Son of Edward Christian Eyring and Caroline Cottam Romney

• Married Mildred Bennion, 25 Aug 1928, Chicago, Cook, Illinois
• Married Winifred Brennan, 13 August 1971, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah

Henry Eyring Glimpses - Contributed By Edward Marcus Eyring

For a guy who ate and breathed chemistry almost constantly, he had some delightful human qualities. He enjoyed telling his descendants about his own childhood in Colonia Juarez, Mexico riding his own black horse with his father, Edward Christian Eyring. They were both enthusiastic cowboys and enjoyed riding together on what he described as their vast grass-covered ranch. For perspective, we should note that Henry and his family were driven out of Mexico by a national revolution in 1912 when Henry was only eleven years old.

For a year or more, the two families of Ed Eyring lived in a lumber yard in El Paso, Texas. During that challenging period, Henry and his younger brother Edward worked as "cash boys" in a large store in El Paso. The boys commuted between the lumber yard and the store on roller skates. The route included a board sidewalk that descended to a ditch where the boys jumped while still on their roller skates. If they did not negotiate the jump successfully, Henry insisted on going back and getting over the ditch while airborne. One of the hallmarks of Henry Eyring's later career as a mature scientist was his insistence on conquering the details of a challenging mathematical derivation that his students found difficult to complete. He was always up to the challenge and encouraged his students to do likewise.

As a seventy-year-old Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah Henry enjoyed gathering his graduate students and postdocs in his spacious business office to sing a lively version of the Mexican National anthem in his fluent Spanish. Henry was a naturalized U.S. citizen who retained a fondness for the culture and Spanish language of his boyhood in the "Mormon Colonies" in northern Mexico.

Biography

Henry Eyring was a Mexican-born American theoretical chemist whose primary contribution was in the study of chemical reaction rates and intermediates. A prolific writer, he authored more than 600 scientific articles, ten scientific books, and a few books on the subject of science and religion. He received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1980 and the National Medal of Science in 1966 for developing the Absolute Rate Theory or Transition state theory of chemical reactions, one of the most important developments of 20th-century chemistry. Several other chemists later received the Nobel prize for work based on it, and his failure to receive the Nobel prize was a matter of surprise to many. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences apparently did not understand Eyring's theory until it was too late to award him the Nobel; the academy awarded him the Berzelius Medal in 1977 as partial compensation. Sterling M. McMurrin believed he should have received the Nobel Prize but was not awarded it because of his religion. He was also elected president of the American Chemical Society in 1963 and the Association for the Advancement of Science in 1965.