Dr. Herbert Charles Brown (Herbert Charles Brovarnik original name) was born in London, England in 1912. When he was two years old his parents moved from London to Chicago, Illinois. He attended University of Chicago and got his B.S. in 1936. He continued his chemistry studies at University of Chicago and earned his PhD in 1938. He worked at Wayne State University from 1943-1947 and then moved to Purdue University where he did research in the Richard B. Wetherill Laboratory. This Wetherill was related to the Wetherill Family who during the 1860s owned the Lehigh Zinc Company in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He won many awards among the ones of most interest to Lehigh was the Charles Frederick Chandler Medal in 1973 from Columbia University. Charles Frederick Chandler (1836-1925) was the older brother of William Henry Chandler (1841-1906), a chemistry professor at Lehigh University and for whom the Chandler-Ullmann Laboratory is named. In 1979, Dr. Brown was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in boron research presumably the Norbornyl topic is related to Prof. Brown’s Nobel Prize research. Professor Brown died in Lafayette, Indiana in 2004. Lehigh University Professor John W. Larsen of the Chemistry Department (c. 1984-2008) apparently donated this Brown correspondence because of its relationship to the arcane, long-standing argument of the “Norbornyl question” around December 1984.