2 Social Mobility through Education

In honor of his accomplishments in applied chemistry, in 1916 Baekeland was awarded the prestigious Perkin Medal by the American Section of the Society of Chemical Industry. While he stated in his diary that it “is not very pleasant to have to talk about yourself,” his friends insisted that he “should give my experience” in his acceptance speech at the award dinner.
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In accordance with this request, Baekeland set out to illuminate the American chemical industry's state of development by means of a series of autobiographically inspired lessons and recommendations. The first provides the starting point to this chapter. Baekeland captured it with the heading “Practical Life as a Complement to University Education,” but he seemed to suggest that this slogan might well understate the problem at stake: “My real intense education,” he claimed, “only began after I had left the university, as soon as I became confronted with the big problems and responsibilities of practical life.” He also expressed the desire to “remain until I die, a postgraduate student at that greater school of practical life, which has no fixed curriculum and where no academic degrees are conferred, but where wrong petty theories are best cured by hard knocks.” According to Baekeland's address, he had experienced such a knock around 1887. At that time, his attempts to prepare a key photographic chemical, commercial silver bromide, had (allegedly) made him lose his “cocksure” confidence “that everything was as simple as it appears in the textbooks.” Then, he added, “By the time I got fully engaged in the manufacture of silver-salt products for photographic purposes, I had come to the conclusion that instead of [the] three or four varieties of bromide or silver [discussed by Belgian chemist Jean Servais Stas in an 1874 publication], there existed perhaps a hundred varieties, but that of those hundred varieties, there was only one which might probably keep me from the poorhouse and assure me success as a manufacturer.”
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