My Chemical Engineering Hero is: Dermot Manning

Article by Roland Clift CBE FREng FIChemE

Roland Clift picks out IChemE fellow Manning, a key figure in the commercialisation of polyethylene (PE), a vital cog in the Manhattan Project, and on a much more personal level, the father of Clift’s wife Diana

DERMOT was one of the team that discovered polyethylene (pretty well by accident). To commercialise production, initially as a high-value specialist material for use in radar sets, he developed the first high-pressure continuous autoclave reactors, one of which is in the Science Museum in London. He went on to be director of a research centre in Wales separating uranium isotopes for the Manhattan Project – part of the vital role played by chemical engineers which has been largely forgotten.

He was a brilliant practical engineer but retained a human-sized ego and a great sense of humour. He was a great raconteur: his story of how he had to restrain Heinz London (of London/van der Waals forces) from blowing steam into liquid nitrogen was just one of his gems. However, he would only talk about his professional work reluctantly.

What do you admire about their achievements?

Dermot’s polythene reactors were an amazing achievement. He had trained at Cambridge as a mechanical engineer although he “badged” himself as a chemical engineer. Developing the reactors required a combination of stress analysis, knowledge of material properties, and fabrication technologies, thermodynamics and integration of components such as high-pressure compressors all relying on the wave-ring joint (which he invented). He provided much of this expertise himself but knew how to engage others where he was not sufficiently expert. He was so modest that he always attributed the success of the process to others, although he himself was the key person.

Dermot never lost sight of the role of engineering to benefit the whole of humanity. He told me that one of his proudest moments was seeing polythene used in the Middle East to enable cultivation of what was otherwise barren land; he said that he had “helped to make the desert bloom”. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima he was devastated – he had been told that it would be exploded as a warning, somewhere unpopulated but conspicuous. He regarded the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki as an even greater crime, because it was unnecessary. He was an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

How have they influenced how you approach engineering?

In my 1998 Hartley Lecture,1 I cited Dermot Manning as the model 20th century engineer: he saw his primary role as supplying human needs. He was a world away from the entrepreneurial engineers of the 19th century – men like Brunel and Bessemer – and the total opposite of other 20th century characters like Haber (who developed the Haber-Bosch ammonia process that was key for Germany’s explosives production from 1914 to 1918, and who was proud of inventing mustard gas). Dermot had a strong social conscience and would have understood my model of the 21st century engineer as a social agent: an impartial expert who ensures that the implications of technological choices are fully understood in policy statements and public deliberation.

If you could ask them a question now, what would it be?

You didn’t envisage that plastics would become cheap throwaway materials. You would be as aghast at the role of plastics in global pollution as you were when atomic bombs were dropped on people. Can you think of ways in which we could stop messing up the planet with plastics? Do you think plastics could have been managed differently? Must we always be left saying “I meant well”?

Reference

1. R Clift, (1998) Engineering for the Environment: The New Model Engineer and Her Role. Trans.IChemE, 76 B, pp.151-160

Article by Roland Clift CBE FREng FIChemE

Initially worked in particle technology before moving into what has become industrial ecology. He held academic positions at McGill, Imperial College, Cambridge, and Surrey, visiting positions at Napoli, Chalmers, Coimbra, and UBC and was a past member of the (UK) Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

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