Willis R. Whitney

Whitney initially wanted to study biology and by chance visited M.I.T. on the same day that entrance examinations were being administered. He was curious about the questions and got permission to take the exam that day. He passed without any preparation.[1] He would later choose MIT to be his academic institution on account of its laboratories. Whitney was a hard-working student but he was fearful of having a limited scope of knowledge. He was a special student in that he had not decided on a major. For advice he went to General Francis Amasa Walker, then president of M.I.T., who offered that Whitney should avoid electrical engineering, then a relatively new field at M.I.T., and stick to chemistry or biology.[3] Whitney discussed his ideas with his peers, Pierre du Pont and George Hale. He ultimately decided on chemistry.

During his sophomore year at M.I.T. Whitney met Arthur A. Noyes, a laboratory assistant in the chemistry department who inspired Whitney with his work on solutions.[1]

Shortly before his graduation from M.I.T. in 1890, Whitney was appointed as Assistant Instructor of Chemistry for the following academic year. It was during this time that he met Gerard Swope and William (Bill) D. Coolidge. He also taught Alfred P. Sloan, Paul Litchfield, and Irénée du Pont. He taught general chemistry for two years and then made the switch over to analytical chemistry. He lectured without notes and got to know the individual student. Whitney saw students as knowledge-seekers rather than storage containers of answers.[3] Similar to his senior, Arthur A. Noyes, Whitney's approach was more research based. He would give students a problem that was not in their textbook and told them to solve it by researching, devising a method, carrying it out, and by presenting a report. This clashed with the institution's approach. After two more years of teaching analytical chemistry, Whitney decided to go to the University of Leipzig to obtain his doctorate and study under Wilhelm Ostwald.

Studying under Wilhem Ostwald, who also taught Whitney's predecessor, Arthur A. Noyes, Whitney's thesis project was on color changes during chemical reactions. He also accepted the task of translating Max Le Blanc's Electrochemistry textbook. Le Blanc was a colleague of Ostwald who Whitney met in Leipzig. In 1896, Whitney finished the translation, finished his laboratory work, and successfully defended his thesis. He earned his doctoral degree and went from assistant instructor of chemistry to doctor of philosophy.[3] After attaining his doctoral degree, Whitney did not leave Germany to return home immediately. Instead, he studied organic chemistry with Charles Friedel at the Sorbonne in France for about six months.[1]

One of the first problems Whitney solved at the General Electric Laboratory was that of making a furnace that produced porcelain rods with scientific precision. He noticed that many rods would go to waste because of various defects.[1] After consulting with a foreman, he found that the current furnaces had varying temperatures; especially after a certain amount of repetitions. As a result, the furnaces could not be expected to produce perfect porcelain rods after every attempt. After experimenting with iron pipes, carbon pipes, and wire, Whitney found that he could create a suitable furnace by passing a controlled amount of current through a wire wrapped around a carbon pipe.[3] The carbon pipe would have a cork or coal powder in it to prevent combustion and water-cooled clamps to regulate the temperature. After finding the perfect ratio of heat to time cooking the porcelain rods, Whitney called in the foreman. Whitney demonstrated that the porcelain came out perfectly nearly every time and G.E. began production of the furnaces immediately.

After finding success with his electric furnace design, Whitney moved on to tackling the problem of improving the incandescent lamp. The trouble was that the current carbon filaments in the incandescent lamps evaporated so quickly at high temperatures that to lengthen the lifespan of the bulbs, it was only viable to keep them on at lower temperatures, thus less light would be emitted.[3] Pressure from competition with other companies like Westinghouse made the laboratory's major goal to improve the incandescent lamp for the time.[5] To tackle this problem Whitney recruited the help of some of his former M.I.T. students and foreign scientists. Eventually in December 1903, Whitney found his solution. He used the electric furnaces from his porcelain experiment to subject the current carbon filaments to carefully controlled yet hotter temperatures.[1] The carbon filaments began to form a graphite layer that had metal-like properties. The resistance of the outer layer of the filament grew with increasing temperature, allowing for the lamp to be run at hotter temperatures for longer. Using his connection with the G.E. Factory in Harrison, Whitney got his filaments into production as soon as possible.[3] The lamps that used these filaments were named "General Electric Metallized" lamps or "G.E.M." lamps for short. It was shortly after this in May 1904, that Whitney decided to leave M.I.T. and accept the full-time position as director of the General Electric Research Laboratory.

