The young Joel
Hildebrand wore wire-rimmed glasses. "Now," says Hildebrand, who
will celebrate his 100th birthday November 16. [1981], "I can
see without them." Remarkable, yes, but not really surprising to
anyone who has come in contact with Berkeley's celebrated
emeritus professor of chemistry and one of its most beloved
teachers. It seems especially fitting for a man who has devoted
his life to seeing nature, both physical and human, ever more
clearly.
Joel Henry Hildebrand
was invited to the University of California (from the University
of Pennsylvania, where he earned his doctorate in chemistry in
1906) in 1913, when Professor Gilbert N. Lewis was assembling on
this campus one of the most distinguished groups of physical
chemists in the world. (The department still enjoys
international renown.) In what proved to be a characteristic
move, Hildebrand accepted the position at Berkeley, at $2,000 a
year, in preference to a more lucrative offer from the U.S.
Bureau of Standards. His reasons were the greater freedom in
research that he would have at Berkeley and, he later stated,
"because I was born to teach. I had discovered as a young lad
the pleasure to be had from explaining the wonders of nature to
my less read playmates."
Hildebrand was an
autodidact from the start. An 1858 test, Classbook on
Chemistry, which he discovered in his grandfather's library,
"started me on the road to science." Without downplaying the
education he received from others (his teachers at Pennsylvania
sent him to Berlin to learn physical chemistry when it was "a
new-fangled subject"), he quickly acknowledges his best
teachers" insatiable and avid reading. "Things that interested
me intellectually came largely from books."
His high school
chemistry teacher gave him the keys to the laboratory when it
became clear that the young Hildebrand knew more chemistry than
he did. He also gave his pupil a book, Josiah Cooke's
Chemical Philosophy. With his own experiments, Hildebrand
demonstrated that the correct formula for nitric oxide gas
wan NO, not N2O2, as given in the text.
"That experiment was a milestone in my career," Hildebrand has
noted. "It demonstrated that even a lad in high school could, by
a well-reasoned experiment, demolish a theory asserted in a
pretentious book by a Harvard professor." Indeed, the only
things Hildebrand regularly explored in the lab were the unclear
theories of other chemists. And those he replaced with simpler
and more experimentally sound ones.
It is safe to assume
that Hildebrand knows virtually all there is to know about
liquids. His early fascination with the color of iodine
solutions spawned a lifetime's work --- and a general theory of
regular solutions. His professional life has been devoid to a
refinement of his own work, and the work of others, on the
nature of non-electrolytic solutions. As Hildebrand is fond of
pointing out, more than half of his scholarly articles have
appeared since his so-called retirement. His most recent paper
in his field in 1979.
In the introduction to
Hildebrand's Viscosity and Diffusivity (1977), J. O.
Hirschfelder writes that Hildebrand "somehow . . . has the
ability to sweep away all of the complexities and discover
simple relationships which will take theoreticians another
generation to derive." Fellow chemists are awed by his ability
both to avoid and obfuscating complexities of thought and to
arrive at simple explanations that are at the same time more
accurate. In fact, scientific scruples have occasionally
promoted him to refute the more rococo concepts and theories of
less clear headed scientists. Some prime examples are described
in his 1977 paper, "Operations on Swollen Theories with Occam's
Razor."
For all the theoretical
aspects to his research, Hildebrand is, still, a practical
scientist. His very decision to investigate the nature of
solutions was a practical one, since an understanding of regular
solutions is critically important to "pure" and applied sciences
alike; his work has proved valuable to chemical engineers as
well as to other physical chemists. His experiments with the
solubility of helium have led to important advances in deep-sea
diving, and his scientific efforts enlisted by the government
during both world wars.
While his fellow
scientists, present and future, will regard him as one of the
century's great chemists, countless thousands of Berkeley alumni
will remember him as the greatest teacher they ever had. His
freshman chemistry course remains a campus legend. Having been
instrumental in designing the course (among other things, he
wrote its text, Principles of Chemistry), he himself
taught it to at least 40,000 spellbound freshmen. Delivering the
lectures without electrical amplification (he credits the voice
training his mother urged on him as a youth), he spoke --- some
would say performed
--- to 500 students at a time. Not all of them became chemist,
but his students did all leave with a deep respect for the
methods, and the importance, of science.
