When I was 11 years old, I became interested in insects — entomology. And for a year I read books about insects and collected specimens of butterflies and beetles in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. When I was 12, I became interested in rocks and minerals. I couldn’t collect very many; where I was wasn’t a good source of minerals except agates, but I read a great deal about minerals. Then when I was 13, I became interested in chemistry in these remarkable phenomena in which one substance is converted into another substance, or two substances react to produce a third substance with quite different properties. Then when I was 18, in 1919, when I was teaching quantitative analysis full time at Oregon Agricultural College for one year between my sophomore and junior years, I read the papers of Irving Langmuir in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, in 1919 and went back to G.N. Lewis’s 1916 paper. These papers dealing with the nature of the chemical bond, the role of electrons in holding atoms together interested me very much. That has been, essentially, the story of my life ever since.