Whitney may have gotten his inspiration for his filaments from the time he visited the Paris laboratory of Henry Moissan, an electrochemist who subjected graphite to enough heat and pressure to believe he made diamonds.[3]

The new tantalum filaments created by Werner von Bolton once again pressured the lamp industry.[3] Whitney and his team set to work by investigating the elements near tantalum on the periodic table. They

Irving Langmuir (left) and Willis R. Whitney (right) in the G.E. Laboratory. 1920

found that tungsten would be the most suitable for the job; if not for its brittleness. After recognizing that he needed to recruit another talented scientist, he enlisted the help of William D. Coolidge, one of his former chemistry students. He gave Coolidge the same deal that Rice had given him; recognizing that Coolidge, like Whitney himself, did not want to leave his M.I.T. research for an industrial laboratory.[1] Coolidge eventually became invested in his work on the tungsten filament and solved the problem using a cadmium amalgam binder to shape the filament. The binder would distil out as the filament was heated, leaving behind a pure tungsten filament. Whitney was sent to Germany to study incandescent and tungsten lamp work in Germany shortly after this discovery. Upon returning he explained to his employees that the Germans had a similar process that G.E. bought the patent to, but he insisted that Coolidge's process will be better in the long-run if it can be given a little more time to be perfected.[1] Around December 1907, Coolidge reported that the process was perfected and that the filaments could be sent for mass production. Shortly after hearing Coolidge's report, Whitney was hospitalized due to untreated appendicitis.[1] He spent Christmas there, but was comforted by his employees who came to visit him.

These tungsten-filament lamps were sold alongside the G.E.M. lamps for a short period of time, until the company dropped the G.E.M. lamp altogether for the superior tungsten-filament lamp.

After Whitney's return to the laboratory after recovering from appendicitis, Whitney met Irving Langmuir, a young chemistry professor who came to the G.E. Laboratory to do research over the summer. Langmuir wondered why the lamp bulbs blackened after use and started working on a solution almost immediately after arriving at the lab. After not having produced tangible results during the summer,

The big three of the G.E. Laboratory. Willis R. Whitney (center) and Irving Langmuir and William Coolidge. 1909

Langmuir was prepared to leave the G.E. Laboratory to avoid wasting funding and time. Whitney insisted that Langmuir stay as long as he was having fun; that he would take care of the administrative details. Three years later, the same scenario occurred. In 1913, Langmuir had a breakthrough. He found that by the blackening of the bulbs was caused by the tungsten filament evaporating on to the glass. Simply put, this could be mitigated by introducing a vapor to the bulb and by altering the shape of the filament; the best vapor based on Langmuir's experiments was argon.[3] Argon slowed the evaporation of the tungsten and yet another revolution was made in the lamp industry. The new lamp, using Coolidge's tungsten process and Langmuir's gas-filling process was marketed as the Mazda C Lamp, referencing the Persian god associated with light.[1]

One day, some of the apprentice lab boys walked into Whitney's office and complained about feeling unwell. They had been working near high-frequency equipment all day. Whitney took this with skepticism, but allowed the boys to go home early for the day. The next day he had Dr. Glen Smith from the nearby hospital conspicuously sit-in with the boys to solve what was going on. Dr. Smith also developed a fever.[1] Whitney ran experiments on cockroaches and mice, artificially increasing their internal temperatures with a high-frequency apparatus to get some more information. He eventually worked his way up to experimenting on a diseased dog and the dog was cured with one hour of treatment a day. Whitney recalled Dr. Julius Wagner-Jauregg's trials with purposely giving patients with brain disorders malarial injections to induce a fever in the hopes of curing them.[1] Before progressing any further with this apparatus, he experimented on his self and found that it relieved his stiff shoulder pain. He progressed with his trials to Ellis Hospital. Then, he moved on to conducting trials at a clinic at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. He later worked with doctors from the Albany Medical College to perfect this device.[1] The device operated by using a vacuum tube to create electromagnetic waves as long as a meter or as short as one ten-thousandth of a meter at maximum. Whitney formally wrote a paper regarding the theory of how this device treated bursitis by raising levels of lactic acid near muscles and transporting calcium bone deposits.[3] After the paper was published in the G.E. Review, the G.E. X- Ray corporation branded this device as the "Inductotherm" and sold it to the masses.[1] The "Inductotherm" is actually a diathermy device. It was for this that Whitney was later awarded with the French Legion of Honor.[1]

Coolidge also had a breakthrough in 1913 with his hot cathode X-ray tube.[1] Ezekiel Weintraub worked on various projects alongside Coolidge, Whitney, and Langmuir but was especially drawn to wireless telegraphy.[3] Other projects included developing better electrodes, lightning arresters, insulating materials, carbon motors, generator brushes, soapstone plates, electric blanket, etc.[1] While Whitney did not

Whitney (left) and Langmuir (center) showing Guglielmo Marconi (left) a vacuum tube that G.E. produced for radio transmitters. This is one of the many other experiments that Whitney was not majorly involved in, but still oversaw the progress of.

work on each project directly, he would often come up with ideas and offer them to his employees for them to work on.

