Over the years I have tried to remember some of the chemists who have influenced me since entering the chemical industry twenty-five years ago. Most of them never won a prize of any sort; some didn't belong to distingushed organizations. One of them never even graduated high school (he was drafted into WW2). But I'm going to try and talk about each of them as I find time.
Today I'm remembering Mr. Alan Varker. I worked with Mr. Varker at a polymer company when I first came to the Philly area about twelve years ago. Mr. Varker had been there for about ten years himself and was an analytical chemist. He ran the High Pressure Liquid Chromatography machine we had there, among other things. The HPLC wasn't used much, but when we did need it, such as to show visitors, he had that sucker fired up in minutes. Mr. Varker could show you chromatographs all day long and tell you what each band meant. He could do the same for FTIR data.
He'd worked at a number of battery companies over the years and had many stories to tell. One involved reccomending a ruby blade used to cut polymer battery sheets to keep the them from shorting-out. Another story of his was about a chemist who created an unstable organometallic. This man nearly blew himself and the lab up trying to take a melting point on the compound. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured.
He was an older man, nearing seventy years of age at the time. I was always astonished by his wealth of chemical knowledge. And Mr. Varker was never the sort of man you wanted to try and "impress" with your grasp of chemistry. He could easily challenge any half-baked ideas you might have. He was also the sort of man who could whip through a newspaper cross word puzzle in minutes.
One of his big accomplishments was a patent for purifying bisphenol A epoxy so that it could be used for cardiac applications. He held many patents, but didn't brag about them.
I last saw Mr. Varker the day they let him go. The higher-ups decided we had one too many chemists in our group and he was the one who lost the draw. I do hope he was able to land something else.