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In the immediate post-WWII world, academic chemical engineering, in common with most of the other engineering disciplines, focused on the construction of increasingly sophisticated mathematical models and tools. Was it just a fortuitous coincidence that at the same time, the computer was being developed by physicists, mathematicians, and electrical engineers to solve just the kind of mathematics the chemical engineers were designing into their new models and tools? I think this overstates the contingency of this history. Instead, perhaps the 1950s were a moment of synergy, where Department of Defense and military spending were driving science and engineering research down the same road. By 1952, when the IBM 701 was introduced, military spending had made the computer a workable tool. In the late 1950s, when the 704 and FORTRAN were introduced, engineering industries became a prime market for computers. While the first target for high-speed computing was the defense industry, chemical companies did not waste much time in investigating the potential of computing for their research and development work. First graduate students, but later even undergraduates, coming out of the highly mathematically oriented chemical engineering programs found significant opportunities to continue working in the community of computer-aided chemical engineering. In this way, chemical engineers from industry and universities worked together to produce a new set of work practices in process design by 1970.

DOI: 10.1007/1-4020-3261-7_14

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