Ronald Sydney Nyholm - Industry

Industry

Nyholm was passionately associated with industry all of his life. One of his earliest jobs was as a chemist at Eveready Batteries in Sydney. The application of science to useful products was of great importance to him and he loved the DuPont logo "Better things for better living through chemistry". He was a very active consultant to a number of companies including ICI and Johnson Matthey in the UK and DuPont in the US. In addition to his many close academic friends from his work in the UK and Australia, and also in the US - people like Stanley Kirschener at Wayne State and James V Quagliano at Notre Dame, some of his closest friends were in industry. They included world class leaders in chemical industry research such as Duncan S Davies, General Manager of ICI R&D, Wendell F Jackson of DuPont's Explosives Division, the first person to see Teflon when as a young man it was his job cut open the famous cylinder, Hub (Harold M) Hubbard formerly of DuPont and latterly head of SERI (NREL) the Solar Energy Research Institute a man who felt as comfortable in a lab as in boots in the middle of Kansas, and Robert M Cavanaugh, Director of Research at DuPont's Explosives Division. All of these individuals provided Ron, and received from him, stimulation in both the arts and sciences with a firm foothold on the real world. Perhaps the best comment on Ron's relationship with industry was summarized by Williams who felt that Nyholm was not a real believer in theoretical chemical studies as such. Instead he believed that Ron was an old school empiricist, collecting data.... and then searching for correlations.