Ralph Landau

Ralph Landau (May 19, 1916 – April 5, 2004) was an American chemical engineer and entrepreneur active in the chemical and petrochemical industries. He is considered one of the top fifty foundational chemical engineers of the first half of the 20th century, and one of the 75 most distinguished contributors to chemical enterprise. He has published extensively on chemical engineering and holds a significant number of patents.

In his 60s, he began a productive second career in economics at Stanford and Harvard Universities, examining economic theory, economic history and the application of technology in the chemical industry. His economic work focuses on understanding the political and economic environment necessary to encourage technological innovation. He published more than 143 papers and nine books.

Ralph Landau won a number of significant awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (2003), the first Othmer Gold Medal (1997), the National Medal of Technology from the United States Government, first awarded by President Ronald Reagan in 1985 "for his technical, leadership and entrepreneurial roles in the development of commercially successful petrochemical processes", and the Perkin Medal (1981).

Ralph Landau was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he received his primary and secondary education. At age 16, while at Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia, he won a Mayor's Scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering in 1937.

He went on to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received funding from a national Tau Beta Pi fellowship, applicable at the university of his choice, and further financed his doctoral work by working as a teaching assistant and research assistant. As part of the MIT program Landau participated in the Practice School. His industrial placements included a steel mill in Buffalo, New York, a paper mill in Bangor, Maine, and a chemical plant in Parlin, New Jersey. He also worked in a placement at M. W. Kellogg Company, helping to design petroleum refining plants in the summer of 1939. He received an Sc.D. in chemical engineering from MIT in 1941.

On July 14, 1940, Ralph Landau married Claire Sackler. They have a daughter, Laurie J. Landeau [sic].

From 1941 to 1946, Landau worked as a process development engineer for the New Jersey–based M. W. Kellogg Company, one of the first engineering firms to specialize in design and development for the oil refining and chemical industries. Landau was initially involved in research on catalytic cracking. Kellogg and several other companies wanted to develop techniques for fluid catalytic cracking that would not infringe on Eugene Houdry's patents for fixed-bed cracking.

During World War II, M. W. Kellogg created a subsidiary company, Kellex Corporation, for work on the Manhattan Project. Scientists at Kellex attempted to design a production-scale facility to produce Uranium-235 for the atomic bomb. Through a process called gaseous diffusion, isotopes of U-235 were separated from the predominant isotope, Uranium-238 by turning uranium metal into uranium hexafluoride gas and straining it through a barrier material.