History of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Baker Laboratory
1923 - present

Pictures

"Planning for a new building immediately, but United States entry into World War I in 1918, which put a dampener on these efforts. Mr. George F. Baker (no relation to the Baker Chemical Company) was persuaded to fund a new building. Andrew D. White appears to not have been too sad at the loss of his personal eye-sore; White died in 1918 and did not live to see the grand new replacement, Baker Laboratory, which was completed in 1923.

Although the money to build Baker was secured in 1918, Dennis reports that he and Mr. A. N. Gibb had drawn preliminary sketches for a new laboratory back in 1910 six years before the fire (that is real planning ahead!). He adds that when Mr. Bakers interest in funding a new building was indicated, these sketches were quickly developed into a plan that help persuade Mr. Baker to offer $1,500,000 to fund construction and the cost of building equipment. This new Baker Laboratory of Chemistry contained a gross area (excluding the attic) of about 185,000 sq. ft., which was three to four times the space available in the Morse Hall complex.

Dennis wrote a pamphlet that is 55 pages long with 20 additional plates describing in great detail the leading features of the plan, a general description of the building and information about the arrangement of the disciplines and their administration. This pamphlet is a must read for anyone interested in the planning of a science building.

One of the features of the new Baker Laboratory was the design of the hoods. Rather than simply rely on an out-of-the-box architects design, the department staff conducted a prolonged investigation of different hood designs, the best of which were then tried out for a year in the old laboratory. In the end they came up with a open face design with a back baffle-plate set 4 from the back wall with narrow 1 openings at the top and bottom extending the full length of the baffle. Behind the back wall of a standard hood were four openings leading to 10x18 glazed-tile flues that led up through the wall to a set of four manifolds each of which was connected to and exhaust fan. Other hoods in the building were connected to same set of manifolds. The advantage of this somewhat complex arrangement was that if one fan motor went down each hood in the stack would continue to be exhausted by the remaining three exhaust fans.

In the standard configuration the hoods in the introductory laboratories had a face velocity of 40 ft./sec.; the advanced laboratories and the research laboratories had a face velocity of 45 ft./sec. The rate of removal of air in a specific laboratory could be increased by changing a sprocket wheel on the particular fan in the attic. When the whole system of 52 attic fans was operating the building had three air changes per hour. There was a forced air supply on the roof that delivered fresh, tempered air through masonry ducts in the walls to the laboratories and the halls. The ratio of air to laboratories and halls was adjusted so that about 25% of the air exhausted through the hoods came in through louvers in the hall, thereby keeping fumes out of the halls. One drawback of this design was that balanced air flow depended on keeping the doors shut, a practice that the students seemed unable to remember.

When I arrived in 1957 the Baker hoods were a subject of frequent complaints of poor exhaust, arising, as it turned out, from a combination of poor maintenance and operator ignorance. On the one hand, the depression years and later World War II had produced a long list of deferred maintenance, which for the hoods meant that over these years the vertical flues had been partially filled with dirt and debris, which sharply diminished the air flow. On the operator side, the basics of the elegant design had been forgotten by the faculty and students and it was customary practice to line up reagent bottles along the back edge of the hood. This kept noxious chemicals further from the operator, to be sure, but it also blocked the lower slat vent thereby sharply reducing the draw of the hood. Together these factors produced a belief that the hoods were antiquated and needed replacement, which in due course they were.

The poor maintenance problem manifested itself in other ways. The large organic teaching labs on the second and third floor were 50 x 70 with windows and hoods along the outside walls (the long dimension). Further in towards the center of the laboratory there were two isles that allowed access to the hoods and movement around the laboratory. The benches were about 30 long and ran perpendicular to the outside wall with large sinks at either end for washing glassware. A picture of an undergraduate inorganic lab is shown here. The organic labs were similar except that each bench has a center trough running the length of the bench to the sinks at the ends. The troughs and bench tops were made of beautiful alberene stone resting on a wooden bench. Unfortunately, there had been numerous floods over the years usually caused by students who ran their condenser cooling water too fast, so that if there was a pressure fluctuation the hose end would pop out of the trough and inundate the bench top. The cumulative effect of these floods was that the wood supporting the troughs had become swollen and distorted and leaks developed. In the early days these leaks were probably inconsequential, but by 1957 any leak in the third floor lab ended up partly as a puddle of water on the floor and partly as a water stream dripping down the conduits in the ceiling to the laboratory below. On a bad day there was a serious concern about electrical shorts and students sprawling on the wet floors. There were frequent frantic calls to the Buildings and Grounds office, but no permanent solution until one day while sloshing through the puddles on the floor, I had had it and threatened to resign if the problem was not fixed. Fortunately, the threat was sufficient and despite limitations on available funds fluorescent lights and a new trough system were installed in the organic laboratories.

Aside from the real problems caused by prolonged deferred maintenance and the shabby appearance it created, there was a growing problem of space. The numbers of undergraduates kept growing (about 2000 students per week passed through Baker spending 10,000 hours per week here) as did the number of graduate and post graduate students. Moreover, there was no place to put the expanding number of instruments used in research. Space was needed both for big instruments such as NMRs and mass spectrometers and for the large numbers of small spectrometers and chromatographs of all types." (Wilcox, 2004)