This exhibit provides a short history and some insights into the character of Henry Erying, Utah’s most distinguished scientist, for whom this building was named. He was born on February 20, 1901, to Edward Christian Caroline Romney Erying. They were part of the group of Mormons who had settled in Colonia Juarez in the State of Chihuahua in Mexico. Henry’s father was a well-to-do rancher who owned 14,000 acres of cattle range, pasture, and farmland, about 6,000 head of short-horned Durham cattle plus approximately 100 horses. Henry’s paternal grandfather (also named Henry Erying) came from Coburg, Germany, while his paternal grandmother came from the German part of Switzerland. His paternal grandparents met as pioneer emigrants crossing the plains to Utah in the fall of 1860. His maternal grandparents were of English stock; the Romney and Cottam family names are familiar in Utah.

Henry Erying was an accomplished horseman by the age of three. He remembered owning three different horses, the last of which was his favorite, up to the time that the Eyring family and other colonists left Mexico because of the social unrest accompanying the Mexican Revolution. The family moved to El Paso in mid-july of 1912, anticipating that they would return home within a few weeks. As the weeks stretched into months they found themselves in fairly desperate financial circumstances. At the age of eleven Henry took his first job as a cash boy in Calasher’s Department Store for the purpose of helping his family make ends meet. His salary for this job was $2.00 for a six–day week (for calibration purposes, note that a loaf of bread or a quart of milk each cost $.05 in 1912).

After deciding that there was no chance for returning to Colonia Juarez, the family moved to Pima, Arizona, in 1912, where Henry’s father had purchased a farm by making a small down payment. After helping to clear the land, Henry enrolled at the elementary school in Pima, Arizona, completing the eighth grade in 1915. For this he received the largest diploma awarded to him in his career, a copy of which is displayed in the upper left corner of the display case in the Henry Eyring Building. For comparison, his 1927 Ph.D. degree diploma is displayed right below it.

Henry’s high school education was obtained at a church academy in Thatcher, Arizona, six miles from Pima. It was at this time that his special skills in mathematics and sciences first became evident. His science teacher, Alma Sessions, noted Henry’s talents and urged him to attend the University of Arizona where it was recommended that he study either electrical or mining engineering. With the aid of a $500 State Fellowship won competitively in Graham County, Arizona, majoring in Mining Engineering. The accompanying contemporary photo suggests the enthusiasm and charm which sustained him throughout his long academic career.

Henry enrolled in the University of Arizona in 1919 and distinguished himself in the study of science, mathematics, and engineering and also by waiting on tables at the campus cafeteria. Thus he was able to send a little money home to help with the payments on the farm. He also wrote a senior thesis with Professor Cressy in the mathematics department on the theory of the aerial tramway. Among the medals displayed in the case is the Award of Merit presented to Henry in 1960 as part of the 75th anniversary ceremonies of the University of Arizona.

Also during his college career, he had summer jobs as a miner in the Inspiration Copper Mine in Miami, Arizona, and at the Sacramento Hill Mine in Bisbee, Arizona. In the fall of 1923 he worked on a Master’s thesis concerned with the separation of sulfide ores by the selective flotation under the direction of Professor Thomas Chapman. This was followed by another summer job at the United Verde Smelter in Clarksdale, Arizona.

These work experiences during his college years and the accompanying exposure to the hazards of underground explosions and sulfur dioxide fumes from smelting operations made an indelible impression upon Henry and affected his future career in significant ways. In particular he elected to return to the University of Arizona as an instructor rather than actively pursuing his career as a mining engineer.h

Toward the end of his first year of teaching in 1925, he was recommended to the University of California at Berkeley for Ph.D. studies in Chemistry. He accepted the invitation to attend Berkely, enrolling there in September 1925. He finished his Ph.D. in August, 1927, after completing a thesis with Professor George E. Gibson concerned with the measurement of stopping powers and ionization efficiencies of gaseous molecules for alpha particles from polonium. With this work he demonstrated that the stopping power of various gasses is nearly independent of chemical bonding while the ionization yield depends much more strongly on the subtle details of chemical bonds and energy levels in molecules.

