Helmut Schulz, 93, Scientist in Physics, Rockets and Refuse, Dies
NY Times
Helmut Schulz, a chemical engineer who received 64 patents in disparate fields like nuclear physics, rocketry and waste-to-energy processes despite having been blinded in a laboratory accident as a young man, died on Jan. 28 at a hospital in White Plains. Dr. Schultz, who lived in Harrison, N.Y., was 93.
His death was announced by his son Roland.
Helmut Wilhelm Schulz was born in 1912 in Berlin and moved to New York with his family in 1924. He was valedictorian at Brooklyn Technical High School. He received a Pulitzer scholarship to Columbia and earned a B.S. in 1933 and a master’s in 1934.
He went to work for Union Carbide, which in 1940 sent him to Niagara Falls to help improve its methanol plant. While experimenting, he inadvertently used a contaminated bottle. The solution he prepared exploded, splattering caustic potash into his eyes and blinding him.
While in the hospital at Columbia, he learned that physicists at the university had achieved fission of a uranium isotope. After leaving the hospital, he devised a process for separating uranium isotopes using gas centrifuges, presenting his idea in a paper to university researchers.
When the government settled on the gaseous-diffusion process to enrich uranium, Dr. Schulz filed for a patent in 1942. Originally placed under wartime secrecy, the patent was granted in 1951.
Returning to Union Carbide after receiving his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Columbia in 1942, Dr. Schulz wrote two papers on the possibility of using infrared radiation to generate molecular reactions.
In 1948, he approached Dr. Charles H. Townes, chairman of Columbia’s physics department and researcher of microwave physics, and offered him a Union Carbide fellowship.
“I had never heard of him before, but I learned soon enough that he was a brilliant and inventive person,” Dr. Townes wrote in “How the Laser Happened.” “It was my lucky day.”
Dr. Townes used the fellowship to hire a young scientist, Arthur L. Schawlow. They invented the laser and its cousin, the maser. Both received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
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