March 18, 1997
UW engineering alumnus behind Ivory, Pampers to turn 100
Back in the mid-1920s, when the University of Washington’s chemical engineering program was a two-man show housed in the old Architecture Building, it trained a brash young student whose work probably has touched the lives, or at least the behinds, of nearly every American born in the past generation.
Victor Mills, who graduated from the UW in 1926, helped build The Procter & Gamble Co. into a manufacturing giant by revolutionizing the process for making Ivory soap and developing consumer staples such as Jif peanut butter, Duncan Hines cake mixes, Pringles potato chips and, yes, Pampers disposable diapers. Retired since 1961, Mills lives in Tucson with his wife, Ruth, and will turn 100 on March 28.
Coincidentally, Mills’ advisor for his senior thesis was Waldo Semon, a UW alumnus and instructor who went on to invent polyvinyl chloride or vinyl, the second-most-used plastic in the world, as well as bubble gum. In 1995, he was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame alongside Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Semon, also still living, resides in Ohio and will turn 100 on Sept. 10, 1998.
“It’s just chance that two chemical engineers of the stature of Victor Mills and Waldo Semon came to the UW at the same time and that they both happen to be turning 100 years old at about the same time, but it’s a wonderful set of circumstances for our department to celebrate,” said Bruce Finlayson, chairman of the UW Department of Chemical Engineering. “It’s an inspiration to our students to see what people who studied here have gone on to accomplish.”
Ironically, Mills started out wanting to be a civil engineer. “I had romantic notions of building bridges across great streams,” he said in an interview with Finlayson in 1992. However, after serving a stint in the Navy during World War I, Mills was encouraged by an acquaintance to consider the then-nascent field of chemical engineering. He took the advice and, desiring to be near his fiancee who was teaching school in Bellingham, he enrolled at the University of Washington.
Mills credits his training under Henry K. Benson, who founded the UW’s chemical engineering program in 1904, for ideas about continuous processes that later helped him to revolutionize Procter & Gamble’s Ivory soap production operation. At the time, Finlayson said, chemical production was done in batch processes that were slow, labor-intensive and costly. Benson was a leader in using energy transfers and controlled reactions to drive continuous processes that allowed manufacturers to feed chemical ingredients in one end of a production plant and get the desired product out of the other end.
Soon after arriving at Procter & Gamble in 1926, Mills developed a continuous process for making Ivory soap that cut the production time from seven days to just a couple of hours. He developed a process to superheat the liquid soap and spray it in concentrated form through an extruder machine that spit out bar after bar of Ivory soap with unprecedented efficiency. This process, which led to one of the first of Mills’ 25 patents, revolutionized Procter & Gamble’s soap-production operation and fueled the company’s rise as a manufacturing leader.
Ivory soap also brought Mills back together with his college mentor, Waldo Semon, during World War II. Semon, then working for B.F. Goodrich, was struggling to develop synthetic rubber for tires needed in the war effort. He was using Ivory soap as an emulsifier, which helped speed up the chemical reaction needed to produce synthetic rubber, but something was disrupting the production process. Semon came to Mills with the problem.
“He enumerated the things that might be causing it, and it suddenly occurred to me that Ivory soap wasn’t, in fact, pure,” Mills recalled. “We added a very small amount of perfume to cover up the soapy odor. I had the factory make up a special batch of Ivory soap (without the perfume) … and it worked. All during the war period, Procter & Gamble furnished what was called special Ivory flakes (to B.F. Goodrich for its sythetic rubber).”
Mills eventually was put in charge of Procter & Gamble’s exploratory development division, which turned out an amazing array of new products as well as improvements on existing products. When possible, Mills explained, his formula for success was to apply existing technologies to new situations.
For example, Procter & Gamble’s Duncan Hines cake mixes were poor sellers in the 1950s because the ingredients were inadequately mixed and the cakes came out lumpy. Mills decided to try improving the mix by passing the ingredients through large milling drums designed to polish aluminum foil. Within three years, Duncan Hines was the top-selling brand in the country.
Mills developed a process for preventing the oil from separating in Jif peanut butter. He also recommended including one part honey with nine parts of the peanut butter to improve the taste. But competitors appealed to federal regulators that peanut butter with honey wasn’t really peanut butter. Procter & Gamble removed the honey rather than lose an entry in the profitable peanut butter market.
The invention of disposable diapers, which arguably was Mills’ most significant achievement, came almost by happenstance. In 1956, Procter & Gamble acquired a paper pulp plant, and Mills’ team of engineers was tasked with figuring out what to do with the plant. A grandfather by then, Mills was reminded of how much he hated changing diapers. It occurred to him that the pulp mill produced clean, absorbent paper that just might work for a disposable diaper. From that hunch, Pampers were born. Disposable diapers are now a $3-billion-a-year business worldwide.
“The essence of engineering is to make a product people want for a price they can afford to pay,” Finlayson says. “Victor Mills is the quintessential engineer.”
###
For more information, contact Finlayson at (206) 543-2250 or finlayson@cheme.washington.edu.
Mills is available for interviews by contacting Greg Orwig in the UW News & Information Office at (206) 543-2580 or gorwig@u.washington.edu.
NOTE TO EDITORS: Duncan Hines, Ivory, Jif, Pampers and Pringles are registered trademarks of The Procter & Gamble Co.
<!—at end of each paragraph insert
—>
