15/5/54 Guide to the Charles C. Price Papers Christopher C. Price Papers Finding Aid Authors: Salvatore V. De Sando.

© Copyright 2014 University of Illinois Archives. All rights reserved.

2014-12-12
19 Library 1408 W. Gregory Dr. Urbana, IL, 61820 URL: http://archives.library.illinois.edu Email: illiarch@illinois.edu Phone: (217) 333-0798 Fax: (217) 333-2868
This finding aid was encoding in EAD by Archon 3.21 from an SQL database source on March 28th, 2024. The collection description/finding aid is written in English
Guide to the Charles C. Price Papers 1943/1945 University of Illinois Archives Overview of the Collection Charles C. Price Papers 1943-1945 15/5/54 Price, Charles C. 0.30 English University of Illinois Archives
19 Library 1408 W. Gregory Dr. Urbana, IL, URL: http://archives.library.illinois.edu Email: illiarch@illinois.edu Phone: (217) 333-0798 Fax: (217) 333-2868

Other Information:

1 page

Additional information may be found at https://files.archon.library.illinois.edu/uasfa/1505054.pdf

Biographical Information:

Charles Coale Price III (1913-2001) was special research assistant (1936-37); instructor (1937-39); associate (1939-41); assistant professor (1941-42); and associate professor (1942-46) of chemistry at the University of Illinois (UI). He was a pioneering chemist known for his contributions to the development of polymers, rubbers, and resins.

Price was born into a Quaker family in Passaic, New Jersey, on July 13, 1913. At age six, he lost his right hand when a box of dynamite detonators accidentally exploded. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Swarthmore College in 1930. He went on to earn a master's degree (1935) and a doctorate from Harvard (1936) after only twenty months, publishing four papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in the process. In 1936, he accepted a post-doctoral research position at UI under Professor Roger Adams, and his tenure at UI came to be defined by the outbreak of WWII. Price worked with the National Defense Research Committee, Chemical Warfare Service, and the Committee on Medical Research. He took on a number of crucial projects in support of the war effort that would inform his research interests for the rest of his career. He devised water testing and removal equipment for chemical warfare agents and formulated substitutes for quinine in the fight against malaria. He also researched synthetic rubber production, which led him to specialize in polymer properties and polymerization processes. In 1946, he accepted a position at the University of Notre Dame where he invented and patented polypropylene oxide-polyurethane rubber, a foam rubber with continued popular use today. After the war, Price became active in the World Federalists Association and made a brief foray into politics in the early 1950s. In 1954, he accepted the Benjamin Franklin Professorship of Chemistry and chairmanship of the Chemistry Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the course of his career, he published widely, becoming founding coeditor of Journal of Polymer Science and authoring the book Reactions at the Carbon-Carbon Double Bond (1946). Price won the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Pure Chemistry (1946) and the ACS Award for Creative Invention (1974). He served as President of the American Chemical Society (1965) and was founding chair of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

In 1936, Price married Mary Elma White (d. 1982), and together they had five children. Following White's death, he was married to Anne Parker Gill (1983). Price died on February 11, 2001.

Sources:

"Charles C. Price," Organic Synthesis, accessed May 15, 2020, http://www.orgsyn.org/content/pdfs/bios/price.pdf.

"Charles Coale Price III (1913รข??2001): Antimalarial Research Program," Noyes Laboratory at the University of Illinois, American Chemical Society, accessed May 15, 2020, https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/noyeslaboratory.html.

Access Terms

This Collection is indexed under the following controlled access subject terms.

Topical Term: Chemical Warfare Service Chemistry Faculty Papers
Arrangement of Materials:

Arranged alphabetically by subject and chronologicaly thereunder.

Scope and Contents

Papers of Charles C. Price (1913-2001), Associate Professor of Chemistry (1936-46); contains hand-written and typed monthly Chemical Warfare Service progress reports, and L. J. Arent's Bibliography of The Determination and Detection of Flourine; including treatment of water contamintated with chemical warfare agents and Cyanuric Chloride as a water contaminant; co-authors include Karl M. Beck, A. M. Buswell, Harry Gilbert, R. C. Gore, F. C. Harrington, T. E. Larson, Katherine Ludwig, L. C. Smith, Frank W. Sollo, Ilya Stephanoff, and Alvin C. Wiese.