#100 from R&D Innovator Volume 3, Number 6          June 1994

Great Ideas--Short of Commercialization
by Norman Hackerman

Dr. Hackerman is chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of The Robert A. Welch Foundation and professor emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Texas.  He was president of The University of Texas at Austin, and later president of Rice University.  Among his many awards is the 1993 Medal of Science.

I could write a book about the "almost-invented's" I've been involved with.  But for a moment, let me write an article instead, and point up some of the lessons I've learned from my life in the research lab. 

Even though most of my career was in academia, and even though I have only a couple of patents directly from my research lab, I do have some feeling of what it takes to get a research idea or result into actual use. 

My first experience came during the depression, while working on my Ph.D. in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University.  The Colloid Corporation had patented a machine that electromagnetically oscillated a steel rod, with attached steel disks in a fluid mixture, 60 times a second, to make emulsions.  The machine made a terrible racket, but also made fairly stable emulsions. 

I worked for Colloid for $18 a week plus some stock.  This was in 1936, when milk was distributed in bottles, and the cream was always found on top.  I suggested we use the machine to homogenize milk, and we did get great homogenization--just about as good as is found in milk today.

Unfortunately, the Submarine Signal Company was also working on the problem, and they came up with a sonic vibrating plate that was much simpler than our mechanism.  Soon, homogenized milk--using their process--was dominating the dairy section. 

That taught me about the importance of learning who else is striving for the same goal, and what strategies they are using.

Keep Your Eyes Open

At that time, bismuth subsilicate crystals were used to treat syphilis, and we wanted to contribute to medicine by dispersing the chemical in oil before injection.  Uneven distribution of the crystals made the injection process pretty crude and very painful.  Our machine did a nice job of dispersing the material, but unfortunately, bismuth subsilicate was being replaced by superior treatments.

This failure was due to an ignorance of market dynamics.  Lesson?  Always look around--don't build a better buggy-whip when Mr. Ford is tinkering in his garage. 

My other "contribution" to Colloid was an idea for emulsifying vinegar and oil in salad dressings.  I thought finely divided carbon black would be useful as a salad emulsifying agent since it maintains itself well at the interface between the oil and aqueous droplets--and also has the useful property of absorbing intestinal gas.  I could even envision the advertising campaign:  "Enjoy your salad and your evening!"

I gave the first sample to Colloid's president, and although it looked good to him, his wife insisted she would not use black salad dressing!  (When I pointed out its intestinal benefits, she was distinctly unimpressed.)

As another good idea went down the drain, I learned another lesson:  Get your customer involved from the start.

By now, you've probably guessed the fate of Colloid Corporation:  It folded in 1939, although I held on to my stock for 10 years before finally taking the loss on my income tax. 

Secrecy is Expensive

In 1943, I worked for the Manhattan Project out of its New York headquarters.  The K25 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was built to separate fluorinated uranium isotopes by gas diffusion through tubes of pressed pure, powdered nickel.  Everything was made of nickel in this system: the compressors, tanks, valves, etc.  K25 was a huge plant, and we had to keep its interior clean and dry.  If moisture got in, nickel oxide would form and reduce the separation efficiency.  The entire plant was treated with fluorine to produce a protective nickel fluoride film, so we also had to keep everything else out.  Even a simple hammer or a piece of waste cloth could have started a fire and destroyed the plant.

In this role, I wasn’t a laboratory chemist but rather an outsider who visited all laboratories associated with K25 to ensure that duplicate experiments did indeed bear each other out.  Thus, in a grand and strategically vital manner, I was introduced to corrosion, the main focus of my future research.  Because of war security, I was to see what each person was doing without divulging what anyone else was doing.  This was a rather strange experience, but it brought home to me the importance of communication.  I’m sure that if free interactions among researchers had been permissible, we'd have saved a lot of time and money. 

Although tight security obviously was essential for the Manhattan Project, some corporate and university research groups seem to think they are also producing the ultimate weapon, and require excessive, perhaps obsessive, secrecy.  I don’t believe such secrecy is necessary at most advanced labs—what you need to promote the work is communication.

It Just Isn't Done!

As assistant professor at The University of Texas, I was approached by a fellow from a Dallas gas company who wanted me to look at a gas-field problem.  We went to the field and saw hydrocarbons flowing from two wells about half-a-mile apart, which had been drilled to the same depth in the field.  The odd thing was that the first well had a lot of corrosion in its wellhead and gathering lines, but not the second.  To corroborate the field observation, I put samples of metal in each line; later, I saw that the samples from the first line were badly corroded, while the second had an interesting sheen, but no corrosion.

My conclusion was that the wells really were not in the same horizon (pool of gas), and that the second well contained some kind of natural corrosion inhibitor.  I suggested they inject gas from the second well into the bottom of the first--only to find that yet another of my ideas would go nowhere--it just wasn’t done that way.

I wondered about that inhibitor, which in fact turned out to be some naphthenic acids, which led me into the whole business of looking at the inhibition of metal reactions as a surface chemistry process.  My lab developed a number of anti-corrosion materials and we concentrated on understanding structure-function relationships that led to even better inhibitors. 

I never was interested in patenting my work.  But my students were, and quite a few work for corrosion-related industries.  I’ve done a lot of consulting for industry, and have been a member of corporate boards. 

So I guess that—in spite of my previous commercial “failures”—I have made useful research contributions to industry and the public, even though they are somewhat indirect.

Students: Get Real

What overall lesson do I take from all this?  Primarily, how poorly prepared our students are for the world of industry--they seem to have no better clue than I did about what’s necessary to convert an idea into a product.  Most don’t have a sense of the differences between academic and corporate research.  Many feel that merely expressing a "good idea" should make everything else fall into place.  They don't realize how many steps are needed to commercialize an idea (these steps, remember, derailed so many of my own "brilliant ideas"):  customer acceptance, other forces in the market, technological change, communication within the company, distribution, manufacturing, building, finance, and so on.

All members of the R&D process must understand how their actions affect other people, as well as the entire process.  Too frequently, there's a tendency to believe that some steps (our own, for example) are more vital than other steps—but in reality, everything is necessary for the system to work.

Even though I’m retired, I still teach freshman chemistry occasionally and maintain a laboratory at Rice (I taught and had Ph.D. students while serving as president of Rice and Texas).  I include, as a part of my teaching, an appreciation of the complex steps that allow a commercial product to arise from an idea. 

At this point, I have only one question.  Everyone knows the value of timing in invention.  In view of the current American passion for healthy eating, do you think it's time to resurrect my inky digesto-matic salad dressing?