John Beynon at Purdue

John Beynon took up the position as Professor of Chemistry at Purdue in 1968, following the resignation of Fred McLafferty to take a chair at his alma mater, Cornell University. Beynon, a well-known figure in mass spectrometry, worked for the large UK chemical company ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) in Manchester and took leave of absence to take the Purdue position. John was the author of one of the earliest books on mass spectrometry, notable for the range of its coverage of the subject including fundamental phenomena, instrumentation, applications, and the new area of organic mass spectrometry. It is also noteworthy for the fact that the illustrations were drawn by hand by his wife Yvonne! He was especially well known for having designed a high-resolution mass spectrometer that became the prototype for the first commercial (Metropolitan Vickers) Nier-Johnson geometry instrument, the MS8. This instrument in turn was the precursor of the very successful and widely sold AEI (later Kratos) MS9 instrument. John's interest in high-resolution mass spectrometry had been sparked by his sabbatical with Al Nier at Minnesota. Beynon had also distinguished himself by his work on metastable ions, including the derivation of the relationship between the width of a metastable peak and the amount of internal energy converted into translational energy of separation of the fragments. This work was published in Zeitung Naturforschung, then the de facto journal for mass spectrometry; the specialist mass spectrometry journals date from 1968 when the current Journal of Mass Spectrometry and International Journal of Mass Spectrometry were established, albeit under different names, both with John Beynon as a member of the founding Editorial Advisory boards. A man of steely determination and great energy, John Beynon was someone who set a course and expected to achieve his goals. While focused and goal-oriented, he took time for hobbies, chief amongst which during his Purdue years was insect photography, interleaved with pictures of less difficult subjects including people. John was a wit and raconteur, who owned a magnetic personality and was inspired by an audience. His stories, often repeated, were told with enormous care and conviction and had great punch lines. His was also an able sportsman, admiring the Rhodes Scholar President of Purdue more for his golf handicap (three, I believe) than for anything else he accomplished. I once had the pleasure of introducing John to a new sport, bowling. A good eye and natural coordination took him to a +200 first game. He spent considerable time with me and my family and my second son, born in 1972, was named for him. John liked people, sought their admiration, and established an unusually close relationship with students. His somewhat Gablesque (as in Clark) looks, trimmed moustache, tailoring and all, meant that he made strong impressions. He always had great and continuing affection for the members of his groups. One example was his decades' long friendship (‘man and boy’) with the late A. E. (Bert) Williams, his technician at ICI. A poignant example is his feeling for the late Tom Keough, his first student, whose recent death was a blow to John. Tom battled two bouts with cancer while a student and went on to a highly successful career in research at Proctor and Gamble in Cincinnati. John wrote carefully and in a somewhat old-fashioned way—for example, ion/molecule not ion-molecule, the difference being very clear and the latter clearly not a term used by the educated. His distaste extended to those who use compliment when they mean complement, not to mention merely boorish behavior by spectroscopists who fail to distinguish the singular from the plural form of their only product. In his science, John Beynon was able to force relationships to make necessary approximations to see the physical world more clearly. The pre-eminent example of this was his connection between metastable ion kinetic energy releases and the geometries of multiply charged ions. He believed in what the data told him and was nowhere happier than after an experiment had been set up (sample introduced, that continuing bane of mass spectrometry for decades) and he could watch the pen recorder tell the story of the ion in hand (actually in vacuo but close to hand). This sort of activity on one occasion led him to announce the presence of ‘fine structure’ in a metastable peak, that for the reaction H3++ → H2++H. I had watched him push the envelope before and end up correct, but this time the imperceptible features of the plot that he called structure seemed too wild a claim altogether. Wisely he chose to publish in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (which avoided a referee thinking as I did). In fact, of course, he was right and subsequent high-resolution data have completely confirmed the original observations. Laboratories during the period under consideration were both very different and very similar to now. The teamwork, focused effort, the late nights, the thrill of discovery, all these seem to me completely unchanged. The tools were very different. Not only instruments but procedures were of another age. Publications were handwritten and then typed by a secretary, so 3 rather than 30 versions seemed to be a reasonable maximum; measurements took orders of magnitude longer (although chemical reactions, solution preparations, and sample work-ups have not changed much). For these reasons one tended to plan more carefully, and to interpret data more deeply. In our lab, most data acquisition was pen and strip chart recorder (which gave one time to think during the measurement) or, in the case of the commercial instruments, UV light on photosensitive paper. The latter provided a record that showed wide dynamic range, allowed fast scanning, and was permanent provided one did not examine the data … in which case it quickly faded away with additional exposure to light! One of the projects that I worked on with John Beynon, Jon Amy and David O. Jones was an imaging detector, an electronic version of the photoplate detector which we fitted to the plane-of-focus of the CEC 110B