Biography of Alfred J. Stamm
(1897-1985)
This biography was written by his son Alfred John Stamm
Alfred J. Stamm who was born 100 years ago (December 29, 1897). He was a colloid and physical chemist of wood serving as information specialist at the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, WI and later as Robertson Professor of Wood Science and Technology in the School of Forest Resources at North Carolina State University. He died November 25, 1985. His father, August Julius Stamm, was born on January 27, 1849 in Estebruegge, near Hamburg, Germany. August emigrated to the U.S. in 1873 and moved to Los Angeles in 1885 where he was a pioneer of orchestra music. In 1893 he founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and was its first conductor. In 1893 he also married Alice Elizabeth Kottmeier who was born in Hoboken NJ. Alfred was born four years later.
Alfred had a much older brother Julius from a former marriage. Julius used to take Alfred around and treated him as his son. Alfred's sister died before Alfred was born. Alfred's father had great hopes for him as a musician and gave him a middle name Joachim after the Hungarian violinist. Alfred did not like his middle name however and never used it. He preferred to be called Al. His father, who had such famous pupils as Ferdinand Rudolph von Grof‚ (Ferde Grof‚ - Grand Canyon Suite), tried to teach Al music, but later admitted Al was his worst pupil. This may have been partly because Al was left handed and his parents tried to make him right handed as was the custom in that day. His handwriting which he did with his right hand was poor, but he could swing a hammer with either hand. He did however have a great appreciation of classical music.
As a boy, he had a birthday party and each guest was given a penny. Al discovered that he could make his penny shine by putting lemonade on it and soon had the other boys doing the same. This was one of the first signs as his future as a chemist. When he was nine, his family visited Germany for a year and Al learned German. Al attended Hollywood High School and participated in several crowd scenes in early movies. Al attended the California Institute of Technology with the intent of becoming an architect, but decided that there was no money in it so turned to chemistry. The future looked good in petroleum chemistry so he worked for a year with General Petroleum Corp. after graduating in 1921.
He then moved to Madison, WI to attend graduate school, receiving a masters degree in 1923 and a PhD degree in colloid chemistry in 1925. At that time it was defined simply as "the science of particles in the size range of one micron to one millimicron". His thesis was "An Experimental Study of Emulsification on the Basis of Distribution of Size of Particles". In college, he and his two room mates had an ice cream maker but no freezer so they would buy a bag of ice. This was enough to make three half gallon batches of ice cream. With no way to store the ice cream, they would each eat a half gallon. One time one of them said he had never gotten his fill of tapioca pudding so they went to the store to get some. They decided that one box each would be enough. After reading the directions, they had to return to the store for several dozen eggs and a lot of milk. They got their fill. One of the places he stayed while in graduate school was the Alpha Chi Sigma (chemistry) house. One night he was sleeping in an upper story room when the house next door caught fire. The firemen towed a hose through his room and aimed the water out the window at the house next door. With all this commotion, he never woke up. From 1922-1925 he was an Assistant in General Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin.
After receiving his doctorate, he obtained a job at the nearby Forest Products Laboratory starting August 15, 1925. Many thought an employee of the lab should be a forester or at least an organic chemist, but the Associate Director thought a colloid chemist might be useful, and he was. He turned loose the armaments of colloid chemistry to obtain quantitative understanding of the behavior and properties of wood. In 1925 he was employed as Associate Chemist. His title soon changed to Chemist then Principal Chemist. From 1946-1951 he served as Chief of the Division of Derived Products and from 1951 to 1959 as Subject Matter Specialist, a special title which was created for him to make him equivalent to the associate director of the lab without any administrative responsibilities.
He met a young lady, Erdine Rosalind Timberlake, while she was at summer school at the University of Wisconsin. The Presbyterian Church (Pres House) had a picnic and he was in charge so he drove the food around the lake while the others came by boat. Erdine first spotted him when she arrived and was immediately impressed. Later she smiled at him when he held up a wire for her to pass under. The people grouped by place of birth for eating but he was the only one from California and she and her friend were the only ones from Washington DC so they ate together. They dated the rest of the summer and he gave her his fraternity pin. The following summer, she returned to summer school there in order to be near him in 1928. At the end of the summer, he received an International Education Board Fellowship for a year at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and found that he would receive more money if he was married, so he decided to ask Erdine to marry him. She was undecided at first, and decided only at the last minute, so it was a rushed wedding, but they managed to get married before the ship left. Erdine traveled with her old passport under her maiden name so there were more than a few eyebrows raised.
