Oregon State UniversitySpecial Collections & Archives Research Center

“Glycylglycine is a Bitch: Roger Hayward and the Art of Science,” Ina Heumann

June 30, 2011

Video: “Glycylglycine is a Bitch: Roger Hayward and the Art of Science” 

0:47:20 - Abstract | Biography

Transcript

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Chris Petersen: Ina Heumann, from Berlin, received her PhD from the University of Vienna at the end of last year and is most recently affiliated with the Max Planck Institute of History of Science in Berlin, and she’s been here for two months with her husband and her now 6-month old daughter, and it’s been a delight having her here. She is primarily interested right now in the work of Roger Hayward, who was a scientific illustrator of some renown; he worked with Linus Pauling for quite a long time and her primary focus right now is his work with Scientific American Magazine for which he provided illustrations for about 25 years. So she’s been studying that for the last two months in the Hayward papers and the Pauling papers. And her title today, as you can see, is definitely the best title we’ve had thus far in the Resident Scholar program: “Glycylglycine is a bitch,’ Roger Hayward and the Art of Science.”

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Ina Heumann: Thanks a lot for the introduction and I’m, as well, really happy that you all could come today, and I know it’s vacation time and maybe there’s something else you could do, but yeah, thanks for coming. And before I start, I really have to thank the staff of the Special Collections for giving me all this help and advice, be it finding a babysitter or accommodation or [unintelligible] which was difficult or documents in some of the thousands and thousands of boxes. So thanks to Chris and Trevor and of course Christy with all the pictures and John, who is not here today, but who copied all the Scientific American of Roger Haywood, that Roger Haywood illustrated, which is this amount of copies, which I think it took him four weeks or something like that, and Will who copied-edited my talk. But of course the mistakes are all mine. Okay, “Glycylglycine is a bitch,’ Roger Hayward and the Art of Science.”

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One of the many thrills of working as historian is that one is allowed to stick one’s nose into things that are usually regarded as secret, private or personal. And thanks to the Special Collections’ Research Scholarship this is exactly what I did the last two months: Sticking my nose in the papers of Roger Hayward, the artist, amateur, and architect, for answering my questions about art and science and the relationship of texts and illustrations. I became especially aware of this excitement when I opened the third drawer of the personal safe of Linus Pauling – a collection of items which Pauling had deemed to be either too sensitive or too important to be filed otherwise. And as you can imagine, my thrill rose even further when I found a letter about Roger Hayward.

This letter was from Bill Freeman Pauling’s longtime publisher, and it was addressed to Pauling. The letter was written in 1953 and obviously, there had occurred a severe disturbance in the collaboration between Pauling, the scientist, Hayward, the illustrator, and Freeman, the publisher: “We can talk further about this when I see you,” Freeman wrote Pauling, “for we must have Roger happy.”

I’m not sure, can you read it? [pointing at projector screen]

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Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

IH: Good.

As far as the sources reveal Roger Hayward’s unhappiness was related to questions of respect, hierarchy, and – money. At the background of Freeman’s letter lay the sudden success of the two volumes, which established Pauling’s reputation as being not only an outstanding chemist but also an innovative and successful teacher, and which brought the small publishing house Freeman & Co. in the front-row of science publishers. Those two ones, of course, General Chemistry, published in 1947 for the first time in College Chemistry, which was meant to be a version for the freshmen in chemistry courses. Both books were abundantly illustrated by Roger Hayward, as was already indicated on both title pages and as became evident, as soon as one opened the book. This is an example of General Chemistry.

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The royalties of the book gave Pauling and his family the first taste of wealth, as best illustrated in the large swimming pool they built outside their mountainside house. This is Pauling and Ava Helen bathing in their pool. It was called “the pool that General Chemistry built,” as Pauling’s children would say.

I would like to give you a rough impression of Pauling’s royalty profit as compared to Hayward’s:

As early as 1948, one year after General Chemistry was published, Pauling gained over 4,000 Dollars in royalties just from General Chemistry. A year later the royalties rose to more than 5,000 Dollars.

