ABSTRAKT

The history of science and engineering shows that progress is frequently, if not primarily, achieved through the means of serendipitous discovery. Atomization and Sprays, as both a decade-old archival journal and a branch of engineering science, was essentially conceived through a serendipitous acquaintance between its founding editor and the publisher several years before its launch, ultimately leading to the beginning of the publication.
There are many examples of now well-established areas of science and engineering that were originally splintered from basic and fundamental disciplines. This is a natural phenomenon of growth and development.
In scholarly publishing circles, such growth and development has been known for about forty years as "twigging," the term having been coined by Curtis Benjamin, the late president of McGraw-Hill. As the term implies, large trunks of knowledge develop branches that, in turn, sprout twigs. The entire tree continues to grow, with the older trunks frequently crumbling away, the newer branches growing stronger and thicker, and the twigs becoming branches and giving birth to new little twigs. As with all things in nature, some twigs survive and others do not. (Do we still remember the name of the bulbous contraptions in our radios before the advent of the semiconductor?)
Another natural occurrence in engineering and science is the development of inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary specialties, such as analytical physical chemistry and biomedical engineering, respectively.
Some of them grow, develop, and thrive; others—due to economic, marketing, or scientific reasons—die on the vine.
From the publisher's point of view, the launching of a new journal, in a twigging stage of growth and both interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary orientations, takes commercial guts. The most difficult and most expensive part of such an enterprise is the marketing and targeting of the audience. In the case of Atomization and Sprays, how does one fish out the engineer or pharmacologist who works for a pharmaceutical company manufacturing antiwheezing sprays? You need to spend oodles of dollars to find one possible subscriber among the thousands from available lists and directories. Tough decision, tough going. Somehow, my intuition was correct.
And we made it. With the help of ICLASS, ILASS, our Editorial Boards, and last but not least, Professor Norman Chigier, the indefatigable atomization-and-sprays man, we have reached the right audience and have developed a primary, important, frequently cited, archival engineering journal: Atomization and Sprays. Serendipitously.