Walter Savage Landis

Background

Walter Savage Landis was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, the older of two children and only son of Daniel Webster Landis and Clara (Savage) Landis. His father, who operated a small business, died when Walter was three years old.

Education

After attending the Pottstown public schools and the Ulrich Preparatory School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Landis entered Lehigh University, where he earned the degree of Metallurgical Engineer in 1902 and the M. S. degree in 1906. He studied at the University of Heidelberg from 1905 to 1906 and at the Technische Hochschule at Aachen in 1909. He received a Sc. D. degree from Lehigh in 1922.

Career

In 1906, Landis started to teach the mineralogy and metallurgy at Lehigh. He left an associate professorship at Lehigh in 1912 to join Frank S. Washburn in the American Cyanamid Company, established five years earlier, which he had already had occasion to advise in connection with its electric furnace operations, a field in which he was well versed.

Washburn planned to undertake the manufacture of the nitrogen compounds which are an essential ingredient of fertilizers. The natural deposits of Chile saltpeter (sodium nitrate) which had been the world's sole source were dwindling in these early years of the twentieth century, and humanity faced the problem of maintaining soil fertility on the world's farms to ensure the food supply for a growing population. Chemically, the problem was to convert the bountiful free nitrogen of the atmosphere, unusable in that form, into a combination available to plants. Three possible approaches had been developed in Europe: Kristian Birkeland and Samuel Eyde in Norway employed a high-powered electric arc to combine the nitrogen and oxygen of the air to form nitric acid, a process that could be economical only where electric power was exceptionally cheap. Fritz Haber in Germany compressed a heated mixture of nitrogen and hydrogen over a catalyst to form ammonia, but this process required special alloys and equipment with which American technologists were unfamiliar. Albert Frank and Heinrich Caro, also in Germany, combined calcium carbide with purified atmospheric nitrogen to yield calcium cyanamide. This process, which used an electric furnace to produce the calcium carbide from lime and coke, depended on a technology well advanced in the United States and hence was chosen by Washburn, who appointed Landis as chief technologist.

The American Cyanamid Company erected its first plant in Niagara Falls, Ontario; a larger plant was later operated at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The production of calcium cyanamide opened other possibilities besides its primary use in agricultural fertilizers, and these Landis realized and actively pursued. An early by-product was the rare gas argon, then under investigation by the General Electric Company for use in its gas-filled incandescent electric light bulbs. Argon was first produced commercially when it became concentrated in the residual gas left after the absorption of the nitrogen into the cyanamide. (The method later proved less economical than a liquid air process and was abandoned. ) Further developments proved to be of more lasting value. Calcium cyanamide readily yields the organic compound cyanamide, which in turn can be converted to urea, dicyan-diamide, and melamine, each a starting point for further applications. By another route, calcium cyanamide yields ammonia. Still a different set of conditions converts cyanamide to cyanides, which are essential in metallurgy in the case hardening of steel, in the cyanide process for the recovery of gold from low-grade ores, and in electroplating, and useful also as insecticides and as starting points for further chemical syntheses.

Landis played the key role in exploring each of these avenues for utilizing the basic product of his company and thus in diversifying and enlarging its operations. He possessed a keenly penetrating mind with an uncanny ability to get immediately to the core of any problem. His capacity for retaining facts and recalling them instantly was remarkable, and his energy and strong will were highly important qualities in his challenging field. Modest and reticent, he preferred to be known not as a trailblazing scientist or as an inventor, but as a chemical engineer who "merely found ways to use what had been discovered by others. "

Nonetheless, he achieved both business and professional distinction. He became a director of the American Cyanamid Company in 1922 and vice-president in 1923, offices he held for the rest of his life. He also held directorships in the American Cyanamid & Chemical Corporation, Southern Alkali Corporation, and Southern Minerals Corporation (all Cyanamid subsidiaries) and in the J. G. White Engineering Corporation. He was president of the Electrochemical Society (1920) and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (1931).

During his later years Landis made his home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut He died there of a heart attack in 1944, at the age of sixty-six, while at work in his garden clearing up debris left by a hurricane. He was buried in the cemetery of the First Congregational Church of Old Greenwich.

Achievements

• Landis was known as developer of the cyanamide process of nitrogen fixation in the United States. He obtained patents on thirty-eight of his inventions, made outstanding contributions to the production of concentrated fertilizers ("Ammo-Phos"), to metallurgy and gold mining (cyanides), and to the development of synthetic resins and numerous other organic compounds (cyanamide, urea, melamine, and their derivatives). His honors included the Chemical Industry Medal (1936), the Perkin Medal of the Society of Chemical Industry (1939), and the gold medal of the American Institute of Chemists (1943).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Your servant the molecule

Connections

On June 9, 1909, Landis married Antoinette Matilda Prince of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. They had three children: Robert Prince, Charlotte Prince, and John Prince.

Father:

Daniel Webster Landis

Mother:

Clara (Savage) Landis

Spouse:

Antoinette Matilda Prince

Daughter:

Charlotte Prince Landis

Son:

John Prince Landis

Son:

Robert Prince Landis