Compared with this, the half percent of royalties that Hayward would get for his contribution to General Chemistry, which were roughly about 120 dollars per year, seemed to be a rather modest outcome.

But money was not the only problem that was discussed in Bill Freeman’s letter. In fact, his letter reveals issues that not only defined the collaboration of Pauling, Hayward and Freeman but that are crucial for understanding the relationship between science and art, between text and illustrations, and between professional and amateur in 20th century science communication. Thus, I am using Bill Freeman’s letter in the following as a thread for discussing “Roger Hayward and the Art of Science.” I will structure my talk in four chapters: the first one is concerned with Roger Hayward the creative scientific artist, the second part will deal with Roger Hayward as a border crosser or someone who would never really fit in or was always in between. The third part is about Hayward and Scientific American and the last part I’m going to deal with, the value of drawings and science texts as “scriptovisual documents.”

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Roger Hayward, the “creative scientific artist”:

Bill Freeman structured his thoughts about Hayward in several points, the first one relating to Roger Hayward as an “extraordinary illustrator”: I quote: “First. Roger is not the ordinary illustrator. He is remarkably good, has both soundness and a certain personality in his drawings, each of which means a lot to us.” As you could already see in the drawings in General Chemistry, Roger Hayward was indeed an outstanding graphic artist. This was due partly to his heritage and upbringing, partly a result of his profession and above all an effect of his overwhelming curiosity. Hayward was born in 1899 into an artistic family. His grandfather William Preston Phlebs was a renowned painter, and Hayward’s mother inherited the artistic streak. His father, although being a business man, held to his hobby of watch repairing. Quote: “Thus design in all forms was a matter of interest”, as Hayward wrote, “And I was particularly absorbed in understanding how things are made to the point that in so far as I could I made things myself.” During his school years Hayward developed a predilection for drawing, painting, mathematics, and, above all for descriptive geometry. He tried to combine all those interests by studying architecture at MIT, where he graduated in 1922. In 1929 he came to Pasadena, California to work in his former classmate’s architecture firm.

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His new neighborhood caused his “scientific awakening.” Hayward lived, as he put it, “within a stone’s throw” of the California Institute for Technology. Quote: “It seemed to me”, he remembered, “that it would be a pity to live in an age which will undoubtly [sic] be known in future centuries as remarkable for its development in science and to be comparatively ignorant in the subjects.” Hayward began to educate himself, built a telescope and a quartz spectrograph, learned about optics, and became member of scientific discussion groups.

At the end of the 1930s Hayward illustrated for the first time a whole book. It was written by one of his friends, John Strong and it as published in 1938. It is quite amazing to see, that as early as that, Hayward had developed his unique style of sketchy, yet really precise freehand drawing. The book caught also the attention of Dennis Flanagan, the editor of Scientific American, who approached Hayward in 1948 with the question if he would illustrate an article for the magazine. It was the beginning of a collaboration that lasted for twenty-five years.

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But it was not only Hayward’s personal style that made him an “extraordinary illustrator,” as Hayward put it. More important was he knew what he was drawing; that means he knew many of the scientific and technical details and he became more and more conscious about the art of illustrating, the rules of which can be jointed together from his rich correspondence. His style developed mainly out of two reasons. First: He tried to make his drawings trustworthy by preserving some of the informal character of the work shop, the guiding example of which was, quote: “the “physicist or architect who is asked about something and explains with a crude drawing on the back of an envelope.” The drawings attested to the intimate knowledge of their producer without being arcane or impenetrable. On the contrary, they were “drawings for people to work from.” “I try to put in enough familiar details so the reader will recognize them and feel on familiar ground. Therefore I am careful to show more detail of glassware, for instance, than he really needs.” Second: Hayward’s first and foremost concern was to make things understandable. He never started a set of drawings before he had read the background available to him through his own library, the 12 scientific journals he was subscribed to or through preprints he would gather from scientists, friends and correspondence partners. The art of illustration was for Hayward not only relying on the ability to render an observed object on paper but also, quote: “to synthesize the object from what one knows about it.” He called this “a sort of artistic prevarication or perhaps deception” as he tried to draw invisible or complicated objects, like antibodies or some amateur’s weird constructions, quote: “as though I had been looking at the real thing.”

