November 18, 1930

Dear Professor Noyes

I wish to suggest that the question of the nature of the work in Freshman Chemistry be reconsidered. As you know from our resent conversation, I have reached the conclusion that a considerable acquaintance, even familiarity, with descriptive and general chemistry is necessary as a prerequisite to further study and is indeed essential for the development of an interest in chemistry, and that our students have not acquired this familiarity and are not given the opportunity to acquire it. The expansion of this thesis follows.

A knowledge of descriptive chemistry is necessary for the study of theoretical chemistry. Let me repeat an argument which I gave before. A boy throws stones, hears sounds, operates machinery, and in general obtains a knowledge of descriptive physics before attending high school or college, and so can be put at once through a course in elementary theoretical physics, which may interest him very much as he learns explanations of known phenomena, which may previously have puzzled him. But a difficult mathematical treatment of chemical equilibrium when he has little knowledge of chemical reactions and their characteristics, or a reasonably rigorous treatment of indicators when he has had no experience with strong and weak acids and bases, and can accordingly not have any curiosity about them, will be just a chore to be done.

I know of no chemist who was attracted to this field of knowledge because of theoretical chemistry. Instead, it is an interest in chemicals and their reactions which has first attracted the chemist, who may (and usually does) become keenly interested in attempting to account for unusual observations, and later become excited over the explanations given by theoretical chemistry.

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Professor Swift, for example, told me that for several years he learned only general old-fashioned qualitative chemistry, and that Chemical Principles came as a revelation to him. I contend that his interest in chemistry and in chemical principles came from his early study of descriptive chemistry, and that Chemical Principles would have been deadly uninteresting to him if he had not had thousands of questions stored up in him waiting to be answered. Swift's experience is the same as yours and mine. I think we can deduce from this that to awaken an interest in chemistry in students we mustn't make the courses consist entirely of explanations, forgetting to mention what there is to be explained.

I feel that the freshman year should give the student, through laboratory work as well as lectures, a good familiarity with chemicals and their reactions. It should not be a bare recital of facts. Simple theories -gas laws, mass action, solubility product, LeChatelier's principle, thermochemistry, oxidation-reduction reactions, ionization - should be woven in, but all richly illustrated with examples, and not too difficult experiments. The good student at the end of the year should have chemical feeling or intuition - which means that he usually knows what will happen. Then, but not before, he is ready to treat these topics quantitatively and more rigorously. He will be able to handle problems of equilibria leading to quartio equations, because he will know what quantities are small: and these problems will be chemical problems to him. A freshman student said, "Our chemistry course is just an extra course in mathematics." That is just what it shouldn't be.

I shall not propose a detailed course of study for the freshman. I would not object to the use of Kendall-Smith as a text, with laboratory work of the sort which Professor Bell was giving eight or nine years ago. In fact, I feel that Professor Bell could devise a satisfactory freshman course of the type I have in mind, giving the students a feeling for chemistry and an interest in it which will increase as they learn more and more in advanced courses.

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Let Professor Bell teach the freshmen "Bell Chemistry." There is a good chance that a number of good students will become deeply interested in it, and if there is some point which remains unexplained, it will make Chemical Principles all the more interesting when we take the students in hand as Juniors.

My opinion may be extreme. Thus when I asked Dr. Sturdivant what he thought of our freshman course (without giving my opinion), he said: "The first term's work would perhaps be all right if it were spread out through the year, with general and descriptive matter in between," whereas I feel that only rough quantitative experiments should be given the first year.

Sincerely,

LP:M