Edwin E. Slosson - Creative Chemistry

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Transcriber's notes:

Underscores before and after words denote italics.

Underscore and {} denote subscripts.

Footnotes moved to end of book.

The book starts using the word "CHAPTER" only after its chapter
number XI. I have left it the same in this text.

The Century Books of Useful Science

CREATIVE CHEMISTRY

Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries

by

EDWIN E. SLOSSON, M.S., PH.D.

Literary Editor of _The Independent_, Associate in Columbia School of
Journalism

Author of "Great American Universities," "Major Prophets of Today," "Six
Major Prophets," "On Acylhalogenamine Derivatives and the Beckmann
Rearrangement," "Composition of Wyoming Petroleum," etc.

With Many Illustrations

[Illustration (Decorative)]

New York
The Century Co.
Copyright, 1919, by
The Century Co.
Copyright, 1917, 1918, 1919, by
The Independent Corporation
Published, October, 1919

[Illustration: From "America's Munitions"

THE PRODUCTION OF NEW AND STRONGER FORMS OF STEEL IS ONE OF THE GREATEST
TRIUMPHS OF MODERN CHEMISTRY

The photograph shows the manufacture of a 12-inch gun at the plant of
the Midvale Steel Company during the late war. The gun tube, 41 feet
long, has just been drawn from the furnace where it was tempered at
white heat and is now ready for quenching.]

TO MY FIRST TEACHER

PROFESSOR E.H.S. BAILEY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

AND MY LAST TEACHER

PROFESSOR JULIUS STIEGLITZ OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

THIS VOLUME IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED

CONTENTS

I THREE PERIODS OF PROGRESS 3

II NITROGEN 14

III FEEDING THE SOIL 37

IV COAL-TAR COLORS 60

V SYNTHETIC PERFUMES AND FLAVORS 93

VI CELLULOSE 110

VII SYNTHETIC PLASTICS 128

VIII THE RACE FOR RUBBER 145

IX THE RIVAL SUGARS 164

X WHAT COMES FROM CORN 181

XI SOLIDIFIED SUNSHINE 196

XII FIGHTING WITH FUMES 218

XIII PRODUCTS OF THE ELECTRIC FURNACE 236

XIV METALS, OLD AND NEW 263

READING REFERENCES 297

INDEX 309

A CARD OF THANKS

This book originated in a series of articles prepared for _The
Independent_ in 1917-18 for the purpose of interesting the general
reader in the recent achievements of industrial chemistry and providing
supplementary reading for students of chemistry in colleges and high
schools. I am indebted to Hamilton Holt, editor of _The Independent_,
and to Karl V.S. Howland, its publisher, for stimulus and opportunity to
undertake the writing of these pages and for the privilege of reprinting
them in this form.

In gathering the material for this volume I have received the kindly aid
of so many companies and individuals that it is impossible to thank them
all but I must at least mention as those to whom I am especially
grateful for information, advice and criticism: Thomas H. Norton of the
Department of Commerce; Dr. Bernhard C. Hesse; H.S. Bailey of the
Department of Agriculture; Professor Julius Stieglitz of the University
of Chicago; L.E. Edgar of the Du Pont de Nemours Company; Milton Whitney
of the U.S. Bureau of Soils; Dr. H.N. McCoy; K.F. Kellerman of the
Bureau of Plant Industry.

E.E.S.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The production of new and stronger forms of steel is one
of the greatest triumphs of modern chemistry _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

The hand grenades contain potential chemical energy
capable of causing a vast amount of destruction
when released 16

Women in a munition plant engaged in the manufacture
of tri-nitro-toluol 17

A chemical reaction on a large scale 32

Burning air in a Birkeland-Eyde furnace at the DuPont
plant 33

A battery of Birkeland-Eyde furnaces for the fixation of
nitrogen at the DuPont plant 33

Fixing nitrogen by calcium carbide 40

A barrow full of potash salts extracted from six tons of
green kelp by the government chemists 41

Nature's silent method of nitrogen fixation 41

In order to secure a new supply of potash salts the United
States Government set up an experimental plant at
Sutherland, California, for utilization of kelp 52

Overhead suction at the San Diego wharf pumping kelp
from the barge to the digestion tanks 53

The kelp harvester gathering the seaweed from the Pacific
Ocean 53

A battery of Koppers by-product coke-ovens at the plant
of the Bethlehem Steel Company, Sparrows Point,
Maryland 60

In these mixing vats at the Buffalo Works, aniline dyes
are prepared 61

A paper mill in action 120

Cellulose from wood pulp is now made into a large variety
of useful articles of which a few examples are here
pictured 121

Plantation rubber 160

Forest rubber 160

In making garden hose the rubber is formed into a tube
by the machine on the right and coiled on the table
to the left 161

The rival sugars 176

Interior of a sugar mill showing the machinery for crushing
cane to extract the juice 177

Vacuum pans of the American Sugar Refinery Company 177

Cotton seed oil as it is squeezed from the seed
by the presses 200

Cotton seed oil as it comes from the compressors flowing
out of the faucets 201

Splitting coconuts on the island of Tahiti 216

The electric current passing through salt water in these
cells decomposes the salt into caustic soda and
chlorine gas 217

Germans starting a gas attack on the Russian lines 224

Filling the cannisters of gas masks with charcoal made
from fruit pits--Long Island City 225

The chlorpicrin plant at the Bdgewood Arsenal 234

Repairing the broken stern post of the _U.S.S. Northern
Pacific_, the biggest marine weld in the world 235