Some students also owe
him their introduction to the arts, particularly music. Lectures
often closed with an exhortation to hear the symphony that night
in Harmon Gym, and anyone willing to stay after class found a
scientist willing to tell them what to listen for in a Beethoven
symphony. While Hildebrand went on supervising doctoral
candidates long after his official retirement in 1952,
throughout his career he promoted --- in principle and in
practice --- the idea that freshmen needed to be taught by the
very best teachers on the faculty.
In addition to his work
as teacher and researcher, Hildebrand served the University
three times as dean --- "for periods as short as I could
decently make them,: he has added. "I think that able members of
a faculty should be willing to undertake tours of duty in
hearing a share of the housework. If they will not, then
deanships are eagerly seized by second rate scholars show hold
onto them for life, if permitted, with the result that policies
and recruitment are not in the hands of men who are in touch
with leaders in the field." Without interrupting his science,
Hildebrand served as dean of men (1923-26), dean of the College
of Letters and Science (1939-43), and dean of the College of
Chemistry (1949-51). He also was chairman of the Department of
Chemistry from 1941 to 1943 and took an active role in the work
of the Academic Senate throughout his career.
Hildebrand has worked
closely with liquids in places outside the lab. A member of the
University of Pennsylvania crew, he has spent a healthy portion
of his robust, athletic life in or on the water. His expert
swimming and remarkable physical condition in general were
extolled in remarks by his son Roger, on the occasion of his
father's receiving the Gibbs Medal from the American Chemical
Society in 1953. Roger recounted an anecdote about a
"grandfather's race" in which Hildebrand was to take part.
Needing several laps to warm up, Hildebrand entered the water
alone, to swim laps in the various strokes he knew. When it was
time to begin, the race was called off. One by one, the other
contestants had quietly walked away.
His love of nature and
the great outdoors (he learned to ski at 40 and stopped skiing
at 75, at his wife's insistence) led to an interest in the
Sierra Club. Hildebrand was its president from 1937 to 1940. And
his delight in explaining nature came out in several books on
camping and backpacking published by the Sierra club and UC
Press.
Few men could lead a
life this full and still have time for family, or at least for a
happy family. But for Hildebrand, and the clan that adores him,
family has always been central. He and his now-95-year-old wife
Emily have produced a large and distinguished family. The four
children, Alexander, Milton, Roger, and Louise, and their
descendents now lavish on their parents the affection richly
deserved by the pair, from the beginning, devoted individual and
unstinting on each of the children --- and still do.
He insists that his
life has been its own reward, noting that he has never sought an
award. Nonetheless, he has received them. Among the greater
honors: election to the National Academy of Science in 1929 and
to the American Philosophical Society in 1951. The American
Chemical Society, whose president he was in 1955, awarded him
the Nichols Medal in 1939, a teaching award in 1953, the Willard
Gibbs Medal in 1953, and the Priestly Medal, its highest honor,
in 1962. The University awarded him an honorary doctorate in
1954, and on Charter Day 1980 he was awarded the Clark Kerr
Medal for "Distinguished Service to Higher education."
Few scientists, and
rather few writer, have understood writing as Hildebrand has.
Although he has written on a wide range of subjects, his aim has
always been the same: to be interesting and to clear. From the
beginning (he was an autodidact in writing,
too), his models
were the great writers of the past, including those of classical
antiquity. From their example he developed a style at once lucid
and as tightly structured as the Mozart and Hayden symphonies he
loves.
In our interview
Hildebrand explained that he has done the things he has done
because he has taken pleasure in them. His writing is no
exception. Now weary of answering questions he has answered, in
one form or another, for 70 years, he encouraged us to draw on
his speeches and essays as well. Taking his suggestions, we
discovered a remarkable consistency in both tone and content of
the things he has said and written of the years. His
conversation, after all, has a certain loftiness that is echoed,
curiously, in the down-to-earth quality of his prose. Perhaps
Hildebrand's obvious delight is responsible for the blurring of
the usual distinction between spoken and written word. Or
perhaps it is more a function of his passionate desire to
communicate.