Hayward’s talent, as we all know, culminated in the art work he did for Linus Pauling from the 1930s onward. You all know the pictures. This is a really early example for ’48 in the Endeavor. This one is a slide Hayward made, presumably in the early sixties, I guess, for one of the lectures of Pauling, but I really—it’s really difficult to track down for which lecture it might have been. He was, as Freeman put it, a “creative scientific artist”, in as much as Hayward’s illustrations united science and art, knowledge and imagination, soundness and personality.

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So now my second part, Border Crossing or Being In-Between. Hayward’s ability to connect science and art, rationality and aesthetics, thus fields that are often thought of as being antipodal or even exclusive of each other, made him a paradigmatic border crosser or a “boundary person.”

Hayward was architect, artist, craftsman, illustrator, and inventor, not to mention his interest and competence in chemistry, optics, physics or mathematics. However: The only formal degree he had was in architecture and technical engineering. He was a self-made man, someone who loved to quote: “get the books and dig the knowledge out” by himself. As such Hayward resembled the figures of the ideal renaissance men, the “genius universalis.” He was a polymath who knew a lot about many things but at the same time lacked the formal education in most of them. Thus Hayward’s talent to serve as intermediate figure rooted at the same time on his deficiencies: he was always in-between, being neither a scientist nor a mere illustrator, neither an educated expert nor just an average layman. Hayward would never really fit in, which is – I want to be clear about that – not a statement about him as an individual person or as a psychological character, but a statement about the structural preconditions of a person who is a border crosser or, so to say, a “liminal agent.”

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Consequently, Hayward was both needed and at the same time neglected. I am citing Freeman’s letter again: “Second. Roger is a bit of a primadonna. He has to be handled just so. He thinks of himself as a professional person – which he is – who wants to be treated as such, rather than as a skilled craftsman. Like all artists (and he is one of those, basically), he is a bit of a problem and [in] this case a bit of a genius.”

We can see by now: It was not only money that was at stake in the quarrel between Hayward, Pauling and Freeman. In the background of Freeman’s letter were issues like hierarchy and respect. Freeman’s letter displayed several clichés that aimed at categorizing science and art, and at positioning Pauling, himself and Hayward in their “proper place.” In comparison of Hayward with a “primadonna” evoked the picture of a presumably fat, female and hysterical singer. Furthermore, by calling Hayward “a genius” he suggested him being a complicated, maybe even neurotic person. Opposed to it, of course, we can imagine the addresser and the addressee: the manager of a successful publishing house and the sincere scientist, both of them responsible persons who were occupied with the rational side of life. (And by the way, it is interesting to note the gender bias in this comparison, the hysterical female on the one hand, the other hand the decision-making men. This is of course a bias which made the two parties most visible and the hierarchy between them).

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I would like to give you three more examples of the often disputed and negotiated hierarchy between Freeman, Pauling and Hayward – or between science and art. First: It was evident in the tone of the correspondence between Pauling and Hayward. Second: It became obvious in the changes of the contractual basis between the publishing house Freeman & Company and Hayward, and third: It is part of the history of Pauling’s famous textbooks.

First, the communication between Pauling and Hayward relied mostly on oral discussions. Hayward often visited the Caltech Campus, attended seminars or met Pauling to discuss drawings he made for lectures and publications. But as Pauling began his extensive research trips and travels around the world they communicated more and more via letters. The tone of communication is well demonstrated by the following letters from Pauling to Hayward from the early 50’s:

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“Dear Roger, would you make me another polyhedron,” as this example of July ’51, or in this example which starts: “Dear Roger, I enclose two drawings which I would like to have changed,” followed by a catalogue of criticisms, and the P.S.: “Would you mail or bring the corrected drawings back to me”?

