John C. Warner*

John Warner was born in 1897 on a farm near Goshen, Indiana. When he was eight, his father died. Warner and his older brother went to work before and after school and during summers to help their mother and two sisters. Warner's mother had been a school teacher before she married, and she encouraged her children to stay in school.

Warner attended a one-room schoolhouse and worked on local farms. In high school, he began working for a furniture manufacturer and became a cabinet maker. He enrolled at Indiana University and majored in chemistry. Through a combination of work, loans, and scholarships, he graduated in 1918 with a bachelor's degree.

Next, Warner worked in Philadelphia as a chemist while earning a master's degree in 1920 and a doctorate in 1923. He did post-doctoral work in physics at the University of Michigan. He then worked as a research chemist for three Indiana companies.

Following research jobs with oil companies in Tulsa and Fort Worth in the 1920s, Warner accepted a position as an instructor in chemistry at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He advanced through the academic ranks to professor of chemistry and headed that department from 1938 until 1949.

During World War II, Warner supervised research on the chemistry and metallurgy of plutonium for the Manhattan Project. He was appointed president of the Carnegie Institute in 1950.