I had to escape from his lessons and went to the Sheffield Public Reference Library some three minutes' walk away. The director of the city libraries was the admirable late J.P. Lamb, who had been an undergraduate at Liverpool University and dean of the graduate college at Princeton. Lamb's acquisition policy for his reference library could not be faulted and there I found two books both beautifully written by Oxford chemistry dons. The first, by Neville Vincent Sidgwick, whose office in Cornell I was to occupy 30 years later as George Fisher Baker lecturer, was entitled The Electronic Theory of Valency, the second was The Kinetics of Homogeneous Gas Reactions by C.N. Hinsheiwood, to whose chair I was later to be appointed. Sidgwick's book shone a flood of light on inorganic chemistry, provided an intellectual framework for the Periodic Table and so relieved me of much of the rote learning ...
Hunt the Paradox and Fate May Smile
Pasteur's dictum "Chance favors the prepared mind" is in my experience a truism, but! would add that whether the mind is prepared may itself be a matter of chance. It certainly was in my case. I became a chemist because of a rather poor chemistry teacher at my secondary school. Later in life he became director of education for Lancashire and was knighted, which is perhaps only another illustration that an indifferent understanding of chemistry is not necessarily a bar to advancement in other fi
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