In other cases the communication between Pauling and Hayward was even more distanced: Sometimes Pauling wrote to Freeman that he would like to have some changes in Hayward’s figures and discussed it in detail with the publisher. Hayward would only get a carbon copy. Of course, this sort of short-spoken, formal and sometimes rather rough interaction was most effective; but, as I would like to argue, it was at the same time a means to reinforce the position of Pauling as the one who defined what was to be represented, and of Hayward, as the one who followed those instructions. I will come to that point later and show that Hayward tried to subvert this scheme and that he was certainly, of course, more than just the illustrator.

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Second, the contractual basis of the collaboration between Hayward and Freeman & Company was an unsolved problem. In 1953 when the letter of Freeman was written, Hayward got on strike. He refused to do more illustrations for the revision of Pauling’s General Chemistry until, quote: “arrangements satisfactory to me have been made,” and he resigned from his position as a Research Assistant at Caltech. Pauling and Freeman were alerted. Freeman finally managed the crisis by offering Hayward 20 Dollars for every new illustration, aside from the royalties Hayward would get for General Chemistry. Luckily for the three of them, the problem seemed to solve itself. Pauling reduced the number of new illustrations to 5, and Hayward excused himself for the “fuss” he had caused and urged Freeman and Pauling to forget the whole issue.

It took as long as 1957 for the contractual basis between Freeman & Co. and Hayward to finally change. Hayward became a formal staff member of the publishing house. Instead of getting royalties for the books he illustrated, he was now paid a yearly salary of up to 7,500 US dollars, partly dependent on the amount of time he spent working for Freeman & Co. The contract was planned to last for 10 years. Hayward illustrated a whole series of scientific texts, for example, this from T. A. Geissman, Principles of organic chemistry, which was published in ’59, and he began to work on several others like this one, Essentials of Chemistry in the Laboratory, by Frantz and Malm, which was meant to be a manual for two texts of Pauling. And you can see on both title pages that Hayward was really prominently announced as the illustrator.

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The agreement seemed to be fruitful. However, three years later it became clear that it wouldn’t work out. At the bottom of it was again a debate about hierarchy and respect: In January 1960 Hayward wrote to Bill Freeman after having received perpetuated criticism on his shaky lines, quote: “I am not a draughtsman. I will not redraw figures until they conform to any other person’s idea of aesthetic perfection. If my hand is not steady enough then other and more amenable hands will have to be employed. My contract with the W. H. Freeman Company entitles them to 60% of my time in the capacity of an illustrator and not a draughtsman.”

This time Freeman brought out the big guns and insisted on the, quote, “sine qua non of satisfying the author”: “The work must be done – dull or not. We cannot afford to pay you and have done elsewhere work that you do not want to do or literally cannot do. […] Would you like to cancel your contract? Or, do you want to commit yourself to the principle that an author has to be satisfied?” The whole affair got really nasty, with each of the parties threatening each other. But they finally came back to a friendly basis and decided that Hayward should go for his artistic freedom. The contract was canceled and Hayward went back to an income based on royalties. He would have to subordinate himself to the principle of fulfilling the authors’ wishes if he agreed to illustrate a book.

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Third, it was also the author’s wishes that would have a huge impact on Hayward’s occupational life six years later. In 1966 Pauling began to work on the third edition of General Chemistry, his famous textbook that was already in print for twenty years. As it came to discussion of the new illustrations for General Chemistry it became clear that Hayward’s position as the most admired artist was no longer undisputed. The benchmark for all illustrations yet to come was now set by Evan Gillespie, the director of the art department at Freeman & Co. Pauling had already worked with Gillespie and was extremely fond of Gillespie’s’ work in Chemical Principles in the Laboratory by Malm and Frantz, which was published in 1966. This is an example of this book.

The publishers as well seemed to favor the style of Gillespie, quote: “Roger Hayward’s illustrations are marvelous – but sophisticated – and in a sense perhaps ‘old fashioned’ in execution. What do you think of the idea of having Evan Gillespie take Roger’s drawings and completely redo them in his – Evan’s – more modern style?” they asked Pauling.

