Memories of Paul R. Weber

I must confess that I spent my first year not at UW-Madison, but at Milwaukee State Teachers' College. I was not all that popular with them because I had declared my intentions of studying engineering. It was, however, cheap and in my hometown. Now it is dignified as being the UWM.

As a result, when I arrive at Madison following one year working at International Harvester in inspection, I was deficient in freshman math, chemistry and a few other requirements. Not wanting to begin here as a freshman, I pleaded my case and was finally allowed to be a sophomore, but on probation in math. And during registration I had to hobble around with a slipper on one foot following toe surgery. With all the hustle and bustle, I was in constant fear of someone stepping on my sore foot.

Sophomore Year

First of all, I was given a slightly reduced course load with three shops, chemistry, machine design and, last but not least, calculus. It was my very good fortune to be assigned to Dr. Ivan Sokolnikoff's calculus lecture course. Being on probation, I had to produce. I was enthralled by his enlightening lectures, which made the whole subject very clear to me. And, too, my good high school math background helped. I was thrilled to wind up with an A in calculus, a decent GPA, and a great start with lots of confidence.

One of my shop courses was Pattern Making with Nick Hollander. He was somewhat of a character and as a sideline made golf clubs (woods) for the pros. I remember his first class when he impressed on us that shellac was made from the shells of the lac bug. We used lots of shellac on our finished patterns. Also, there was forge and foundry shop.

Machine Design was with Pat Hyland who was my advisor. This was interesting and involved considerable mechanical drawing, which required my old UW Extension course. We had to design gears and cams, and we wound up designing a punch press as a final assignment. We used his text book. It was now September '36, and I remember Hyland telling me that after the presidential election, Langdon Street was to be named Landon Street for our new president! How wrong could he be, as it turned out.

Chemistry was fun with Louie Kallenberg, a real fixture for many years. One of our lecture arm desks had [aviator Charles] Lindbergh's initials carved in it. He had been an engineering student earlier for a short time. Louie was fascinating in his lectures and would usually begin by discussing far out stuff remote from chemistry. We would hope he would forget to get to the chemistry, but suddenly he would turn the switch and start the main lecture. He didn't like anyone in the large auditorium to fall asleep and on one occasion when I was feeling drowsy, he pointed up to me to chew me out I feared. However, I glanced to my neighbor who was fast asleep! Saved! He would have some surprises for us, such as in the middle of a lecture a fire would erupt on the lab table. It got our attention. Our lab experiments were fun and we covered qualitative analysis. I was lucky in my final unknown analysis in having to determine which of two states one of my compounds was. I guessed at it and hit the correct one! Very lucky!

Junior Year

Now for the real work ahead. First there was Electrical with Professor Kelso. I was very much interested in it because during my high school days, I had also done lots of experimenting with electricity and radio. Ham radio was next and I became a "ham" with my call W9JUH. During our lab work in the course, I was usually elected to trace out all the wiring before we turned on the juice to make sure we wouldn't be blown to kingdom-come. Our tests were successful, I'm glad to say. This course explained lots of mysteries I had had, and I enjoyed it all.

For Thermodynamics, I had one of my favorite professors, Ben Elliott, who certainly made his course very interesting. His specialty was internal combustion engines and he was author of a book on the subject. An interesting development many years later was that at our 50th reunion, Ben Elliott was there, and I had a nice chat with him. He remembered me and told us that he still had an office in the ME Building and that he walked to it several times a week. He was 100 years old! On one of his exams, I sweated over a problem and finally gave up. I put down that I thought there was insufficient data. Others in the class had worked it out, and in our exam postmortem I felt lousy. The papers came back the next week and to my surprise I was correct -- Insufficient Data. Relief!

Statics and Dynamics. Here I had Raymond J. Roark, who had been in the military and had a good military bearing. These were most interesting courses and proved to be very basic for my engineering. During one class, Roark went up to the board and with a piece of chalk, drew a perfect circle. We gave him a rousing "Sky Rocket" cheer, but he didn't raise an eyebrow and went on with his lecture as if nothing had happened. Later he was author of a wonderful textbook, "Formulas for Stress and Strain." This book proved to be practically a bible for most of us in duPont engineering and it was prominent on many of our desks and well worn.