In Sweden he worked with the well known The Svenberg working on molecular weight of high polymers using the ultracentrifuge technique. Al of course studied cellulose which was difficult to work with, because the cellulose molecule was stiff and rod-like. This work impressed on him the importance of learning more about the fine structure of cellulose. In the winter in Uppsala, they would eat their breakfast at ten as the sun was rising, lunch at three as the sun was setting and dinner at eight after it had been dark for many hours. Erdine spent her time studying art and returned with several excellent paintings she made. Al knew some German but little Swedish. Once he went into a store and asked for an item in Swedish. The storekeeper answered him in German. Al felt better with the German but was still having trouble thinking of the translation. At one point he said under his breath "what is that word?" The storekeeper heard him and this time answered him in English. He said Al had a German accent to his Swedish so he thought he was German. Since most people spoke English even then, he had little trouble there. Two toasts he learned in Sweden which he liked to use later in life were "Min skol, din skol, alla backa flicka skol" (Here's to me, here's to you, here's to all the pretty girls) and "Here's to you as good as you are, here's to me as bad as I am, but as good as you are and as bad as I am, I'm as good as you are as bad as I am." They enjoyed trips to Norway. The next summer they toured Europe (England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and Spain). He took Erdine to see his relatives near Hamburg Germany. After the war, he lost track of them as Hitler had many of them killed so he could take over their businesses.
Once Al was enjoying a holiday with Erdine on a deserted beach. After they returned to the car, Erdine said she had left her hat on the beach so he offered to go back for it. When he returned, his hair was wet but not his clothes. He said the tide had come in and he had to swim for the hat. Al had four children: Robert Timberlake (1930) who died at age 6; Virginia Erdine (1933) who married John Lemanczyk and had three children Lori, Linda and Larry; Bonnie Ellen (1937) who married Paul Dougherty and had two children Amy and Keith, and later married Ray Sutton; and Alfred John (1941) who married Ginny Durkin and had two children Abigail and Craig. There are presently four grandchildren: Amy had Kevin, Brian and Nathan and Lori had Alexander. When he was visiting the nursery just after Alfred was born, a lady saw him admiring his son so she asked him if it was his first grandson. His hair was beginning to turn silver. Later in life, the silver turned to gold as his hair started to form yellow streaks.
Two of Al's favorite jokes were: A man went into a drug store and ordered a pill. The druggist asked him if he wanted to take it there or take it home. The man said "just throw it on the floor and I will roll it home". The other was: A man went into a drug store and ordered a soda without chocolate. The person behind the counter said "But we don't have any chocolate." So the man said "Then give it to me without vanilla." The following was recounted by a coworker when he was a student many years earlier. Al was measuring the molecular weight of certain wood cellulose by determining the time of flow through a glass capillary. He applied pressure by bubbling air through a series of tubes filled with sulfuric acid. Something blew and suddenly there was a geyser of concentrated sulfuric acid falling down on Al. He quickly washed himself and ripped off his shirt. After cleaning up he returned to his experiment. According to the student, he uttered only one word during all of this - "Golly".
Shortly before WWII, he purchased some land in Shorewood Hills with the intention of building a larger home. When the war started, he put the land to better use with a victory garden. In fact, many of his friends and neighbors also used the land and had nearly an acre under cultivation. He said "I feel closer to God in my garden than I do in church". His first attempt at growing corn was impressive. He proudly had his picture taken with his son on his shoulders and the corn towering over both of them. Only later when he went to harvest the corn did he find out it was horse corn. He planted fruit trees and grapes and even was successful with peaches in the cold Wisconsin climate. He loved to garden and was disappointed in later years trying to grow things in North Carolina clay.
After returning to Madison, one sees from his publications a rapid growth in his understanding of the fine structure of wood and its behavior. These publications describe techniques and concepts such as electrokinetic phenomena, gas, vapor and solute adsorption, zeta potential, diffusion, and permeability. One application was the swelling and shrinking of wood. In 1936 he wrote a major USDA publication "Colloid Chemistry of Cellulosic Materials". In the summary he stated "Colloid chemistry of cellulosic materials is now at the stage of transition from a qualitative to a quantitative science. Further researches . . . will make possible a more intimate understanding of the physical nature of cellulose and strengthen its claim to being the world's most important organic raw material."
During the war, he was asked to make a better propeller blade. He used a wood base product he had invented called compreg. The wood was layered as in plywood, impregnated with chemicals and compressed. This formed a hard, dimensionally stable material. The propeller worked well, but not as good as the newly invented hollow steel. Now the material is found mainly in knife handles. In 1946 he wrote another major USDA publication "Passage of Liquids, Vapors and Dissolved Materials through Softwoods". In the introduction he states "The purpose of this publication is to assemble the necessary capillary-structural data and to present approximate calculations covering the differences in the structure, effective for the passage of liquids, vapors and solutes through the wood under the motivating forces of diffusion and pressure permeability." This was a model based on parallel and series circuits of electricity. Combined they acted like the passage of fluids through wood. The conductor could be water as in drying of wood or fluids under pressure as in treating of wood. This work allowed others later to derive the statistical information of the anatomical structure of wood. One invention he made based on this work was impreg. This substance was used by the automobile industry for pattern stock since it was dimensionally stable. Later he tried to make paper dimensionally stable so that computer cards could be made smaller or more information could be put on a card. The change away from computer cards made this work unnecessary. In the 1950's he was asked to develop a material which would pass oxygen, water vapor and carbon dioxide, but not poisonous gas. He did this and got two companies to make 100,000 square feet of the wood based material for testing by the Army Chemical Corps. Luckily the need for this material was not forthcoming. He developed the process of stabilizing wood by replacing the water in green wood with polyethylene glycol (PEG). This process has been used by artists before carving wood and was used by the Swedish government to preserve the warship Wasa which was raised from the bottom of the harbor at Stockholm. It sunk in 1628.