However, before they finally decided whether Gillespie or Hayward should make the new illustrations, they urged Hayward to try new techniques on some, and send some sample illustrations. They were anxious about the results, quote: “I hope that Roger will be able to present a technique that will please us,” Freeman’s partner wrote. “It would be a shame to have him drop out as the illustrator of your books after all these years.”

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A couple of weeks later Hayward delivered his samples. Pauling’s evaluation was devastating: “I do not think that the two drawings rendered mechanically by Roger are satisfactory. I could do a better job myself, although I have never been first rate in mechanical drawings. […] The drawings by Evan Gillespie […] from the Malm-Frantz manual are in my opinion better than the Roger Hayward illustrations – better than those in my present editions of College Chemistry and General Chemistry, and better than the samples that Roger has prepared.”

The decision was made. Three years later the third edition of General Chemistry was published, and as you can see, no illustrator was announced anymore on the title page, and indeed, the appearance had strongly changed, and not the actual objects that were drawn changed, but the style in which they were drawn. Whereas Pauling would edit and rewrite his text, Hayward’s drawings in Pauling’s books were now a matter of the past. The changing style of science communication had outrun Hayward’s illustration technique and obviously neither Pauling nor Freeman trusted Hayward’s ability to change and adapt. Hayward had been a vital part of the success of General Chemistry, as is not least visible in the promotional material for the book: this is, I guess, from the late 50’s, and you can see that on both the cover and the back of these [unintelligible], they are drawings of Hayward, which was really an important part of the books. Hayward had set the style for portraying chemical substances as individual and concrete, and he was widely admired and copied throughout the scientific world. However, as we can see: science came first and then came the art.

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Third, “A marriage made in Heaven, Hayward and Scientific American.” Opposed to this sometimes tense and disputed relationship between scientist, publisher and illustrator, was Hayward’s engagement with Scientific American, which lasted from 1948 to 1973. In the late 1940s Dennis Flanagan, the editor of Scientific American, approached Hayward and offered him a position as an illustrator for the column “The Amateur Astronomer.” Hayward was delighted. He accepted, and started to illustrate the column in December 1949. It turned out to be, as Flanagan wrote many years later, “a marriage made in heaven”. “The Amateur Astronomer” was a column that addressed the do-it-yourself tinkerers, those who designed and built optical instruments like telescopes, spectrographs or astronomical observation domes, as you can see in this example. In 1952 the column was extending its coverage to include the work of amateurs in all the sections and departments of science. It was based on an enthusiastic definition of the amateur, a notion that was held onto despite the rapid specialization of scientific and professional life: I quote the Amateur Scientist Column from 1952: “The amateur is generally a fellow of boundless curiosity, who enjoys digging for facts – and sharing them with everyone he knows. It is not the hope of epic discoveries that keep him at his avocation. If he should chance to learn something important to mankind, that would indeed be a thrill, but he finds reward enough in the fun of the free quest.”

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The amateur was someone like Hayward, who wrote about himself: “I love to know how things are done and I delight in telling others how to do things.” And indeed, he was much more than just an illustrator [inaudible]. In his vast correspondence with the two editors of the column he contributed countless ideas and suggestions for improvements of the devices he had illustrated. The letters were often literally published in the column, citing Hayward as an experienced expert of amateur science. He illustrated and commented on questions like “How to measure the Metabolism of Animals,” “Cloud Chambers and Detecting Nuclear Events,” or how to construct inexpensive x-ray machines. It seems as if Hayward had finally become himself: a professional amateur, and thus a border crosser by profession, whose drawings and comments would tell people how to do things.

