J.D. Perkins’s scientific contributions

The early pioneers of chemical engineering in the last two decades of the 19th century were concerned to establish a new profession to support the needs of a rapidly growing chemical industry. This discipline and profession developed as the industry itself grew rapidly to a growing demand from society for the products of the chemical industry. Early practitioners of chemical engineering, emerging from university courses in the early years of the 20th century, quickly found employment not only in those sectors of the chemical industry that had originally served to define the need, but also in other parts of the process industries. The early conceptual basis of chemical engineering, based on "unit operations," enabled the burgeoning discipline to establish itself as distinctive from courses in industrial or applied chemistry and mechanical engineering. This chapter also discusses that the future will try to ensure that chemical engineering realizes its full potential as the broadest and most scientific of the engineering disciplines. The threat of "opportunity overload" is that the chemical engineers will lose focus, and lose contact with their distinctive roots, as they try to deal with an evergrowing range of challenges.