Q: What were your
first impressions of the University, when you visited it in
1913?
A: California was
obviously a fresh, young university in the making. There were no
precedents that one was bound to follow. One could propose
something new.
Q: What did you make
of the chemistry department which Dean Lewis was about to invite
you to join?
A: I could easily
sense the kind of department he was trying to make. He was
trying to make a scientific department with young men. His
policy all along was not to try to strengthen the department by
getting somebody who was well-known from another institution ---
a shining light. Such a man, of course, thinks he's doing you a
great service. But selecting a young man who'd be grateful for
the opportunity, as I was. We all grew up together.
Q: Once you
accepted and came to Berkeley, did the reality match your
expectations?
A: I sensed an
eager curiosity at Berkeley about natural phenomena that was
quite absent from the department in Philadelphia, where a
research conference was conducted by a professor who did no
research. Arriving in Berkeley, I felt that I had escaped from a
dungeon into sunshine.
Lewis took as much
satisfaction in the productivity of his colleagues as in his
own. We were just a group of young fellows who were all trying
to do a good job of teaching in order to produce some graduate
students who would be the kind was wanted. We couldn't expect in
those days that anybody would come out from New England to do
research under us; they didn't know about us. So we had to start
with "The child in the cradle." We'd meet weekly to discuss how
we would teach the freshman and other courses. We all would talk
about what we were trying to do and what the important ideas of
chemistry were.
Q: How did you set
out to create "something new"?
A: We started a new
student right out with research. In Pennsylvania you had to
spend at least two years learning what was known before you
could venture into the unknown. Well, here Lewis' idea was to
teach by using unanswered questions, rather than committing to
memory the answers to existing questions, which are often wrong.
So the whole spirit was a different spirit. And the spirit ever
since has been to teach through questions and not through
answers.
We rapidly achieved a
national standing; students were coming to us from the East. By
the late '20s, we were helping to staff the departments of good
universities.
Q: Is it true that
the methods your department devised had wider ramifications in
the University community?
A: It became a
tradition that lecturing to large freshman and sophomore classes
was not something to avoid but was a challenge which many people
gladly accepted. It became a tradition here that good teaching
should begin with a freshman year and not wait until the
graduate period. The fact that I could turn 400 or 500 freshmen
a year who felt that Chemistry 1A was worthwhile would become
known to their parents and established goodwill toward the
University. And there were other men in the faculty who were
doing a similar job, although few in such a scale. However, in
some departments, such as history, we had some men who like me
were ham actors and could give a lecture on a historical period
that would be attended gladly by students and auditors. What
students go home and tell their parents has a lot to do with
support of the University, if they respect the people.
Entertainment isn't the important thing; respect for the caliber
of the teacher is.
Q: Over the years
you've had a good deal to say about teaching. To your mind, what
makes a good teacher?
A: Good teaching is
primarily an art, and can be neither defined nor standardized.
My own methods varied, depending on whether I was lecturing to a
class of 500, or conducting a quiz section of grade A students,
or one of grade C students. Good teaching is a personal
performance. Each teacher must do it in his own way. I am sure I
would have become a frustrated man id I had not become a
teacher. One of the wisest decisions I ever made, early in my
career, was to reject a fine position in the Bureau of Standards
to remain in a university at slightly more than half the salary.
No one should enter the teaching profession unless he takes such
pleasure in explaining things that he would rather do it than
spend the extra money he might make doing something more
lucrative.
A good professor must be
devoted to the truth and a competent seeker after truth in his
own field. No amount of processing can make a good teacher out
of unsuitable material. The right material must first of all be
born, because good teachers are both born and made;
neither part of the process can be omitted.
Q: What, then, in
your opinion, are the essential materials?
A: First, I put an
enthusiasm for significant knowledge. No Quality in a teacher is
more important than this, for no teacher who lacks such
enthusiasm can stimulate it in students. But a desire to know is
not enough. There must be also an urge to communicate. Good
teaching is an art of communication, like painting, and requires
the establishment of a rapport. Ideas must "get across." Closely
allied to the urge to explain is the verbal facility and
capacity for clear, orderly presentation necessary to pull it
over. The teacher must not be like the student who, asked to
define the term "vacuum," said, "I have it in my head, but I
cannot explain it."