instrument, a very high-resolution magnetic sector instrument that used a photoplate detector. The glass photoplates were automatically read to produce high-resolution data on a large number of ions. The handling of large quantities of data in analytical chemistry was a problem that appeared early and often in various forms of mass spectrometry. The off-line nature of the measurement had obvious disadvantages; putting in the photoplate backwards, for example, was an error that only became apparent after much time and effort. The electronic version of this detector represented one of the very first electronic imaging detectors. It was not commercialized, widely copied or cited, but did represent quite new concepts and technology. It involved ions-to-electrons-to-photons conversion. While operating the instrument it seemed rather magical to be able to visually observe (with the vidicon) the lines of the mass spectrum and to adjust the magnetic field and other parameters and see immediate responses in the output data. The only thing that has changed since then is that the human mind has been removed from the loop, so there has been a loss in the aesthetic realm. One of the two main instruments in use during John's years at Purdue was the Hitachi RHM-2 instrument, a super-high-resolution instrument of which just six were built. An error in the ion optics limited its high-resolution performance. Looking at this instrument, with its five large pumping systems, 3 m ion path length, and large electric and magnetic sectors, one had an impression of great power. One also learned, based on its performance, a respect for ion optics. The error was fortunate perhaps, since it meant that the instrument had to be used for something other than standard high-resolution experiments. This opened the way to ion kinetic energy spectrometry (IKES) and the use of the instrument, after modification, to characterize ions based on kinetic energy/charge ratios. A logical extension of this development was to perform IKES on mass-analyzed ions by which circuitous means we arrived at MIKES. The resulting MIKES instrument (mass-analyzed ion kinetic energy spectrometry) was designed in 1971 and completed in 1973. The original design was a hand-sketch on a single sheet of paper which was presented apocryphally to the precision machinist, the late Tom Ridley. With significant contributions from Bill Baitinger to both the mechanical and electrical systems, this gradually evolved into a functioning instrument. In view of the importance of this instrument and its progeny, the VG (subsequently MicroMass) ZAB line of instruments, this is a significant piece of paper. The story of these instrumental developments, and of some of the experiments done at that time, has been told elsewhere. However, it is worth emphasizing the role of Jon Amy and the philosophy of instrumentation that he developed at Purdue. Jon did a Ph.D. at Purdue and stayed on to help the late Prof. Walter Edgell build an optical spectrometer. This task led to others, to the gradual acquisition of a technician or two, to a cubby-hole of space under the stairway in which to design, build and repair instruments, and gradually to the facility now known as the Jonathon W. Amy Facility for Advanced Instrumentation. This unique facility at the time John Beynon was at Purdue had perhaps 10 people on its staff, all with permanent state-supported positions. It is fair to say that his group was not widely appreciated by the faculty of the time, the word ‘tinkerers’ being one of the more flattering descriptions of the activity of the group. However, successive Heads of Department were wise and powerful enough to ignore faculty opinion and their appreciation of Jon's ‘shop’ was strongly endorsed by successive generations of excited graduate students to whom he provided views of the technologies of the future. This effort formed the basis for Purdue's early lead among academic institutions in the US in microelectronics and instrument development. Another group that appreciated Jon Amy's talents was the succession of instrumentation industry leaders for whom he consulted. These activities stretched from gas chromatrography to spectroscopy to mass spectrometry to surface science, and involved people like Bill Packard of HP, Wilkens of Wilkens Instruments, John Keithley of the eponymous company, T. Z. Chu and Bob Finnigan of Finnigan Corporation, and many more. John Beynon enthusiastically welcomed Jon Amy's assistance and Jon and Bill Baitinger effectively seconded themselves to the mass spec group for a couple of years. Jon Amy had war experience with the Navy and John had corresponding tank experience. They were virtually the same age and both remarkably talented people. However, there was never, to my knowledge, any clash of personalities. Jon Amy was an acute observer of people, skillful at dissecting problems (including the human, often the most important, component) and he always acted rationally. Never ego driven, he believed in the organization—the team—and had a missionary sense of doing good. Jon Amy may be the person I have known who has come closest to living by the golden rule and there are many scores of Purdue graduate students who can raise a cheer for his influence and help. John Beynon was emotionally driven, tightly focused and passionate about the goals he set, yet gregarious and generous. With these two archetypes and several more remarkable personalities thrown in, this was a special time in a special lab. Purdue was one of the US universities that expanded dramatically after the Second World War when returning servicemen were given unprecedented access to higher education. The Chemistry Department grew very rapidly to become one of the largest in the nation, both in terms of undergraduate and graduate student enrollment. At the time John Beynon came to Purdue, the number of graduate students was about 500, almost all of whom were white American-born males. (Purdue still has one of the largest chemistry graduate programs but its ethnic complexion has changed dramatically, but that is another story.) Jon Amy himself and Bill Baitinger worked closely with John Beynon and their contributions were