This brings us right in the middle of the fourth and last part of my talk, which I titled “The value of drawings: science texts as ‘scriptovisual documents.” As you can easily gather from Hayward’s illustrations for the “Amateur Scientist,” the drawings captured a vast amount of information that couldn’t be easily conveyed by the text. Hayward’s drawings were not only beautiful refinements of the text but a means to understanding how to construct the discussed instruments. In Scientific American, visual means of communication – no matter if they were photographs, graphs, diagrams, tables, or drawings – were not only essential in the Amateur column but also in the published articles. Gerard Piel, the publisher of Scientific American put it this way, quote: “In truth, the words underneath the pictures were the illustrations, the story was carried by the picture. What you did with the text was answer the questions excited by the picture.”

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The illustrations took a lot of the burden of the prose, served to define a new technical term, presented new concepts or the objects discussed. The textual and the visual parts of the articles were inseparably tied together in the process of communicating the scientific facts. This was most obvious in one of the articles Hayward published together with Pauling and Robert Corey in Scientific American in July 1954. The article was called “The Structure of Protein Molecules.” By the way, the left side is glycylglycine. And you can see here as well that the text ran through just nine columns of the article, whereas Hayward’s illustrations covered nearly twice as much. The task of illustrating the structure of protein molecules was not an easy one. Quote: “Some of the crystal structures are stinkers, it is so hard to make them read,” he wrote Flanagan, “Glycyglycine is a bitch, nine atoms per molecule, not counting the hydrogens and four molecules per unit cell.” Nevertheless, as you can see, Hayward finally succeeded and designed pictures that were not only beautiful but presented the complicated structures of polypeptides. It was Hayward’s illustrations that made visible the invisible, which Corey and Pauling could only describe, and it is thus not surprising that Hayward was included as a co-author.

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In light of this the third statement of Bill Freeman in his letter to Pauling in 1953, it seems highly debatable: He wrote: “Third. He [which is of course Hayward] overestimates the value of his drawings. He feels they are, square foot for square foot, as important as the text they illustrate. I think, obviously, he overestimates the value of his work.”

Freeman was wrong, as I would like to argue, and he was not only wrong regarding Hayward’s role in the success of Pauling and of his publishing house. He was also wrong if one regards the general question that is still in the heart of an old but still current science historical debate: By what means do scientists actually do science? What is the role of tools, representations and models in the making of science? How do scientists communicate their findings and how can we interpret scientific texts?

I would like to give you some examples out of the Hayward-Pauling collaboration that may demonstrate that Freeman was wrong and would like to finish with a general assumption about the relation of scientific texts and pictures.

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Pauling himself grounded his thinking in images, quote: “[M]y original ideas in the field of science usually came or perhaps always came from my having a picture or model relating to some phenomenon.” Whenever he had an idea about chemical structures he drew it, so that he had something in his hands from which his thinking could proceed. In the late 40s and early 50s he strongly relied on Hayward’s ability to translate his sketches, his estimates, and tentative definitions into lucid drawings and models. Sometimes the drawings even could and should prove whether or not Pauling’s descriptions of chemical structures were right. So, in one example, he wrote Hayward in 1952, after a long description of chemical structures that [inaudible], and asked a question to make, to actually draw it, he wrote: “Please telephone me if […] you think that there is some mistake in this description.”

Beside that the drawings were essential to communicate the knowledge to a wider audience, be it to students via textbooks, lectures and seminars or to colleagues via scientific articles. Pauling was very conscious about that, and quote: “The success of our paper will be determined in considerable part by the clarity of the drawings,” he wrote to Hayward in 1951.

To sum up: Hayward didn’t overestimate the value of his drawings. They were indeed essential, not only for communicating the facts but also for developing them. This means, concerning the quarrel of 1953, that he might have had every right to ask for more appreciation of his work. And this means for us, who read and interpret scientific texts, no matter if they are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, in Scientific American or in a textbook like General Chemistry, we have to take those texts as they are: Documents that “can be read and looked at simultaneously.” They are, as Daniel Jacobi and Bernard Schiele put it, “scriptovisual documents.” It becomes very obvious in the papers of Roger Hayward: behind the images is a story as worthy to be told as behind the texts. Thanks.

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[Applause].

