Since 1902, ECS has continuously published innovative, impactful research in the field of electrochemical and solid state science and technology. From the first publication of the Transactions of the American Electrochemical Society over 100 years ago to the over 1,700 journal papers published in the Society’s Digital Library every year, ECS has disseminated a massive amount of research since its establishment.
One ECS member happened to have a good deal of that research sitting in his basement office.
John Murray joined ECS in 1962, which is when he began receiving the paper version of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES). Since then, he’s stowed the paperbound research in his basement, making sure to transfer it wherever his career took him. Now, that collection has made its way from his home in Timonium, MD to ECS headquarters in Pennington, NJ.
Cultivating a collection
Murray’s electrochemical career began at Allis-Chalmers Corp. Research Division in West Allis, WI, where he worked on catalysts and electrodes that would assist in the development of hydrogen oxygen fuel cells for NASA. When the company hit financial issues and sold its research division to Teledyne Technologies, Murray was one of just nine employees to keep his position. That took him and his wife Stephany to Timonium, MD, where they currently live.
And of course, where the around 700 pounds of ECS journals live as well.
But the journals didn’t just serve as abandoned piles of paper cluttering a basement. Hundreds of JES issues lined Murray’s home office bookshelves for many years, providing him with a vast array of research to compliment his own work and experiments. Murray’s penchant for collection further paid off during the time he spent working at Johns Hopkins University.
“I was teaching a one semester course on the history of electrochemistry,” Murray says. “I didn’t want to give the students a final test, so I told them to write a small paper. A few days later, I received a paper from one student and I thought, ‘I’ve read this before.’”
Because this was prior to the days of a simple search for plagiarism on the internet, Murray went home to his basement to find why the student’s paper rang so familiar. After paging through a few JES issues, he found it a past paper published in the journal that matched the student’s paper word for word.
Where it all began
Now, 80 years old and with limited room left in the basement that houses multiple collections ranging from his golf balls to his wife’s antiques, Murray began wondering what he could do with all the journals. That’s when he reached out to ECS.
“I figured I’d reach out to the Society to see if anyone needed some real, hands-on journals,” Murray says. “They’re even in pretty good condition; not too many chemical or coffee stains.”
Murray began packing up the journals and taking the first bunch on the trip from Maryland to ECS headquarters in New Jersey. The research that helped Murray throughout his career would now be making the trip back to where it all began.
Typically, when people offer to donate old journal issues to ECS, the Society directs them to a library or school nearby that would benefit from the collection. However, when ECS archived past volumes of JES, the covers were lost. These covers carried ads and a list of corporate/institutional members at that time. The recovery of the journals from Murray’s basement not only allows ECS to access information that was thought lost, but also brings back a piece of the Society’s history.
Murray unloaded around 300 pounds of journals at ECS’s headquarters, amounting to 15 boxes with volumes starting in the early 60s until the 90s.
“I just would have hated to throw them out,” Murray says. “Rather than just get rid of them, we thought we might be able to bring something positive back to ECS.”