George E. Davis

George E. Davis was an English chemist and engineer, born in 1850 and died in 1907, regarded as the founder of chemical engineering as a distinct discipline. He identified common unit operations shared across otherwise very different chemical factories and systematized them into a coherent field of study, laid out in a series of twelve lectures delivered at the Manchester Technical School in 1888 and later published as A Handbook of Chemical Engineering. British industry at the time largely regarded the material as common knowledge already in practice, but the lectures had a much larger impact in the United States, where they helped spark the creation of dedicated chemical engineering degree programs at several universities; the Institution of Chemical Engineers now honors him through its George E. Davis Medal.