In 1955-56 Al was a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow at the Division of Forest Products, C.S.I.R.O. in Melbourne, Australia. This time he had two daughters, Virginia and Bonnie and a son Alfred to take with him in addition to his wife. They made it a trip around the world crossing first the Pacific then later the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. They passed through the Suez Canal while Nasser was celebrating his nationalizing the canal and just a month before it was closed. The following year, the ship, the Otronto, was sold as scrap to Gillette to make razor blades as it was made of blue steel. On the way home in Amsterdam, the family decided to attend a new movie Guys and Dolls. The locals decided that his son, then 15, was too young to attend so Al took his son for a walk while the girls attended the movie. His son got an even better education as Al had to explain to him why women along the street would beckon to them as they passed.
Al retired from the US government at the age of 62 after over 30 years of service. He then became a professor of wood research and wood technology in the Forestry School at North Carolina State University. For the next eight years he worked closely with graduate students, guiding and acquainting them with the ideas and concepts of his earlier work. During this time he published his book Wood and Cellulose Science. This 500 page book became a textbook for many years. In 1962 he was made Reuben B. Robertson Distinguished Professor of Wood Science and Technology. At age 70 he was forced to retire, then asked to return to teach another course, because another qualified instructor could not be immediately found. The following year, 1969, the University of California at Berkeley finally got their chance to have him for a year as a visiting professor. After returning to Raleigh, he continued to go to work every day as an emeritus professor. At age 80 he was still publishing.
He was Chairman of Cellulose Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 1933, Chairman of Colloid Division of ACS in 1934 and Chairman of the Wisconsin Section of ACS in 1936. In 1953 he was the Chairman of the Cellulose Division of the ACS. From 1963-64 he was South Eastern Board Member of the Forest Products Research Society. He was Director of the Visiting Scientist Program of Society of Wood Science and Technology from 1966-68. He became a fellow of the International Academy of Wood Science in 1966 and in 1968 he was the recipient of the Anselme Payen Medal and Award given by the Division of Cellulose, Wood and Fiber Chemistry of the ACS. In 1945 he received the Naval Ordinance Development Award in appreciation of exceptional service and in 1965 he received the Distinguished Classroom Teacher award from North Carolina State University. In 1983 he was given a plaque for Distinguished Service by the Society of Wood Science and Technology.
Dr. Stamm was an outstanding physical chemist in research on wood and related materials. He worked mainly in the following areas: colloid chemistry and physical chemistry, interfacial surface tension of liquid-liquid systems, emulsification, capillary and surface properties of wood, electrokinetic and electrical conductivity properties of wood, thermodynamics of the wood-water systems, adsorption by wood, diffusion and flow of gases, vapors, and liquids through wood, fundamentals of seasoning wood, molecular properties of wood components, and swelling and shrinking of wood and its control. He developed a number of products with names such as "Impreg," "Compreg," "Staypak," "Staywood," and "Acetylated Wood" as well as the polyethylene glycol (PEG) process of stabilizing wood from swelling and shrinking.
Dr. Stamm was a member of the American Chemical Society, the Forest Products Research Society, the Society of Wood Science and Technology, the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry, the International Academy of Wood Science (honorary), Sigma Xi, Alpha Chi Sigma, Phi Lambda Upsilon, Tau Beta Pi, Xi Sigma Pi and Gamma Sigma Delta. He published about 170 articles and papers in such journals as Journal of the American Chemical Society, Journal of Chemical Education, Journal of Agricultural Research, Journal of Physical Chemistry, Colloid Chemistry, Physics, Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, Transactions of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Electrical Engineering Transactions, Journal of Forestry, Modern Plastics, Timberman, Tappi, Textile Research Journal, Forest Products Journal, Journal of Polymer Science, Wood Science and Technology, Wood and Fiber, and Macromolecules. Between 1974 and 1977 his work was cited 69 times. Some of the references were to his publications in the 30's and 40's. He had 11 patents, chapters in 2 volumes of Wood Chemistry (1952) and one in Principles of Wood Science and Technology (1974), was coauthor of Chemical Processing of Wood (1953) and author of Wood and Cellulose Science (1964).