Donald Othmer

From 1927 to 1931 he worked as an engineer at the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, producing 40 patents. In 1932 he joined the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn as an instructor in the newly independent Department of Chemical Engineering. He was to remain there. In 1937 he became Head of Department, which continued until 1961, when he was named Distinguished Professor. His duties ended in 1976 when he was made Professor Emeritus, but he never officially retired and was actively involved with what was by then the Polytechnic University until his death on November 1, 1995.

For this and other achievements he received awards from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Chemists and the Society of Chemical Industry. In 1987 he received the New York City Mayor's Award of Honor for Science and Technology. He was named by the readers of Chemical and Engineering News as one of the 75 greatest chemical scientists ever.

In 1950, following a divorce, he married his second wife, Mildred Jane Topp, also from Omaha, and an English major from the University of Nebraska. They were together for 45 years and she died in 1998.

In 1945, together with Dr. Raymond Eller Kirk (1890–1957), a chemist at the same institute, he began the work which became the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology, a major reference work. (At that time the only comparable reference work was Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry, in German.) In 1947 the first volume was published, and it was completed in 1949. The 5th edition was completed in 2007 with 27 volumes, which is the current (2021) edition.

Donald Frederick Othmer (May 11, 1904 – November 1, 1995) was an American professor of chemical engineering, an inventor, multi-millionaire and philanthropist, whose most famous work is the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology, which is a major reference work in chemistry.

Othmer was born in Omaha, Nebraska on May 11, 1904. He attended Omaha Central High School, then gained a scholarship to the chemical engineering program at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology), in Chicago. However, he changed to the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1924 in Chemical Engineering. He completed a Masters at the University of Michigan in 1925 and completed a doctorate in chemical engineering with a thesis entitled "The effect of temperature, purity and temperature drop on the rate of condensation of steam" at the same university in 1927.