Fourth, I would specify a
sense of humor. The value of humor to lighten and season what
might otherwise be heavy diet is obvious, but there is a deeper
reason. The essence of humor is paradox, the ability to see more
than one thing at a time, and this is a quality certainly
required for good teaching, because the teacher must bear in
mind simultaneously both the matter he is trying to explain and
the reaction produced by it in the minds of his students. He
must try to hitch the new idea to one already there.
The list of qualities
could go on , but I'll complete it with one more, namely,
personality. This is, of course, a composite of many
characteristics, and while it is easy to recognize, it is
difficult to define. No one who lacks it can become an actor, or
a leader, or a successful politician, or a greater teacher, for
without it he cannot make himself interesting to his associates,
nor command their attention.
Q" After your years of
tremendous success teaching chemistry, do you see things about
the teaching of chemistry, or science in general, that are
specific to those disciplines?
A: A student once
asked me to define chemistry. I answered with the best
definition I can construct, "Chemistry is what chemists do and
how they do it." It is essentially an enterprise, not a defined
content. The most important element in the education of a
chemist --- I mean a scientist, not a technician --- is
association and apprenticeship with chemists at work and
thinking.
In the course of my long
years of observation of the policies of different departments, I
have arrived at the following rough generalization, which has
been called "Hildebrand's Law": the number of different courses
offered by a department is inversely proportional to the
eminence of its staff and to the significance of what has been
achieved in the field.
Q: In your years of
battling for subject-centered, basic education, you have
consistently promoted the nurturing of curiosity in individual
students and decried the presence, in an academic setting, of an
atmosphere of intellectual authoritarianism. Would you expand on
that?
A: Any intellectual
interest that has been aroused is so precious that it should be
carefully nurtured and used as a basis for expansion, not
interrupted by a rigid curriculum designed by persons who do not
appreciate individual variability. If a student is eager to
delve deeply, by all means let him so so. His interests can
later on be broadened gradually and naturally. A lad whose
interest has been awakened in chemistry soon learns, if he is in
a good environment, that mathematics and physics belong with
chemistry, and if he finds that the men who teach these subjects
are not ignorant of history, and have some taste in literature,
music, or art, his range of interest is easily expanded to
include such objects.
Q: In your writing,
you described a theory of liberal education based on the analogy
of a pyramid, "with a broad base laid during the first two
years, and then narrowing during the last two to the apex of a
'major'." In its place you proposed the analogy of a tree, which
begins as a stalk and only later branches and bears fruit. Is
that what you are talking about here?
A: Intellectual
interest, when first awakened, is likely to be fixed on some
narrow object. Only as it matures does it expand to include
related matters. No person is liberally educated by virtue of
the credits upon his report card at the end of his sophomore
year or even his senior year. The time to appraise his education
is in middle life, by what he reads and talks about when away
from his job. A degree should represent not a store of knowledge
completed but a scientific career started in the right
direction. We should be training athletes, not fattening hogs.
Q: How is this
brought to bear, particularly, on the making of scientists?
A: I regard all the
functions of science as interdependent. I assert only that
discovery is basic to all the others, and sufficiently different
as to require that a person, in order to be a success at it,
must have certain special aptitudes and training. A scientist
must be, above all, the kind of person who takes a special
delight in devising and answering questions of his own.
The ablest men in any
occupation are always in short supply. Even when there are men
seeking jobs, there are always jobs seeking the best men to be
found. We need not worry about producing too many top flight
scientists; they make their own jobs, as well as jobs for
others. They help to prevent depressions.
We are in danger of
missing the fundamental point when we discuss the production of
scientists chiefly in numerical terms of demand and supply.
There was no demand in England for a Michael Faraday, except,
fortunately, by Sir Humphrey Davy, as his laboratory helper. The
more critical demand today is not that of routine positions that
await filling but a demand that we ought to be making that every
potential Michael Faraday among our youth should have the
opportunity to develop to his full capacity. We need every
Michael Faraday we can produce, as well as everyone at all
approaching the stature of a Faraday.
