Podbielniak’s contactor

The first single I ever bought – from a school fundraising fair – was Blood Sweat and Tears’ Spinning Wheel with its lyric ‘what goes up, must come down, spinning wheel got to go round’. I was reminded of the song while reading about the story of penicillin, whose availability after the second world war was in no small measure due to the efforts of a pair of Polish–American inventors who spun the wheels of fortune and who never really came down, even when things went wrong.

Walter (Władisław) Joseph Podbielniak was born in Buffalo, the eldest of five children, to parents who had recently immigrated from Poland. Buffalo had a strong Polish community and, unlike many second-generation children, Podbielniak remained strongly attached to both the language and the culture. He studied analytical chemistry at Buffalo University, but also gained a reputation as a poet and a pianist. After graduating in 1920 he landed a job as an analyst with the National Aniline and Chemical Company in Buffalo, which controlled 75% of the dyestuff market in the United States and is said to have provided the indigo for every pair of jeans produced in the 1930s.

Although it was a natural destination for a chemist, perhaps the work was too dull and repetitive for his liking. After a stint as a teacher, he went back to school in 1923, this time to study chemical engineering at Ann Arbor, Michigan. By 1925 he had a BSc degree and started research with the young head of department, E H Leslie, who the fledgling Phillips Petroleum Company had consulted to help it understand the nature of what it was pumping from underground.