Norman Bekkedahl (1903–1986) was Deputy Chief of the Polymers Division at the Institute for Materials Research of the

National Bureau of Standards The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...

. Bekkedahl received the 1967

Charles Goodyear Medal The Charles Goodyear Medal is the highest honor conferred by the American Chemical Society, Rubber Division. Established in 1941, the award is named after Charles Goodyear, the discoverer of vulcanization, and consists of a gold medal, a framed c ...

for his work with the application of

thermodynamics Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that deals with heat, work, and temperature, and their relation to energy, entropy, and the physical properties of matter and radiation. The behavior of these quantities is governed by the four laws of the ...

natural rubber Rubber, also called India rubber, latex, Amazonian rubber, ''caucho'', or ''caoutchouc'', as initially produced, consists of polymers of the organic compound isoprene, with minor impurities of other organic compounds. Thailand, Malaysia, and ...

. In 1995, he was inducted into the

International Rubber Science Hall of Fame The International Rubber Hall of Fame recognizes the careers of notable professionals in rubber technology. It is jointly sponsored by the Maurice Morton Institute of Polymer Science at The University of Akron and the Rubber Division of the Americ ...

. Bekkedahl made one of the first investigations of the

glass transition The glass–liquid transition, or glass transition, is the gradual and reversible transition in amorphous materials (or in amorphous regions within semicrystalline materials) from a hard and relatively brittle "glassy" state into a viscous or rubb ...

of rubber and wrote more than 40 technical articles on rubber. He studied chemical engineering at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

. He continued his studies at George Washington University and received his Ph.D. from the American University in Washington, DC. He worked at the American Sugar Beet Company, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Bureau of Standards (Polymers Division).

References

Polymer scientists and engineers 1903 births 1986 deaths {{US-academic-bio-stub