Calorimetry

The Eighteenth Calorimetry Conference was held October 16–18, 1963, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, at the Bureau of Mines Petroleum Research Center. This annual conference provides a gathering place for experimental calorimetrists to exchange views on techniques, to report new developments in thermodynamics and thermochemistry, and to develop cooperative schemes for improving the acquisition and dissemination of thermodynamic data. The eighteenth conference was the first to be held at the home laboratory of its founder and for several years its guiding hand, the late H. M. Huffman. This occasion, together with the fact that the Thermodynamics Laboratory of the Bureau of Mines has recently moved into completely new quarters, made particularly appropriate the subject of the keynote lecture, “Some Legacies of H. M. Huffman to Calorimetry and Thermodynamics”. This lecture, given by John P. McCullough (Socony Mobil Oil Co.), a successor of Huffman as director of the laboratory, described the development of a model laboratory and the approach to obtaining a coherent and comprehensive body of thermodynamic data by a coordinated series of experiments of various kinds upon carefully selected classes of compounds. This approach, started by Huffman in those laboratories, and continued by his successors, G. Waddington and J. P. McCullough, and now by D. R. Douslin, has resulted in such outstanding contributions of thermodynamic data that it has become a model of its kind, widely copied and of inestimable influence in its field.