In the fall of 1927 Henry was appointed Instructor at the University of Wisconsin where he continued his experimental work in reaction kinetics. In 1929 he was granted a National Research Fellowship to work with Professor Max Bodenstein at the University of Berlin. His award certificate, signed by many of the most distinguished chemists and physicists of the day, is in the display case. Shortly before leaving for Berlin he learned that Professor Bodenstein was going to spend that year at Princeton University in connection with the dedication of the new Frick Chemical Laboratory. For this reason Henry decided to work with Professor Michael Polanyi at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

Henry and his wife, Mildred Bennion Eyring, set sail for Europe with this goal in mind. After arriving, they discovered that Professor Polanyi was also in the United States. However, the laboratory of Professor Fritz Haber was then occupied by leading kinetics of the day, along with leading workers in the new field of quantum mechanics. Then, as later, Henry Eyring had a little need for research direction, and he quickly plunged into an experimental program involving what would now be called reaction dynamics. This involved the spectroscopic identification of specific excited states formed by the reaction of sodium vapor with chlorine. On Professor Polanyi’s return they completed this interpretation of reaction rates. They used Fritz London’s approximate quantum mechanical solution for the hydrogen molecule (the Heitler-London approximation) as a starting point for constructing a potential surface for three hydrogen atoms. Disappointed in these results, they then moved to a semi-empirical method now known as the London-Erying-Polanyi-Sato, or LEPS, potential surface method for explaining the rates of chemical reactions. This opened up an entirely new world of chemistry as it yielded the first fundamental interpretation of the details of how chemical bonds are made and broken in a chemical reaction.

While in Berlin, Henry Erying received disturbing news that his younger brother, Joseph, had been determined by the State Department to be a Mexican citizen. This meant that Henry also was a Mexican citizen holding an illegal passport and a fellowship to which he was not entitled. However, when he consulted the American Consulate in Berlin, it was ruled that he had acted in good faith and that he should retain his passport until his scheduled return to the United States, at which time he should proceed with naturalization (accomplished five years later in Trenton, New Jersey).

Following the completion of the exciting and productive research in Berlin, Henry joined the University of California at Berkeley as a junior faculty member for the Fall Quarter of 1930. He further developed the quantum mechanical approach to the explanation of reaction kinetics. Also, the Eyring’s first son, Edward (better known in this department as Professor Ted Eyring) was born in Oakland, California, on January 7, 1931. That spring Henry Eyring journeyed to Indianapolis to attend the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society and presented a paper using potential surfaces to explain reaction mechanisms in the hydrogen/halogen system. This paper engendered a great deal of interest, and Professor Hugh Taylor invited him to go to Princeton, rather than return to Berkeley, and to present lectures there on the quantum mechanical calculations of reaction rates. This led to his faculty appointment in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton and to an extremely productive 15 years spent in that department.

In the early years of the Princeton experience, in November, 1934, he submitted to the Journal of Chemical Physics the paper entitled “The Activated Complex in Chemical Reactions” which showed that rates could be calculated using quantum mechanics for the potential surface, the theory of small vibrations to calculate the concentration and rate of crossing of the potential energy barrier. Whereas many people were enthusiastic about his breakthrough, others were skeptical. An anonymous referee recommended that the paper be rejected. (This is a course of reassurance to some of us).

This paper was completed in 1935 in a hospital in Laporte, Indiana where Henry was convalescing from an automobile accident which occurred while he was returning to Princeton. In the second of a long series of papers applying his theory of reaction rates, Henry’s secretary, Lucy Darcy, inadvertently invented the “double-dagger” or “Cross of Lorraine” which symbolizes the activated complex configuration in all contemporary textbooks, because her typewriter did not have an asterisk key. She substituted an overstruck diagonal and equals sign for the asterisk in Henry’s hand-written manuscript, which the typesetter interpreted as the Cross of Lorraine. This distinctive symbol has been universally used by scientists since that time in the thousands of research papers and books dealing with this subject.

The detailed description contained in this paper of the way chemical reactions proceed still dominates the formalism used for the description of reaction kinetics. All but two of the nine books and many of the nearly 700 papers published by Henry Erying and collaborators elaborate the application of what is now known as the Eyring activated complex theory to diverse fields of chemical reaction, ranging all the way from explosions through chemical reactions in gases, liquids, and solids to applications in biology and medicine.

Henry Eyring’s second son, Henry Bennion, was born on May 31, 1933, and his third son, Harden Romney, on August 20, 1939. Some family photos, inclduing dates, are shown below.