John Leighton Bray was the second faculty member and second Head of the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. Bray was born in Milbridge, Maine on August 11, 1890, and died on December 6, 1952. He was educated at MIT where he received his B.S. in 1912 and his Sc.D. in 1930 working with Prof. R.C. Williams in the Metallurgical Engineering (now Materials Science) Department. Upon graduation with the B.S. degree he spent five years as a mining engineer in British Columbia, Canada and in Oregon and New York. From 1917 to 1918 he was a major of ordnance in the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1918 he went to Tegucigalpa, Honduras where he was superintendent of construction and operations for Rosario Mining Co., and then served a year as professor of metallurgy at the Nova Scotia Technical College in Halifax, Canada. From 1921 to 1923 he was metallurgist for the U.S. Tariff Commission at Washington and in 1923 he joined Purdue. He took a leave of absence in 1929 to complete his Ph.D., and returned to Purdue in 1930. He became Head in 1935 and stayed in this position for twelve years. Bray was active in various societies including AIChE, AIME, Society for Metals, ACS, Electrochemical Society, Institute of Metals and ASEE. He was also a member of Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi and Omega Chi Epsilon. An active researcher and prolific writer he wrote more than 90 publications and several books. Early in his career he contributed the Textbook of Ore Dressing (1925), Principles of Metallurgy (1929) and German Grammar for Chemists (1938). His most impressive textbook output came in the 1940's when he wrote the classic Non-Ferrous Production Metallurgy (1941) and Ferrous Production Metallurgy (1948). These two books were used for many years as standard textbooks.

Source: Peppas, Nicholas, and Ronald Harland. "History of the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University." West Lafayette, Indiana: School of Chemical Engineering, 1986.