Vladimir Ipatieff

Vladimir Ipatieff — chemist (high octane fuel) with roots in the Russian Empire

Vladimir Nikolayevich Ipatieff was born in Moscow on 21 November (9 November, Old Style) 1867. He trained as an officer and studied at the Mikhailovsky Artillery Academy in St Petersburg, where he later taught chemistry; from 1906 to 1916 he also taught at the university. His research focused on catalytic reactions of hydrocarbons at high pressures and temperatures, a field he helped to found, and in 1916 he was elected to the Imperial Academy of Sciences.

In the army he rose to major general in 1910 and lieutenant general during the First World War, when he was appointed chairman of the committees that directed the chemical industry's war effort, including explosives and the production of poison gas and defences against it. After the Revolution he remained in Russia and worked for the Soviet state; in 1927 he founded the State Institute of High Pressures. Troubled by the arrests of fellow scientists, he left the Soviet Union in 1930, believing his absence would be temporary. In 1936 he was deprived of Soviet citizenship and expelled from the Academy.

Shortly after leaving, already in his sixties, he was invited to the United States by Universal Oil Products in Chicago, which made him director of chemical research, while he also became professor of chemistry at Northwestern University. He founded a high-pressure catalysis laboratory there and became an American citizen in 1937.

At Universal Oil Products he applied his catalytic methods to the manufacture of high-octane gasoline from low-value feedstock. With his colleague Herman Pines and their team he developed processes of polymerisation, alkylation and isomerisation, the last producing the isobutane needed for alkylation from abundant normal butane; together they became essential to the production of high-octane aviation fuel during the Second World War. He held several hundred patents.

Ipatieff was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 1939. He published a scientific autobiography, Catalytic Reactions at High Pressures and Temperatures (1936), and memoirs that appeared in Russian in New York in 1945 and in English as The Life of a Chemist (1946). He died in Chicago on 29 November 1952, aged eighty-five. An Ipatieff Prize for experimental work in catalysis and Northwestern's Ipatieff professorship of catalytic chemistry preserve his name.

Tracing the roots — Moscow (Russia)

Born in Moscow in 1867, he made his career as an officer-chemist of the Imperial army and a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (1916), stayed after the Revolution to found the State Institute of High Pressures in 1927, and left the USSR in 1930.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Moscow (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition