History Of Chemical Engineering
Chemical engineering as a discipline is a little over one hundred years old. It grew out of mechanical engineering in the last part of the 19th century, because of a need for chemical processors. Before the Industrial Revolution (18th century), industrial chemicals were mainly produced through batch processing. Batch processing is similar to cooking. Individuals mix ingredients in a vessel, heat or pressurize the mixture, test it, and purify it to get a saleable product. Batch processes are still performed today on expensive products, such as perfumes, or pure maple syrups, where one can still turn a profit, despite batch methods being slow and inefficient. Most chemicals today are produced through a continuous "assembly line" chemical process. The Industrial Revolution was when this shift from batch to continuous processing occurred.
Read more about History Of Chemical Engineering: Origin, Professional Associations, Definitions
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, chemical and/or engineering:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in San Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.”
—Merle Colby, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)