UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In the late 1940s, a budding electrical engineer named Hu Barnes spent the summer working with General Radio Company. In a time before the widespread use of computers, he watched as doctoral students toiled over drafting tables.
That fall, when the undergraduate student returned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he took an elective — geomorphology. In that course he was surrounded by a “hard-nosed crew” of World War II veterans who were frequently roused by the lectures of a professor who told stories of traveling the globe to far-flung places such as Afghanistan, where he sometimes rode on the fender of a Ford Model T while sketching rock formations.
“It made the thought of a career as an electrical engineer pretty calm compared with that kind of life,” said Barnes.
That one course prompted Barnes to shift gears and start down a path to becoming a geochemist and one of the leading experts on how ores are formed under heat and pressure. Barnes earned his bachelor’s degree in geology from MIT in 1950 and his doctorate from Columbia University in 1958. While at MIT, he met his future wife, Mary. Mary Barnes earned a doctorate in chemistry from Penn State and worked as a research scientist in Penn State’s Materials Research Laboratory; she died in 2017.
Barnes died Aug. 3, at the age of 94. Barnes’ entire life was driven by curiosity. He chased his research objectives for 37 years at Penn State and remained active for decades as a professor emeritus.
He taught in places such as China and Russia and often referred to every day of his career as “pure fun.”
A curious life
In high school, Barnes built ham radios. He and his friends then took up Morse code. He learned how to plumb, wire and work with wood while working for a construction firm. He could fix anything: In his late 80s, when a neighbor’s lawn mower broke, Barnes repaired it right there in the yard.
At MIT, he paid the bills by building lab instruments. He used these skills throughout his career. While at Penn State, he created several inventions to fuel his research, his most famous being the rocking autoclave.
Barnes spent the early part of his career exploring the fundamentals of how ore deposits are formed, much of the work relying on his own laboratory inventions. His research and techniques are still used today, said colleague Hiroshi Ohmoto, professor emeritus of geosciences. Ohmoto, who joined Barnes at Penn State in 1970, said Barnes’ seminal work comprises his three volumes on hydrothermal ore deposits; Ohmoto contributed to two of the three.
“They were sort of the bible for students and researchers in the field,” Ohmoto said. “He’ll be remembered as the person who developed the geochemistry of hydrothermal ore deposits.”
Later, Barnes turned his attention to the applied sciences, particularly those that bettered the environment. After his retirement, he built pieces of his nano lab in his garage, and at the time of his death was still working to improve research related to acid mine drainage and iron pyrite, a local environmental issue that threatens freshwater streams here and beyond. His research generated several patents — one of which resulted in the treatments of the road cuts at Skytop.
He loved the outdoors, skiing and sports, especially Penn State football.
A legacy of learning
If you asked Barnes, he would say his greatest contribution — his research legacy — was his graduate students.
That’s the answer he gave Julianne Snider, director of the Earth and Mineral Sciences’ Museum & Art Gallery, who interviewed Barnes for her dissertation.
“He was very proud of his students,” Snider said. “He had some very successful graduates. He was very proud of getting them to a level of success where they would go off and do these great things. When we talked, he walked in with several sheets of paper, and he said, ‘I made a list of people who have earned degrees with me. I don’t know whether that’s of any consequence, but it gives you an idea of who I am.’”
Snider knew Barnes through his commitment to improving the museum. He gave to several causes, including some of the custom cabinets displaying the exhibits, and he was working to finalize plans for reinstating the granite slabs, which were put in storage in the early 2000s. Barnes, who always stressed the importance of field work, felt that the visible structures in the slabs told great stories, and were great teaching tools. He also gave to Penn State faculty, establishing an endowed professorship with his wife so faculty members could advance their research.
‘You didn’t work for him, you worked with him’
One of Barnes’ former students — a bit of who Barnes was — remembers Barnes as a tough but caring mentor.
Martin Schoonen, associate laboratory director at Brookhaven National Laboratory, earned his doctorate under Barnes in 1989.
“He was really one of the preeminent researchers in my field,” Schoonen said. “It was an extraordinary opportunity to work with him. He challenged his students to tackle some of the hardest problems in the field.”
Schoonen also remembers Barnes for all the soft skills he taught. If an experiment failed or a publication was rejected, Barnes taught them that that, too, was a learning experience. The relationship, said Schoonen, isn’t like a traditional occupation; it’s more like family.
Schoonen, who is from Holland, really appreciated that. Lessons he learned beside Barnes in the lab had the same impact as Thanksgiving dinners, which they sometimes shared in the Barnes’ home with fellow students. Hosting graduate students at Thanksgiving, when they might otherwise be alone, was a Barnes family tradition.
But make no mistake, Schoonen said, Barnes demanded excellence.
“One thing Barnes would say is, ‘when you leave here, my expectation is you’re the world expert in your research area.’ One thing I took from him that I still rely on is that you didn’t work for him, you worked with him," said Schoonen.
"He looked at it like this: 'I’m going to teach you. I’m going to transfer knowledge to you. But, after a few years, you’re going to teach me what you’re finding. And we’ll solve these problems together.'
"He viewed this as a relationship that became equal and then you were supposed to, as a graduate student, begin telling him what you know, where the field is going, what the future holds and what is the next question to solve.”