CP: We’ve got time for questions if there’s anyone who would like to ask some.

IH: [unintelligible] left us some cookies.

[Audience Member 1]: What was the technique that he used for molecules, as opposed to just the line drawings that he did for illustrating instruments, that sort of thing? Did he—I understand the technique actually, but how did do that?

IH: He always used pencil drawings for the first sketch and then he used a technique; he made many, many little dots on the paper for getting—

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[Audience Member 1]: In order to get it three-dimensional.

IH: Yes, exactly.

[Audience Member 1]: But they were never—

IH: You can maybe…see the best one, the slide, and sometimes of course when he made the paintings for the famous book The Architecture of Molecules, he used [unintelligible] on paper.

[Audience Member 1]: Oh yeah. So he did have color illustrations.

IH: Yeah, yeah. But not that much, because it was difficult to print them, so for example, in Scientific American, they—he was not allowed to use two colors. And you can see it here, he used—it’s just pencil. And the ink, the letterings obviously inked, and he would try and vary with the paper he used and with the pens. And the ink also.

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[Audience Member 2]: Did he—did Hayward work for…in how many cases was Hayward working from a basic sketch that Pauling had made? Or a line drawing that Pauling had made, and then enlarged it as well as colored it?

IH: It’s really difficult to tell. I’m—because there are no such sketches anymore in the Hayward correspondence, and the only thing I can—sometimes he would get some sketches, sometimes he would check the [unintelligible]. Of course not when it came to molecules, but in other cases he would look at the objects and sometimes it was just described and Pauling would really describe it and he would say the angles between the molecules and the [unintelligible] and it was more or less a mathematical equation and Hayward was such an able chemist that he could translate the equations in three-dimensional drawings. And sometimes of course he had photographs, especially for the Scientific American. Either he painted the photographs or he tried to draw the photographs from looking at them, or if they were really good, he used a camera and projected it on the paper he was using.

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[Audience Member 2]: And I think you talked about this for a little bit, but was Hayward involved in—he had this position at Caltech, so was he, Hayward himself, involved in working with some technicians who were making the physical molecular models?

IH: I think he did it himself. I have two—I found two letters where it was clear that Hayward already—he really did the models which are famous when you see pictures of Pauling. But it’s just in two cases that I can [unintelligible]. But I think this is really important, because he touched the thing, and this is, I mean, if you touch molecules and the three-dimensional thing, it’s easier to draw it, I guess, so he really had a deep understanding how polypeptides and the chains, which were…

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[Audience Member 3 (Cliff Mead?)] Might the comments by Bill Freeman to Pauling, regarding Hayward, might they have been colored by the exceptional relationship of Pauling to the Freeman publishing company?

IH: Um, I don’t understand your question.

[Audience Member 3 (Cliff Mead?)]: Okay, in other words, Pauling had a—Pauling, when he began his relationship with Bill Freeman and the publishing company, got an extraordinarily high royalty rate, and one of the reasons was that Pauling was being used to sort of build the Freeman company up and allow other things, and so as a result, Freeman wanted to make sure that Pauling was happy at all times.

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IH: Yes of course, and Pauling acted not only as author of the books he was doing, but also as the editor of the small series. He makes, or publishes the series with similar companion texts, textbooks in chemistry, a series of books on chemistry, that was the title of the series, and there were about ten titles in it and in the beginning they tried to give all the books included in the series a unique style by using, of course, the same page size and the same cover and the same colors, and of course Hayward’s illustrations. So it was a really big step to drop out Hayward and it had to do not only with the books of Pauling, but with a whole section of chemistry texts. Yeah, it was a huge decision.

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[Audience Member 4]: What did you say was the extent of Hayward’s formal training in science?

IH: Just architecture. This was all. Yeah, and he—I can’t really understand how he did it. Well, he really educated himself and started to read and to attend various discussion groups that he must have been, well somebody was always there to help him and to work to sneak in the seminars and the lectures and try to get all there was in scientific facts. And of course he was never shy to ask people how to do things and how to understand things.

