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Professor Harry Willis and the History of NIR Spectroscopy

"Necessity is the mother of invention". For Harry Willis I think that proverb was shown to be true. He went to work as an infrared spectroscopist in the Plastics Division of ICI just at the end of the second world war. Physical methods of analysis were largely untried and ICI was the "bastion" of the traditional chemical industry where chemical analysis had to be performed on substances in solution. However, Harry battled away, with the prime objective of getting infrared evaluation accepted as a valid physical tool. Subsequently he developed novel methods of analysis for polymers in solid form on which chemical analysis had not been done before. His dream was to use infrared for continuous on-stream analysis and this was realised many years later in the NIR. Having overcome the hurdle of "acceptance" by the scientists in the Company, the next stage was the use of infrared to solve problems which occurred in technical service and development work. This necessitated examining solids in "chunky" form, sometimes in the form of moulded objects placed directly into the spectrometer beam because any further sample preparation might destroy the very effect or problem we were seeking to investigate. It was exciting to find that there were suitable absorption bands in the NIR region which could be studied on plastic materials of some 1/81/4"thickness. The various overtone and combination bands had not been hitherto characterised by anyone and therefore Harry and I approached the task empirically by comparing spectra of chemically similar substances and drawing deductions from their similarities and differences. One of our early papers included work on the water content of liquids and solids.1 I joined Harry in 1950 when he had been working for nearly five years in Plastics Division after leaving postgraduate studies on petroleum products with Professor G.B.B.M. Sutherland at Cambridge. In ICI Harry had laboriously constructed his own rock-salt prism instrument for analysis in the fingerprint region, possibly the first infrared spectrometer in British chemical industry at that time, ca. 1946. Its archaic quality was typified by the photographic recording from a spot galvanometer-which meant that everyone doing IR work was confined in the "black hole of Calcutta". Commercial spectrometers were gradually coming on