150 Years of Chemistry at Purdue University
2024-09-12
Writer(s): Steve Scherer
Classes began at Purdue University on September 16, 1874, with six instructors and 39 students. Student fees for the year totaled about $20.
On that day, Purdue’s first professor of chemistry was Harvey Washington Wiley. He became a very popular instructor on campus. In addition to teaching chemistry, Wiley served as the university’s first ROTC instructor, first baseball coach, and much to the disdain of the board of trustees, rode a bicycle to work.
“I reached Lafayette a few days before the school was to open and found a great opportunity in the new institution. Several buildings had already been completed, among them the dining hall, the gymnasium, and the chemical and physics laboratories. Other buildings were in the process of construction." Harvey Wiley
Purdue’s first science laboratory building was located near the present-day Beering Hall of Liberal Arts and Education building.
Wiley came to Purdue from Indianapolis where he was teaching at North-Western Christian University (now Butler University.)
“Mr. John B. Harper followed me to Lafayette. He had just completed his junior year in college and had specialized in chemistry in which he took a most vital interest,” Wiley wrote in his 1930 autobiography.
Harper was Purdue’s first alumnus graduating in June 1875 with a B.S. in Chemistry. He pursued a civil engineering career where he is most famous for planning and building the Zuni Dam in New Mexico during the early 1900s.
During his tenure at Purdue, Wiley studied sorghum culture and sugar chemistry, working to help develop a strong domestic sugar industry. His first published paper in 1881 discussed the adulteration of sugar with glucose.
Wiley left Purdue in 1882 when he was offered the position of Chief Chemist in the United States Department of Agriculture. During his three decades in Washington, D.C., Wiley became a crusader and coalition builder in support of national food and drug regulation which earned him the title of "Father of the Pure Food and Drugs Act" when it became law in 1906.
Purdue’s Wiley Residence Hall and Dining Court is named in his honor.
Other notable events in chemistry history at Purdue
1890 - Purdue awards its first M.S. degree in chemistry.
1902 - The first course in chemical engineering offered at Purdue, under the direction of Percy N. Evans, chemistry department head (1900-1925).
1907 - Purdue opens its first chemistry building under the guidance of Winthrop E. Stone, chemistry department head and Purdue president (1900-1921).
1926 - Richard Bishop Moore, an early developer of helium and radium extraction, comes to Purdue as dean of the College of Science and Chemistry department head. He is instrumental in supporting the construction of a new chemistry building.
1928 - Construction begins on the first phase of a new chemistry building, dedicated in 1930, later named Wetherill Laboratory of Chemistry in 1955 in honor of donor Richard Benbridge Wetherill.
1930 - Purdue awards its first Ph.D. degree in chemistry.
1931 - More than 2,000 students enrolled in chemistry department courses, including 38 M.S. and Ph.D. candidates in five areas: analytical, biological, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry.
1935 - Alice L. Watson Kramer is the first woman to earn Ph.D. degree in chemistry at Purdue.
1942-1945 - Under the direction of department head Henry B. Hass, more than 100 chemistry faculty, staff, and students were secretly working on the Manhattan Project in West Lafayette.
1950 - Postwar growth on campus necessitates expansion of Wetherill Laboratory, with the second phase of the building dedicated in 1955, more than doubling the existing space.
1955 - Jonathan W. Amy graduates with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry and begins the instrumentation operation (now the Jonathan Amy Facility for Chemical Instrumentation) that still serves as the bedrock for analytical and physical chemistry research.
1967 - William “Bill” E. Moore is the first African American to earn Ph.D. degree in chemistry at Purdue.
1972 - Construction of second chemistry building completed and dedicated in 1987 as the Herbert C. Brown Laboratory of Chemistry.
1973 - Mass-analyzed ion kinetic energy spectrometer (MIKES) is completed, the first of many new mass spectrometers to be built at Purdue.
1979 - Faculty member Herbert C. Brown presented Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
2007 - Chemistry consistently ranked at the top in number of women faculty (of the 50 largest chemistry research departments.)
2010 - Faculty member Ei-ichi Negishi along with former H.C. Brown postdoctoral student Akira Suzuki presented Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
2013 - The R. B. Wetherill Laboratory of Chemistry is recognized by the American Chemical Society as a National Historic Chemical Landmark.
2014 - Purdue dedicates the new Drug Discovery Building located in the university's Life and Health Sciences Park.
2020 - Purdue dedicates the new Chaney-Hale Hall of Science, moving undergrad teaching labs from Brown Laboratory into a state-of-the-art learning space for science courses.
2024 - The department is renamed in honor of longtime donors James and Margaret Tarpo.
Sources:
Century and Beyond : The History of Purdue University, 1988, Robert Topping, Purdue University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections
Harvey W. Wiley: An Autobiography, 1930
Harvey Washington Wiley, Wikipedia
Harvey Washington Wiley, FDA.gov
About Purdue Chemistry
The Tarpo Department of Chemistry is internationally acclaimed for its excellence in chemical education and innovation, boasting two Nobel laureates in organic chemistry, the #1 ranked analytical chemistry program, and a highly successful drug discovery initiative that has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties.
About Purdue University
Purdue University is a public research institution demonstrating excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top four in the United States, Purdue discovers and disseminates knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 105,000 students study at Purdue across modalities and locations, including nearly 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its first comprehensive urban campus in Indianapolis, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.