He spent a year in 1946-47 at the Bell Telephone Research Laboratories at Murray Hill, New Jersey, working with five Nobel Laureates.
In nine months Whiffen developed a sensitive experimental cell usable over a wide range of temperature.
He constructed a 9 GHz Spectrometer at the NPL and turned it into one of the world's top ESR and NMR Laboratories, testing theories and models.
He was the first to successfully test the predictions of the underlying theory of Peter Debye, the Dutch-American theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1936 for his work on molecular structure, the theory of dipole moments in liquids and the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases.
He was not known as self promotional, and when on arrival at Newcastle Chemistry Professor Clemo suggested people were saying he 'shouldn't have come' he merely raised his eyebrows and nodded slightly in apparent agreement.