Hydraulics was another eye-opener where we learned to dispel some of our misconceptions of fluid behavior. We had some experimental work along with the classroom lectures. This course proved useful in our later engineering.

Senior Year

Some of the heat was off for this our final year. It was time to take some elective courses such as economics and psychology. I took Wild Bill Kiekhofer's Econ. 101, the classic. He was indeed wild, but very good with his lectures. His home's brick wall was the target of many students who painted it with all sorts of graffiti, and I think he really enjoyed and expected this.

Another good course was Metallurgy, and I had young Professor Bill Bain. We studied alloy compositions, heat treatment and phase diagrams, among other things. This was most helpful again in our engineering. Toward the end of the term, I had received an offer from the duPont Company and I discussed this with Bain. He was very encouraging and thought it was a fine company to be with. He was so right!

Descriptive Geometry was very helpful in that it required one to visualize objects and drawings from many perspectives. It took lots of concentration, but was good to have under one's belt.

We had several machine shop courses, the first being Tool Making. Here we made reamers, taps, milling cutters and arbors. They were hardened and ground and were pretty good looking tools. Another was making a project. Mine was a bucket-type water pump which tested OK.

I might add that during my last two years in Madison, I was so lucky to have my sister, Elizabeth, in attendance, too. She was such an excellent student and wound up making many honoraries, including Phi Beta Kappa. She was my social helper and arranged for me to meet many of the coeds. She gave me much encouragement in my engineering as well. She was active too for the Daily Cardinal and the yearbook.

I was fortunate to have been elected to Pi Tau Sigma and to Tau Beta Pi. In all, my experiences at Wisconsin were excellent and I feel fortunate. And we certainly can't forget the SLIDE RULES which we all carried around as constant companions. How superfluous they are now that we have the versatile calculators and can calculate loads more than their three digits.

Following Graduation

Late in our senior year, I interviewed with companies, but not with duPont. However, I was asked to fill out an application form and as a result was asked to visit duPont in Charleston, West Virginia. I joined them in July to begin work in the engineering section at the Belle, West Virginia plant. This site was state of the art in high-pressure synthesis of ammonia, methanol, ethylene glycol, acids, urea, and later all intermediates for nylon were produced here. Seven of us mechanical engineers started and were given a two-month training course that covered all areas of the plant. We had to master each area and write a report and flow diagram for each.

Belle was an excellent training ground because of the wide variety of engineering problems encountered. We worked with the chemical engineers and chemists to come up with solutions. Because of the high pressure -- 15,000 PSI -- there was much know-how and lots of very special needs for equipment design and fabrication. This in addition to all the other phases of plant design.

During the war, we produced polyethylene at still higher pressures, up to 30,000 PSI! Some very sophisticated equipment and systems were developed and required lots of engineering skills.

Later I transferred to Wilmington, Delaware, the duPont Co. headquarters, and became a member of the vast engineering department. This was a world class organization and the only one that could design and build the billion dollar Hanford Plutonium Plant during the war. This amazing feat was carried out based on the properties of the only few micrograms of plutonium available from the physics labs.

Working here was a wonderful experience. We had about 2,500 people at our central engineering site, Louviers Building, with specialists in every imaginable field. We designed many chemical plants and the specialized equipment required for the numerous duPont products. I authored two important patents now in productive use. Our construction division built the plants world wide, based on our designs and drawings.

I found that in my 41-year duPont Co. engineering career, I made use of practically all of my UW education. There was much need for math for stress analysis, etc., and knowing calculus. It was so helpful also to be able to interact with various specialists and speak their language. Mechanical drawing was important for me and I have notebooks full of my scale drawings and sketches of many designs I worked on. Our machine shop training was very important, to visualize how parts could be machined. Metallurgy was quite important, too, for all the special design requirements, both mechanical and chemical.

Paul R. Weber (BSME '39)