Chemical Caricatures.pdf - University of Cincinnati

INTRODUCTION
The majority of the following caricatures were done more
than 40 years ago when I was a junior at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and attending Aaron Ihde’s lectures on
the history of chemistry. Each week, rather than taking lecture
notes, I would instead select one of the chemists that Ihde was
lecturing on and do a caricature based on the portraits found
in Ihde’s textbook, The Development of Modern Chemistry
(1964). This original set has since been supplemented by
about another half-dozen caricatures prompted by requests
over the years from various individuals and journals. In the
1970s there was little interest in these drawings, but with
the passage of time, a sort of underground demand for them
has spontaneously arisen among teachers and students of
chemistry and many have since been reproduced on coffee
mugs, T-shirts, and on various internet sites. More recently I
was informed that one of them (Robert Bunsen) was even
being used as the logo for a rock band. In any case, I thought
it was about time to collect and present them in a more
permanent and convenient format by supplementing each
drawing with a short biographical sketch of the subject in
question, as well as with an occasional hint concerning the
symbolism used.
! Also included as an appendix is a short piece of
chemical doggerel which I first published in 1972 under the
title of “A Chemist’s Annotated Mother Goose of Chemical
Bonding Theory,” in which I coupled variants of well-known
nursery rhymes with caricatures of noted physicists and chemists
connected in some fashion with the history of chemical
bonding. Two of these (Langmuir and Pauling) already appear
among the individual caricatures, but since these, unlike the
nursery rhymes, also come with short biographical sketches, I
hope readers are willing to forgive the redundancy.
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William B. Jensen
April 2010