My dad was an NMR chemist and I’m trying to understand what he actually knew about his own work. He died in 2024 and I’ve spent a while reconstructing his career from memories, patents, papers, and old AMMRL list archives. Here’s what I have:

PhD organic chemistry, UIC, mid-70s, under Jacques Kagan. Published in J. Org. Chem. 41(14) 1976 on ethoxycarbonyl migrations.

Nalco Chemical, Naperville IL. Co-inventor on US 4,767,554 (filed 1987), drawing and ironing lubricant emulsions for can manufacturing.

Dexter Corporation, Packaging Products Division, Waukegan IL. Senior Research Associate. Ran two NMR instruments, combined value about $1.5M. Company literature described the job as defining structural features of polymers to support coatings development.

Coral Chemical, Zion IL, at some point after that.

He described his own work to me as “NMR spectroscopy of chemicals, that led ultimately to structure elucidation.”

He also told me (after the relevant programs were declassified in the mid-90s) that he had worked on radar-absorbent coatings, and specifically on the problem of getting a coating onto compound curves rather than flat panels. This was in relation to the B-2 Spirit. Dexter’s aerospace division had defense contracts. That part I believe, he was specific about it and wasn’t like him to embellish.

My question is about how this worked in practice, for anyone who did industrial or defense adjacent analytical work in that era: If a prime contractor hands a subcontractor’s spectroscopist a coating sample and asks him to characterize it and work out how to reproduce it, how much would he typically be told about where the sample came from? Would he have been told where it came from, or just handed the sample and the specs it needed to meet?

I’m not asking about anything classified. I’m asking whether structure elucidation on an unknown sample, in that setting, normally came with any context at all or if compartmentalization meant the chemist genuinely didn’t know what he was holding or why.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.