Special Issue in Honor of Professor Graham Wright's Achievement in Electrochemical Sciences

Dear Colleagues,

Professor Wright's name needs no introduction to a significant cadre of electrochemists. He has dominated the electrochemical sciences in the Southern Hemisphere for more than 65 years.  He has published seminal papers in Coatings, Corrosion, Electrochemical Kinetics, Passivation, Polymerization, Anodization, Catalysis, and Material Characterization.  Furthermore, Prof. Wright engaged with local New Zealand industries to solve problems outside the usual academic realm.  Excellent examples of these activities include the localized corrosion of domestic copper piping in hard water environments, the thermo electrochemistry of lead-acid batteries, and the online monitoring of corrosion of steel piping in geothermal steam supplies.  The work on the lead-acid battery is particularly intriguing, as lead oxide, basic lead sulfates and material from cured positive and negative plates have been characterized by differential scanning calorimetry and thermogravimetry. The free-lead content can be conveniently measured, and the thermal transitions show promise as indicators of phase composition.  The work is intriguing because it was performed well before similar studies on lithium-ion batteries that have enabled the proliferation of portable electronic devices.  The findings of Professor Wright were then used to improve the performance of lead-acid SLI batteries significantly.

He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship (circa 1957) after graduating from Auckland University in May 1957 with a Master of Science degree with first-class Honors in Chemistry. He then went to Oxford, Balliol College, in 1958, where he did his Thesis under Professor R.P. Bell. He then got a scholarship to Copenhagen, where he worked under Professor Jannik Bjerrum.

Although Professor Wright is rightfully known for his scientific accomplishments, his impact on science extends well beyond that. He is mainly known for the high-quality graduate students who passed through his group and succeeded in industry and academia.  I was one of those students who graduated with a M.Sc. in Chemistry in 1966.  As a mentor, Prof. Wright taught me that, in science, detail matters; in fact, it is all that matters.  Gloss over the details, and indeed, the rest will be wrong.  I carry that lesson with me to this day and it has served me well in my 55-year career.  It was a hard lesson to learn as there is a natural tendency to spread one’s wings and postulate the improbable when analyzing complex scientific data.  The result is “N-rays”, “polywater”, and “cold fusion” to name but a few of the garden paths down which we may be led.

This volume honors Professor Wright's seminal contributions to New Zealand, his native land.  Many, but not all, of the contributors are from his former students and I am confident that they hold him in the same esteem as I do.

Dr. Digby Macdonald
Guest Editor

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• coatings
• corrosion
• electrochemical kinetics
• passivation
• polymerization
• anodization
• material characterization