Life on the edge : Peter Danckwerts GC MBE FRS, brave, shy, brilliant /by Peter Varey.

A biography of Peter Danckwerts (1916-1984). Educated at Winchester College and Oxford, Danckwerts volunteered in July 1940 for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, receiving training in bomb disposal. Following a period during which he was responsible for dealing with unexploded bombs and mines in the Thames Estuary, Danckwerts received a George Cross for his work defusing unexploded parachute bombs during the London Blitz. In 1942 he was posted to Sicily but was injured in a minefield and returned to England, joining the Combined Operations Headquarters. He received an MBE in December 1942 for his 'gallantry and undaunted devotion to duty'. After the end of the war, Danckwerts studied chemical engineering at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, later working for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. He went on to become a professor of chemical engineering science at Imperial College London and then, from 1959, Shell Professor of Chemical Engineering at Cambridge. Danckwerts served as president of the Institution of Chemical Engineering in 1965 and 1966, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969, and following his retirement in 1977 became executive editor of the journal Chemical Engineering Science. An appendix contains Danckwerts' case for recognising Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) as the first to postulate the First Law of Thermodynamics and formulate the Second.