Partially because I have
grown up in an age which has tended to glorify science as a
field apart, I had a mental picture of the scientist as a man
apart, and even above other men, different from most,
dispassionate, non-believing, unconcerned with the social
problems of mankind. This is as inaccurate as labeling all
lawyers as scoundrels or all doctors as unselfish servants of
society. I realize now that being a scientist does not make the
man. However, it occurs tome that the converse is partly true.
Being a man, in the sense of being a mature adult, does make the
scientist. For science, as I am beginning to "feel" it, is not
the development of the cobalt bomb, not the conquering of virus
diseases, indeed, not even all the inventions of the ages.
Science is a way, a discipline of mind, a way of approaching a
task, a problem without prejudice and fear. And these are
traits, I think, of a real man.
Q: Is that the basis
of your belief that science itself is not immoral, even if it is
thought by some that its discoveries have been put to immoral
uses?
A: Yes. The history
of science furnishes abundant evidence that a scientist usually
serves his fellow men better by extending the boundaries of
knowledge than by aiming directly at some social result.
Penicillin was not discovered by a bedside physician. Basic
knowledge has been the main source of countless beneficent
applications. It has afforded vastly increased opportunities to
enjoy leisure, music, travel, and stimulating social
intercourse. It has supplied valuable correctives to human
thought. It is significant that those who deprecate the gifts of
science never renounce any of them to live like the
contemporaries of St. Augustine.
A scientist can seldom
predict just what he will discover, least of all its possible
later misuse in the hands of evil men. Few scientist have that
kind of imagination. Many of the most valuable discoveries have
been stumbled upon in the search for something else. A visitor
at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley asked Professor E. O.
Lawrence what they expected to find with the new bevatron. He
replied, "If I knew what we would discover, we would not have
had to build the bevatron." A scientific investigation is a
question, not a prophecy.
Q: What was your own
association with Professor Lawrence?
A: I was very well
acquainted with Lawrence. In fact, when the University of Texas
offered him $1,000,000 to build his cyclotron there, Lawrence
wanted to build his cyclotron, but he didn't want to leave
Berkeley. I had a good deal of influence on President Robert G.
Sproul. He had called me and others for advice about whether he
should spend money in certain ways. He consulted me about what
he ought to do. I wrote to Sproul saying that I thought he ought
to bend every effort to raise the money to keep Lawrence here. I
said there were two reasons. One is that it would be a serious
blow at our good sense to allow any young fellow as brilliant as
Lawrence to be enticed away to a second or third rate
university. The other would be a more ethical reason. That is,
the byproduct of the cyclotron could have a profound influence
on other sciences, as, for instance, furnishing isotopes. and it
would be a scientific crime to have the cyclotron located
anywhere else than in the greatest possible center of scientific
activity. Sproul has a Scotch sense of money, bur he also had an
imagination for great things. So he raised the money and kept
Lawrence here.
Q: What about the
offers, like the one relatively early from Cal Tech, that you
have had to go elsewhere to work and to teach? Why have you
stayed at Berkeley?
A: The University
of California has treated me well. I didn't see any reason for
leaving Berkeley. I was very happy here and had everything I
wanted. Facilities for continuing research have been generously
afforded. Many institutions dismiss all professors at a
prescribed age. Friends of mine have been completely evicted,
regardless of their distinct and continuing productivity. At 70
I could still swim and ski better than any of the regents, and I
was publishing scientific papers. President Sproul invited me to
continue teaching on a scale that permitted me to receive a
certain pension. I stopped teaching for greater freedom, but the
University negotiated grants for research that enabled me to
have Ph.D. research assistants. at the age of 90 I could say
that 43 percent of all my scientific publications had been
published since my pseudo-retirement in 1952. I am very
grateful.
Q: Needless to say,
the University is grateful, too, for all the ways in which you
served. What are your reflections on the time spent as an
administrator and dean?
A: Sproul wanted me
very much to become dean of Letters and Science. I didn't want
to, but he kept at me, and he was a friend of mine, so I
reluctantly agreed. But I said, "I don't want to punch a time
clock; I want the freedom to run the office according to my best
judgment." He said, "I don't care whether you're ever in the
office if you'll be responsible for it."
