properties of Gases and Liquids was published, coauthored with
R. C. Reid. In 1963 two more books appeared, A Course in Process
Design and The Role of Diffusion in Catalysis, the latter coauthored
with C. N. Satterfield. Tom's last book-writing effort, Mass
Transfer already referred to—was completed less than two years
before his death. In addition to these many books, Tom published
248
OCR for page 249
some 120 technical papers and a dozen or so editorials or nontech-
nical papers and gave many invited lectures.
War is an ugly business that incongruously but understandably
often draws out of men of good will their best efforts. In 1940 Tom
was asked to help begin the organization of chemical engineering
manpower for use in the newly organized National Defense Re-
search Committee (NDRC). In 1942 he became a Consultant to the
Baruch Committee concerned with synthetic rubber development
and in the same year Section Chief for Miscellaneous Chemical
Engineering Problems, in NDRC'S Chemical Engineering Division.
New hydraulic fluids for use at high and at very low temperatures,
antifouling coatings for ship bottoms, inerting of gas space in
aircraft fuel tanks, development of large screening-smoke
generators, production of concentrated hydrogen peroxide these
are a few examples of the many projects that came under his expert
supervision. In 1944 he was a Member of the Whitman Committee
on the status of jet propulsion. That fall, as a Consultant for the
War Department, he went into Europe behind advancing troops on
an Army mission on scientific intelligence. Tom was among those
of us who looked back on the exciting war days jointly with
nostalgia over the intensive research efforts produced and with
regret over the source of the stimulation.
Although Tom was primarily an educator, his contact with
industry was frequent and effective. He made major contributions
in the areas of seawater conversion (he was advisor to the Office of
Saline Water), the removal of sulfur dioxide from stack gases, the
freeze-drying of blood, the manufacture of penicillin, and the
development of various petrochemical processes, including the
manufacture of vinyl acetate and oxo alcohols.
The above record in the areas of education, teaching, peacetime
research, wartime research, research administration, and industrial
consulting eminently justify the adjective "prodigious" to describe
Tom's output. This led naturally to recognition by his peers in the
form of many honors received through the years. Honorary doctor-
ates were bestowed by Northeastern University, McGill University,
and the Technical University of Denmark. Election to the Ameri-
can Academy of Arts and Sciences came in 1948 and to the
249
OCR for page 250
National Academy of Sciences in 1958; and Tom was a Founding
Member of the National Academy of Engineering. The American
Institute of Chemical Engineers, in which Tom was Counselor in
1947-49, awarded him the William H. Walker Award in 1941, the
Founders' Award in 1963, and the Lewis Award in 1972. The
American Chemical Society bestowed the Murphree Award on him
in 1973. The Chemical Institute of Canada made him an Honorary
Member. For his war work, he received the U.S. Medal for Merit in
1948.
A personal note: We were graduate students and roommates in
early MIT days; our paths crossed frequently, particularly during
the war years; and we spent an idyllic month together climbing the
Grand Tetons in 1951. Tom lived a full life of outstanding service
to his profession and his fellow man. His peers salute his memory.
He will long be remembered.
250
OCR for page 251
OCR for page 252
Representative terms from entire chapter:
kilgore sherwood
