Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau

Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau, a chemical engineer, helped design the first commercial plant that made penicillin on a massive scale.

About Her Life

Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau (1911–2000) was born in Houston, Texas. She earned her bachelor's degree from Rice Institute (now Rice University) in 1932. She then moved across the country to attend graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1937 she became the first woman to earn a doctorate in chemical engineering from that school. After graduation she stayed in the Boston area and began her long career at E. B. Badger and Company (now part of the Shaw Group), an engineering company that specialized in designing and building plants all over the world for other companies making various products, especially those derived from oil. At Badger she met her future husband and fellow engineer, W. C. Rousseau, with whom she had a son.

As a young chemical engineer she worked on two historically important projects, both during World War II. She helped design processes for producing high-octane gasoline, which was a new invention when she started work. During World War II, U.S. oil companies rushed to design and build refineries for making high-octane gasoline to be used in military aircraft.

In her other project she played an important part in designing the first plant for making penicillin, the first widely used antibiotic drug. It is not known which penicillin plant Rousseau helped design. There were about 20 American and Canadian companies manufacturing penicillin during the war, but the first company involved in the new technology of deep-tank fermentation was the Pfizer Company in Brooklyn, New York. Instead of being grown in flasks and pans as in the laboratory (see also Gladys Hobby), the mold was grown there in deep tanks with thousands of gallons of capacity that had to be kept at a constant temperature and continuously stirred to provide oxygen to the mold. And the processes for extracting the penicillin from the mold had to be scaled up from the size of apparatus that a scientist would use on the laboratory bench to the huge equipment of a commercial process—no simple matter.

Oil and petrochemicals were also an important part of Rousseau's career. In the 1950s she helped develop better ways of distilling crude oil. Crude oil is a mixture of many substances, and distillation is a method used to separate them. This is done because some of the components of crude oil are used to make gasoline, while others are used to make a variety of products, like plastics. Rousseau helped invent a device called a ripple tray that improved the distillation of petroleum.

In 1945 she became the first female member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). She earned the highest award of this institute (the Founders Award) in 1983 and, as of 2003, remains the only woman ever to have done so. Rousseau was also interested in the arts. She was an amateur artist herself and when she retired in 1961, she became an overseer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She died in 2000 at the age of 89.