The time finally came at the end of April 1938: Mark attached skis to the roof of his car, so that it looked like they were going on holiday, fitted a swastika flag on the radiator, loaded wife Mimi, his two sons Hans (born in 1929) and Peter (1931-1979) as well as his Jewish niece, the pianist and harpsichordist Greta Kraus (1907-1998) in the car – and left Vienna for Zurich, where the family arrived the next day without being accosted on the way. The journey continued from Switzerland directly through France to England, where the five of them finally made an interim stop of several months in Manchester. Time that was put to good use in preparation for Canada, with particular emphasis on improvement of their knowledge of English. Hermann Mark also spent time at the Shirley Institute in Didsbury near Manchester, which the British cotton industry had established for research purposes in 1920, where he focussed on synthetic fibres. He initially went to Canada alone, embarking on the “Duchess of Richmond” in Liverpool in mid-September, which reached the port of Montreal on 26. of the same month. During the Atlantic crossing, he found the necessary time to polish a lecture about cellulose that he was supposed to give at McGill University in Montreal. Professor Harold Hibbert (1877-1945) had invited Mark to give the lecture and the latter was already contemplating continuation of his career as a university professor, as soon as he had finished his job successfully in Hawkesbury (Mark 1993, 86).
Whether he was in Germany, Austria or – now – America, what was characteristic of Mark and what remained his aim throughout his life was to try and build bridges between university and industrial research, in order to develop technically viable products. In his late work “Giant Molecules”, that was translated into German, he looked back on his time in Ludwigshafen:
“In 1927, the huge I. G. Farben conglomerate recruited a staff of more than 20 scientists (including Herman F. Mark, the author of this book) for a laboratory in which research into high polymers was supposed to be carried out. The success achieved by this team was almost sensational; they developed a sound theoretical basis for the structure of macromolecules and practical instructions for synthesis of them. The chemists from I. G. Farben fine-tuned the original qualitative ideas about the structure of the polymers, so that they were able to use pencil and paper to plan the individual stages that led to the development of new macromolecules from a large number of basic materials. The consequence of this was that the team began to manufacture numerous new polymers in the laboratory, many of which subsequently proved to be extremely valuable. The first of the new polymers that promised to become an economic success was polystyrene, which I. G. Farbenindustrie started to manufacture on an industrial scale in 1929. […] During the time between 1929 […] and 1932, the group developed synthetic polymers at a speed of about one new product a day. It goes without saying that not all of them were viable, but some were of major economic significance. They included the first polyacrylic compounds, some of them were later used to produce excellent materials – such as Orlon and Acrilan […]” (Mark 1970, 103-104).
Mark always emphasised in this context that the essential precondition for the planned development of new high polymers as outlined above was progress in the findings of basic scientific research. A sound understanding of the “laws […] that govern the connection between (molecular, editor’s note) structure and (physical, editor’s note) properties” was the key to enabling “the targeted production of materials with very specific qualities” (Mark 1938, 363), for which “molecular engineering” became the common term (anonymous 1980, 277):
“We know now, for example, that the elasticity of a high polymer substance is connected to the fact that it consists of flexible, chain-like molecules and that it increases as the chain length increases; it has been determined that tear strength and abrasion resistance also depend on the length of the chain molecules as well as on the fact that interconnections can be created between the individual chains, which strengthen and stiffen the entire molecular structure. Whether a high polymer substance swells in water or oil is encouraged by the presence of certain atomic groups (OH, CH3 etc.) and is impeded by their absence as well as by close crosslinking between the chains. The electric insulation properties reach particularly high levels when the plastic consists only of C and H atoms, while heat resistance can in turn be achieved by strong mutual cross and ring bonding. […] So if the assignment is to produce a substance that is as suitable as possible for structuring […] car tyres, then no more anxious attempts will be made to imitate natural rubber with all its properties; instead of this, the properties (abrasion resistance, resistance to ageing etc., editor’s note) will first of all be produced that the new material is particularly supposed to have in view of its proposed application […]; it can be irrelevant here if it has other qualities of natural rubber to a lesser extent than natural rubber itself.” (Mark 1938, 362-364)
It was possible for university and industrial research to benefit from each other if they were governed by scientific findings. As a result, Mark succeeded not only in making major improvements to corporate research departments in Ludwigshafen (BASF), Hawkesbury (CIP) and elsewhere; he also established high polymer physical chemistry research at universities and crowned his academic career in doing so. The latter had begun during the First World War, when Mark was still a soldier and was recovering from a war wound; he enrolled at Vienna University to study chemistry and physics: “They could be studied together at the same time” (Kreuzer 1982, 43). In July 1921, he obtained his doctorate (Dr. phil. – the chemistry department was part of the philosophy faculty at this time) “summa cum laude” as a student of Wilhelm Schlenk (1879-1943). The title of his doctoral thesis was: “Pentaphenylethyl and about a new method for presenting catalytically effective nickel”. The emphasis was on the free pentaphenylethyl radical with trivalent carbon (Mark and Schlenk 1921). Mark 1993, 15 recalled tongue-in-cheek: “The concept of ‘free radicals’ was not known in 1920 – well, perhaps in politics, but not in chemistry.” When Schlenk took up an appointment at Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin in 1921 as the successor to Emil Fischer (1852-1919), the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Mark followed his teacher and became an assistant at the Chemical Institute.