My idea of a good
administration is that he devotes himself to making the next
year's model a better model, rather than operating the current
machinery. If a man can't pick able assistants whom he can trust
and inspire, you wonder whether he's competent to make the
decisions himself.
I might digress and tell
about one of the changes I engineered. One of the requirements
for graduation was two years of physical education. It meant,
really, two half hours a week of actual participation, and that
could hardly make a difference in a student's health. And the
fact that it was a requirement made it odious. I proposed that
we abolish the requirement. Some stout professors were afraid
the students wouldn't exercise. I exercised a great deal, and I
suggested that we, more appropriately continue to require
intellectual efforts, and we could leave safely to most students
whether they took physical exercise. I got the requirement
repealed, and immediately there was abig increase in the demand
for lockers in the gymnasium.
Q: You must tire of
being asked about your longevity. But what do you think about
your own level of creativity across nearly a century?
A: I recently read
a dictum that little creative work can be expected from a man
after the age 35. That is unquestionably true, because few
persons do anything very creative even before 35. But there is
no arbitrary age deadline after which a person can no longer
enjoy the pleasures of the mind. There are notable instances of
extraordinary creativity continuing to twice 35 and beyond.
Galileo was 72, ill, and a house prisoner of the Vatican when he
wrote his greatest work, The Two New Sciences, Verdi was
80 when he composed his best opera, Falstaff, Goethe
completed Faust at 80. Benjamin Franklin at 80 wrote on
Marine Observations. Peter Debye published excellent
research until his death at 82. Michelangelo continued to
produce superb sculpture and architecture until the eve of his
death at nearly 90.
What I have contributed to
science has been small compared with the works of these great
men, but to have contributed even a minor part to the present
imposing structure of science, and to have seen most of it under
construction during my lifetime, has filled my days with
exciting intellectual adventure.
Q: It seems an
understatement to refer to you days as "filled." Still, you
speak with evident fondness of your personal and private life.
What has that time been like?
A: The finest hours
of life are not those spent among large groups of people, but in
conversation with just a few, in reading great books, in
listening to great music, wandering in a forest of giant
sequoia, peering into a microscope, unraveling nature's secrets
in a laboratory. The men who have had most to give to their
fellow men are those who have enriched their minds and hearts in
solitude. It is a poor education that does not fit a man to be
alone with himself.
Q: What about your
remarkable health?
A: A completely
food life includes good health. This requires good luck and
sensible management. i have great respect for my body. I have
never had a headache. I have not dosed my lungs with tar. The
only carbon monoxide I breathe is that which my associates
generate. I have lived a physically active life; I celebrated my
77th birthday by swimming a half mile in 22 minutes.
I take care of a large
garden, which is more fun than swinging dumbbells. Redwood trees
I planted when three feet tall are now 100 feet tall, and two
are twelve feet in girth. I raise wood for the fireplace. I grow
beautiful camellias.
I used to be a pretty good
skier, but my legs no longer obey me very well. I am probably
dying from my feet upward, which is better than starting at the
top.
Q: And your family
life?
A: I am the
patriarch of a tribe numbering 40 including our four children.
They shower my wife and me with affection. We all love each
other. There are no generation gaps. They are our best friends.
I live with my wife Emily.
I have been in love with her since the day I met her, in 1908. I
met her at a musical. The moment I saw her I knew she was the
woman for me. The feeling was mutual. She turned 95 in June
[1981].
Q: How do you spend
your evenings?
A: After an early
light supper, my wife and I sit before the fire in comfortable
chairs, and I read aloud from a book of the sort that should be
read aloud, and good enough to have read before, perhaps by Jane
Austen Trollope, Robert Frost, or Stephen Vincent Benet. This
reading aloud stimulates good conversation. The great novelists
and dramatists are the keenest observers of human nature.
After 8 p.m., we listen,
perhaps, to a great symphony by Hayden, Schubert, or Mozart, or
to a concerto by Dvorak. With such music in our minds we go to
bed early and sleep soundly.
We are living in harmony
with the Irishman's wish: "May you live till you die and never
grow old." It's been a great life.
__________
Pfaff,
Timothy. "California Q & A: An Interview with Joel
Hildebrand," California
Monthly. 92, No. 1 (October 1981), pp.8-12.