As the director of the General Electric Research Laboratory, Whitney had to take care of administrative details, hire employees, fire employees, read the latest scientific journals, write articles on new inventions, attend conferences, speak at conferences, etc. Whitney believed in encouraging collaboration in the laboratory and held mandatory weekly meetings that he called colloquia.[1] In these meetings, his researchers were required to update each other on any progress or discoveries, disclose any issues, offer advice, or simply discuss something they learned somewhere. Whitney made it a point to check in with every one in the research lab every day to offer advice, encouragement, generally inquire, critique, or just say hello.[1] He believed that this would encourage teamwork and boost morale. Whitney chose his research team applicants based on those who already had one to two years of experience performing their own experiments as well as based on the individual's desire to experiment and strong ideas. Considered the founding father of industrial research, Whitney came up with three main ideas for smooth direction.[3]

1. All inventions would remain the researcher's work but would go to the company.
2. Each individual is allowed to have a personality. As a research director, Whitney wanted his employees to play to their strengths.
3. A research director should remain optimistic. Whitney was an astute believer in profiting from seemingly aimless research.

As time got harder, the General Electric Laboratory focused more on short-term goals in order to maintain profit. However, they still had one or two major projects continuing at all times. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Whitney had to fire many of his employees.[1] This plunged him into a depression that he took a six month vacation to remedy. Coolidge remained acting director ever since and eventually, in 1932, Whitney announced his plan to retire and effectively make Coolidge the next director. During Whitney's time, the G.E. Laboratory effectively combined the worlds of industry and research and became known as the "House of Magic."[3]

Beginning around 1912, Whitney focused more of his energy towards one of his favorite hobbies: turtle tracking.[3] He would log his encounters, locations, dates, and even mark the turtles' shells to track them. Once he witnessed a turtle laying its eggs and marked the spot. A skunk came along and ate some eggs, so Whitney scared it off before it could eat all of them. Then, when hatching season came, he and his wife came down and watched the turtles hatch.[1] Eventually Whitney began to keep some in captivity, but he noticed that turtles will not lay eggs in captivity. While conducting his various turtle observations in Niskayuna Woods, Whitney found that turtles liked to eat bananas, they migrated annually to same spot each year, and that their age could be told by rings on their shells.[3] He also found that turtles would bury themselves in mud in the fall, get snowed on in the winter, and emerge alive in the spring.[6] During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Whitney would give children who brought him a turtle a quarter.[3]

At one point, Whitney received a letter asking whether insects could survive in a vacuum.[6] Whitney gave this experiment to an employee to perform, but the employee replied that it was pointless. Another employee was offered the experiment to the same result. Whitney eventually performed the experiment himself. He sealed a cockroach and a fly in a vacuum chamber and observed. The insects stopped moving. After some time, Whitney gradually released the vacuum and both insects started moving again.[6]

Whitney was fairly active in keeping up with scientific journals. Once, he entered the discourse regarding the freezing of hot and cold water after reading an article in the journal Science, titled "Roger Bacon Was Mistaken."[7] Whitney performed the experiment himself after some reasoning based on colligative properties. He decided that because heating water usually dispels any soluble components, the hot water's freezing point should be raised compared to the colder water's. Thus, the hot water should freeze faster. Performing the experiment himself, he found that the hot water tray that he left in his freezer froze significantly more than the cold water tray, measured by volume. He published his own article in the same journal in June 1946.[7]

One day, the Whitney's and a childhood friend's family went out on Lake Chautauqua over the summer. Whitney noticed that if the camp they were staying at had a seawall, the dock and land would be protected from any waves. He took it upon himself to oversee and facilitate the construction of such a seawall.[1] Some time after, he found a shallow area in the middle of Lake Chautauqua. He got out of his friend's boat and inspected it for a couple hours. He dropped stones here and there and the idea to make an actual island popped into his head. He hired a team and set to work filling the two-hundred and fifty-six foot space with rocks. The following summer the island was completed. Whitney erected a flag there and left Whitney's Island. He went down to a courthouse and received a deed to the property on November 6, 1899. It was made out to Willis R. Whitney and Fred E. Armitage. The island has been lost to time and is now known as Whitney's Crib to visitors of Lake Chautauqua.[8]