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Return to Chemistry Majors Home Page The Department was founded in 1882. (We will celebrate the 125th Anniversary in 2007). Hudson H. Nicholson was hired as its Chair and only member. Nicholson was very adept at developing programs for the University, hiring the best personnel to staff the Department, attracting the best students into the graduate program, and choosing succinct projects for the students to research. George Bell Frankforter earned the first masters degree West of the Mississippi in 1888. Actually, our Chemistry program was the first graduate program of any kind West of the Mississippi. Frankforter was hired by the Chemistry Department at The University of Minnesota and shortly thereafter became its Chair. Rachel A. Lloyd was hired as the Department's second chemistry professor in 1887. She was a woman of many firsts. She was the first woman to publish a research article in Organic Chemistry (actually she published the first three research articles). She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry (University of Zurich, 1886). She was also the first woman in the world to become a chemistry professor. Nicholson and Lloyd carried out the first research program West of the Mississippi. Nicholson choose sugar beet chemistry because sugar beet factories had to be located near the crops for them to be economically viable. He knew that the factories would need staff that included analytical and industrial chemists! Lloyd trained the graduate students in the analysis of sucrose content. Within ten years, there were three sugar beet factories in the State and their research program became the model upon which subsequent agricultural research has been based Nationwide. Their research was among the earliest funded by the Hatch Act. Rosa Bouton was the Department's second graduate student to earned her masters degree, in 1893. She was the first woman to receive a graduate degree West of the Mississippi. After graduation, Bouton was hired as the fourth faculty member in the Department. Her interests in training women in the scientific method led her to found the School of Domestic Science, which ultimately became the College of Human Resources and Family Resources. The first two women to become members of the American Chemical Society were Rachel Lloyd in 1891 and Rosa Bouton in 1893. The Nebraska local section was founded in 1895 as the seventh local section of the Society (and the first one not located along the East Coast). For three decades, the Nebraska local section had more women members than any other section. During those decades, half of the faculty and one fourth of the graduate students were women. Four people associated with the Department have had buildings named in their honor. Samuel Avery (B.Sc. 1892, M.A. 1894, Chair & Professor 1901-1909, Professor 1928-1935) has a building on the University of Nebraska City Campus named after him that had housed Chemistry but now houses Journalism and others. Rosa Bouton (B.Sc. 1891, M.A. 1893, Adjunct Professor 1893-1899) had a women's dormitory named for her on the University of Nebraska East Campus. Gilbert Newton Lewis (undergraduate 1889-1892) has a Chemistry building named for him on the University of California at Berkeley campus. Edward E. Nicholson (B.Sc. 1894, M.A. 1896) has a building named for him on The University of Minnesota, Minneapolis campus. Horace Grove Deming was a faculty member who specialized in chemical education. His textbook titled General Chemistry was the top-selling chemistry text from the 1920s until the late 1940s. It was translated into several languages. He also wrote two books that popularized chemistry and one of them remained in print until the 1980s. He retired early to Hawaii long before that though. Interestingly, history repeated itself in through the 1970s and 1980s when Henry Holtzclaw Jr. co-authored a text titled General Chemistry with Quantitative Analysis. It was also the top-selling chemistry textbook for a decade. Clifford S. Hamilton was the Departments first research star. Hamilton was a faculty member during the late 1920s through the 1960s and trained over 120 graduate students. He studied organic arsenic compounds and later anti-malarials. One of the drugs he created was Arsphenamine which was sold by Parke, Davis & Co. as Marpharsen. Until very recently, this arsencial provided the best cure for syphilis. His antimalarial drug Camoquin also sold well. Professors Cromwell, Hamilton, Militzer, Baumgarten, and Washburn were all top researchers who were most active during the 1940s and 1950s. They created the attitudes toward research that exist in our Department today. At the same time, our faculty continue our tradition of teaching excellence. As a result, we believe that graduate students who enroll in our program receive the best training possible. One of our most famous graduate students is Donald J. Cram. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1987 with two others for their creative approaches to organic synthesis. Cram earned his degree at Nebraska working as Norman Cromwell first graduate student. Cromwell got it right the first time. |