Papers of John H. Wotiz

John H. Wotiz (1919-2001) was a Czech organic chemist and science historian. Wotiz was born in Ostrova, Czechoslovakia (now part of the Czech Republic) in 1919. He began his higher education at the Technical University of Prague studying chemical engineering, but the increasing likelihood of invasion by Germany, then under the rule of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party led his family to send John and his brother to the United States.

A scholarship from the International Student Service organization allowed Wotiz to enroll at Furman University. Upon receiving his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Furman (1941), he attended the University of Richmond and received his M.S. in 1943. During World War II, while working toward a Ph.D. at Ohio State University, Wotiz enlisted in the Chemical Warfare Service of the United States Army, where he served as a lieutenant.

After the war, Wotiz resumed his studies at Ohio State and was granted his Ph.D. in 1948. He then accepted a position as an instructor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, where he remained until 1957, rising to the position of associate professor. Taking leave of the academic world, Wotiz accepted a position with Diamond Alkali Company in 1958. He was a successful researcher and was awarded numerous patents as both a group leader and then senior group leader at Diamond Alkali.

But the academic world still exerted a pull upon Wotiz. In 1962, he took a position as a professor of chemistry at Marshall University, where he later became department chairman. Wotiz left Marshall in 1967 to accept a professor of chemistry position at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIU-C). He spent the remainder of his career at SIU-C, working with graduate students, conducting research on allene chemistry, and helping to establish an international graduate student program.

While at SIU-C, Wotiz’s growing interest in the historical origins of chemistry led to his increased involvement in the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division on the History of Chemistry (HIST). He also participated in a successful European Summer Studies program, which involved guided tours of sites important to the evolution of the chemical science. By 1980, he was a recognized authority on museums and cultural sites dedicated to this topic and was chairman of HIST. As chairman of HIST, he was an early supporter of the establishment of a Center for the History of Chemistry (CHOC) in the United States. Partially for his work on behalf of CHOC (later renamed the Chemical Heritage Foundation), he was awarded HIST’s Dexter Award in 1982.

In 1984, Wotiz and one of his graduate students, Susanna Rudofsky, ignited a fierce controversy when they suggested that the nineteenth-century German chemist August Kekule may have misrepresented the facts behind his conception of the ring-structure of benzene. The remainder of Wotiz’s career and even his retirement years were consumed by the Kekule controversy. He chaired a contentious symposium on Kekule sponsored by HIST in Boston in 1990. Wotiz also edited the book The Kekule Riddle: A Challenge for Chemists and Psychologists, which was published in 1993.

The politics of the symposium and the publication of The Kekule Riddle resulted in lawsuits involving both individual scholars and the HIST Division as a whole. In the end, the affair seems to have been less about who deserved credit for the discovery of the ring structure and more about whether the history of chemistry should be written by historians-with-a-chemistry-background or by chemists-turned-historians.

John Wotiz and his wife Kay were both fatally injured in an auto accident in 2001.

Sources

Oral History of John H. Wotiz, Science History Institute Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. - https://oh.sciencehistory.org/oral-histories/wotiz-john-h

Papers of John H. Wotiz, Science History Institute Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.