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[Audience Member 3 (Cliff Mead?)]: I just think it’s interesting that even though Pauling and Hayward seemed to be [unintelligible] regarding this particular book, that later on Pauling was to rely upon Hayward for the structure of molecules, architecture of molecules.

IH: In ’64, you mean?

[Audience Member 3 (Cliff Mead?)]: Yes.

IH: Yeah—

[Audience Member 3 (Cliff Mead?)]: Rather than going to another illustrator.

IH: Pardon?

[0:43:07.9]

[Audience Member 3 (Cliff Mead?)]: Rather than going to another illustrator.

IH: In 1960, yeah.

[Audience Member 3 (Cliff Mead?)]: Yeah, he stayed with Hayward.

IH: Yeah, but then he dropped him in 1966, so two years after The Architecture of Molecules.

[0:43:25.9]

[Audience Member 5]: so how would you characterize the relationship between him and Pauling over the long run of things?

IH: Oh it’s, I mean it’s really difficult to say. And it’s most interesting they—I mean there’s a rather thick folder of correspondence between the two of them, but—and they are really formal all the time, but it’s never going into some private subjects.

[Audience Member 5]: Never, okay.

[0:43:53.9]

IH: I think Hayward really admired Pauling, of course he did. And he was proud of being the illustrator of Pauling’s books, and it’s really interesting and I didn’t find any letter that addressed Hayward and told him that he would not be the illustrator anymore. This must have been an oral discussion, and then there’s the last letter from Pauling to Hayward in 1965, then there’s two years of a break, of no letter at all, neither Pauling addressing Hayward, nor Hayward addressing Pauling, so I guess he was really offended. And then the next letter from Pauling to Hayward is concerning this advising some architectural stuff, so not as illustrator anymore but really an expert in his kind of profession. I found this really interesting. But this is all I can say. There’s no more in the sources.

[0:45:04.5]

[Audience Member 4]: And the other person, of course, quite famous as a molecular artist, was Irving Geis. Can you compare the nature of their contributions and the quality of contributions?

IH: I’m glad that you asked for Irving Geis, because it’s really interesting that—I knew they were—they lived at the same time, exactly the same time, Geis and Hayward, and Hayward painted—drew for Pauling, and Geis did the drawings for Kendrew and of course Kendrew and Pauling, they worked with each other, but it’s unbelievable Hayward didn’t know Geis and he didn’t know even Gillespie. So he was really, he really shut his focus and he didn’t want—I have the impression he didn’t want to be compared, to compare himself with illustrators that were out there. And I don’t really know a lot of the pictures of Geis. I just know the famous myoglobin molecule, of course. And it’s much more [unintelligible], do you say that? It’s much—it’s lighter, the whole way he drew it and yeah, it’s a totally different kind of illustration technique. And this is something I would like to do in the next couple of months, grab all the chemical textbooks and articles and stuff and really compare the style of communicating scientific texts and chemistry, so that I really can argue about or discuss the style of Hayward’s work, and for being able to better understand why they had to make the decision in ’66 to drop out Hayward.

[0:46:58.4]

[Audience Member 4] The reason I ask about Hayward’s formal training, you said it was architecture?

IH: And he had a degree in technical engineering, yeah.

[Audience Member 4]: I had some interaction with Geis a number of years ago and he told me his formal training was architecture.

IH: Yes, architecture.

[0:47:13.2]

[Audience Member 4]: You know, it turned out in conversation he knew very little chemistry and it was just amazing that he was able to create molecules, and the kind of understanding of molecules that he was able to do without knowing the nature of the functional groups and so forth.

IH: Yeah maybe he drew from—Kendrew had all those models of the…I don’t know how you, in Germany it’s called [steinenlied?], it’s like being in the forest and the lots of trees and maybe he just draw the models that were already there, I don’t know.

CP: Okay, thank you very much.

[Applause].

CP: Please feel free to stick around and have some of our goodies. And otherwise, we’ll see you in July.

[0:48:12.3]

 

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