Percy Lavon Julian - Private Sector Work: Glidden

Private Sector Work: Glidden

After being denied a professorship at DePauw in 1936 for racial reasons, Julian applied for a job at the Institute of Paper Chemistry (IPC) in Wisconsin. However, the Wisconsin city of Appleton where the institute was located, was a sundown town, forbidding African Americans from staying overnight. DuPauw had offered a job to fellow chemist Josef Pikl, but declined to hire Julian, who had superlative qualifications as an organic chemist, apologizing that they were "unaware he was an African American".

Julian wrote to the Glidden Company, a supplier of soybean oil products, in part because his wife was suffering infertility, to request a 5-gallon sample of the oil to use as his starting point for the synthesis of human steroidal sex hormones. After receiving the request, W.J. O'Brien, a vice-president at Glidden made a telephone call to Julian, offering him the position of director of research at Glidden's Soya Products Division in Chicago. He was very likely offered the job by O'Brien because he was fluent in German and Glidden had just purchased a modern continuous countercurrent solvent extraction plant from Germany for the extraction of vegetable oil from soybeans for paints and other uses.

Julian supervised the assembly of the plant at Glidden when he arrived in 1936. He then designed and supervised construction of the world's first plant for the production of industrial-grade, isolated soy protein from oil-free soybean meal. Isolated soy protein could replace the more expensive milk casein in industrial applications such as coating and sizing of paper, glue for making Douglas fir plywood, and in the manufacture of water-based paints.

At the start of World War II Glidden sent a sample of Julian's isolated soy protein to National Foam System Inc. (today a unit of Kidde Fire Fighting) of Philadelphia, PA which used it to develop Aero-Foam Aer-O-Foam the US Navy's beloved fire-fighting "bean soup"; and while not exactly the brainchild of Percy Lavon Julian it was the meticulous care given to the preparation of the soy protein that made the fire fighting foam possible. When a hydrolyzate of isolated soy protein was fed into a water stream, the mixture was converted into a foam by means of an aerating nozzle. The soy protein foam was used to smother oil and gasoline fires aboard ships and was particularly useful on aircraft carriers. It saved the lives of thousands of sailors. Citing this, in 1947 the NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal, its highest honor.