essential to the changes in the RMH-2 and the construction of the MIKES instrument. Jon Amy passed on his philosophy of work and his deep insights into understanding systems (of which human individuals represent just one particularly interesting example) to generations of Purdue graduate students, who are richer as people for having known him. His views are summarized in aphorisms like “We always have time to do a job twice, never enough to do it properly” and “No surprises” and “Let's understand what he/she wants”. The small group of people in the laboratory in those years included the late David O. Jones, a post-doctoral and imaginative scientist who, with John Beynon, invented electronic black-jack, poker and other games of chance. This arose in conversation at the Pig and Whistle after a lecture by the South African chromatographer, Victor Pretorius; John Beynon remarked that one of the frustrations of coming to Purdue was that he had just been granted a UK patent on ‘Games of Chance using Solid State Logic Devices’ and had not had a chance to build a prototype ‘Fruit Machine’. This started the project of building games machines using integrated circuits, and the products were trotted out at parties where they created the expected sensation. John and Dave too innocently decided to look into commercialization and arranged a meeting in Chicago. I have no idea what transpired but the ebullient Dave Jones was subdued and John was very quiet when they returned to West Lafayette after the appointment. Apparently they had met a group of people from another field (turf) to whom this was a very serious matter. A little over a year later electronic gaming machines started to appear in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Another invention that obviously gave John Beynon equal pleasure was the ‘automatic salad crisper’. This was a bowl containing a little water to which one attached a vacuum pump and inserted the wilted lettuce; turn on the vacuum and ‘poof’ the lettuce crisped up immediately, as the air in its veins was pumped away and replaced by more rigid water. John's great joy in this story was the idea of doing the experiment with salad dressing instead of water … internalizing, so to speak, the dressing. Richard Caprioli was a young postdoc at the time who continued his close association with John Beynon after being appointed Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 1972. Richard had the peculiar idea that one could do mass spectrometry on peptides and other biological compounds, and it is rather amusing to reflect on the comments of the biochemists at the time as to just how foolish a notion this was. However, this was also an idea that John did not embrace, his appreciation for organic molecules having been too firmly fixed by the ICI Dyestuffs Division's favorites which ran (obviously) to aromatics often with azo, amino and other less pleasant substituents. Had this topic caught John's imagination, the history of biological mass spectrometry might have been different. As is quite well known, mass spectrometry was not highly respected in organic chemistry circles either at that time or indeed later (has it yet changed?). It had about it too wild an aspect … too much speculation … to be consonant with the rapidly gelling orthodoxies of physical organic chemistry of the late and early This is since both had much to from and the subsequent of much mass spectrometry activity to analytical rather than organic chemistry the John Beynon was very in the history of mass spectrometry, and wrote at on the gave him more than the connection to history that came with the that a postdoc of and an of was living in in the Manchester John arranged a meeting and came to Purdue of His from this the importance of mass of the line … the connection from one in the to the in is not a It and The can be quite were to He was always about new often very to people they had any but when his were not met or time was being This could take quite I two to the that were especially One was a set of comments on a of the from a rather physical The to the for comments on the was fact it the in It made to the of the the approximations in the the of understanding of the of the of consideration of energy John Beynon, Richard Caprioli and I worked on this for some time, Richard me to consideration of what had been many of work on the of the and more and more like an was It was. The of comments the and into the I and have they were an effort, too at being but rather doing which was in the of 1972, went on to become one of the most widely books in mass spectrometry. The other was a instrument. John's of doing experiments as to with a person at the instrument and to do the experiment It was of that worked well in a small group and that the of research was highly It also meant that the were by the graduate student and by John who had less for than the of This the in was a that was to tell the current at an in a instrument that was being in a way or was that but this is how are while was and was set … or was it These with or the of in the West Lafayette the and just being to make the and then of the too It of course was not the only John did not the year at Purdue but always spent the he was by his he came These were of great activity and As an John was and quite early for all of The were often the period of most work but on quite a John take an or two and out to do His subjects were and there is still a on where he spent to and other close up and on the He was very good at as he was at he In the done during John's Purdue several of ions which lead to or changes in or and the provided on measurements of in charged ions from kinetic energy metastable and their understanding in terms of energy It is to much of a of the world at large from the of but it seem to after and in research in mass spectrometry for much of the of the that John contributions to the subject are and perhaps only by and Looking over the period under it still like a special The that John Beynon established still Purdue is more than a for mass spectrometry, with more than Ph.D. students on in the The of John Beynon at Purdue set a standard the of which have been rather than over