Making aloxite in the electric furnaces by fusing coke
and bauxite 240

A block of carborundum crystals 241

Making carborundum in the electric furnace 241

Types of gas mask used by America, the Allies and Germany
during the war 256

Pumping melted white phosphorus into hand grenades
filled with water--Edgewood Arsenal 257

Filling shell with "mustard gas" 257

Photomicrographs showing the structure of steel made by
Professor E.G. Mahin of Purdue University 272

The microscopic structure of metals 273

INTRODUCTION

BY JULIUS STIEGLITZ

Formerly President of the American Chemical Society, Professor of
Chemistry in The University of Chicago

The recent war as never before in the history of the world brought to
the nations of the earth a realization of the vital place which the
science of chemistry holds in the development of the resources of a
nation. Some of the most picturesque features of this awakening reached
the great public through the press. Thus, the adventurous trips of the
_Deutschland_ with its cargoes of concentrated aniline dyes, valued at
millions of dollars, emphasized as no other incident our former
dependence upon Germany for these products of her chemical industries.

The public read, too, that her chemists saved Germany from an early
disastrous defeat, both in the field of military operations and in the
matter of economic supplies: unquestionably, without the tremendous
expansion of her plants for the production of nitrates and ammonia from
the air by the processes of Haber, Ostwald and others of her great
chemists, the war would have ended in 1915, or early in 1916, from
exhaustion of Germany's supplies of nitrate explosives, if not indeed
from exhaustion of her food supplies as a consequence of the lack of
nitrate and ammonia fertilizer for her fields. Inventions of substitutes
for cotton, copper, rubber, wool and many other basic needs have been
reported.

These feats of chemistry, performed under the stress of dire necessity,
have, no doubt, excited the wonder and interest of our public. It is far
more important at this time, however, when both for war and for peace
needs, the resources of our country are strained to the utmost, that the
public should awaken to a clear realization of what this science of
chemistry really means for mankind, to the realization that its wizardry
permeates the whole life of the nation as a vitalizing, protective and
constructive agent very much in the same way as our blood, coursing
through our veins and arteries, carries the constructive, defensive and
life-bringing materials to every organ in the body.

If the layman will but understand that chemistry is the fundamental
_science of the transformation of matter_, he will readily accept the
validity of this sweeping assertion: he will realize, for instance, why
exactly the same fundamental laws of the science apply to, and make
possible scientific control of, such widely divergent national
industries as agriculture and steel manufacturing. It governs the
transformation of the salts, minerals and humus of our fields and the
components of the air into corn, wheat, cotton and the innumerable other
products of the soil; it governs no less the transformation of crude
ores into steel and alloys, which, with the cunning born of chemical
knowledge, may be given practically any conceivable quality of hardness,
elasticity, toughness or strength. And exactly the same thing may be
said of the hundreds of national activities that lie between the two
extremes of agriculture and steel manufacture!

Moreover, the domain of the science of the transformation of matter
includes even life itself as its loftiest phase: from our birth to our
return to dust the laws of chemistry are the controlling laws of life,
health, disease and death, and the ever clearer recognition of this
relation is the strongest force that is raising medicine from the
uncertain realm of an art to the safer sphere of an exact science. To
many scientific minds it has even become evident that those most
wonderful facts of life, heredity and character, must find their final
explanation in the chemical composition of the components of life
producing, germinal protoplasm: mere form and shape are no longer
supreme but are relegated to their proper place as the housing only of
the living matter which functions chemically.

It must be quite obvious now why thoughtful men are insisting that the
public should be awakened to a broad realization of the significance of
the science of chemistry for its national life.

It is a difficult science in its details, because it has found that it
can best interpret the visible phenomena of the material world on the
basis of the conception of invisible minute material atoms and
molecules, each a world in itself, whose properties may be nevertheless
accurately deduced by a rigorous logic controlling the highest type of
scientific imagination. But a layman is interested in the wonders of
great bridges and of monumental buildings without feeling the need of
inquiring into the painfully minute and extended calculations of the
engineer and architect of the strains and stresses to which every pin
and every bar of the great bridge and every bit of stone, every foot of
arch in a monumental edifice, will be exposed. So the public may
understand and appreciate with the keenest interest the results of
chemical effort without the need of instruction in the intricacies of
our logic, of our dealings with our minute, invisible particles.

The whole nation's welfare demands, indeed, that our public be
enlightened in the matter of the relation of chemistry to our national
life. Thus, if our commerce and our industries are to survive the
terrific competition that must follow the reestablishment of peace, our
public must insist that its representatives in Congress preserve that
independence in chemical manufacturing which the war has forced upon us
in the matter of dyes, of numberless invaluable remedies to cure and
relieve suffering; in the matter, too, of hundreds of chemicals, which
our industries need for their successful existence.

Unless we are independent in these fields, how easily might an
unscrupulous competing nation do us untold harm by the mere device, for
instance, of delaying supplies, or by sending inferior materials to this
country or by underselling our chemical manufacturers and, after the
destruction of our chemical independence, handicapping our industries as
they were in the first year or two of the great war! This is not a mere
possibility created by the imagination, for our economic history
contains instance after instance of the purposeful undermining and
destruction of our industries in finer chemicals, dyes and drugs by
foreign interests bent on preserving their monopoly. If one recalls that
through control, for instance, of dyes by a competing nation, control is
in fact also established over products, valued in the hundreds of
millions of dollars, in which dyes enter as an essential factor, one
may realize indeed the tremendous industrial and commercial power which
is controlled by the single lever--chemical dyes. Of even more vital
moment is chemistry in the domain of health: the pitiful calls of our
hospitals for local anesthetics to alleviate suffering on the operating
table, the frantic appeals for the hypnotic that soothes the epileptic
and staves off his seizure, the almost furious demands for remedy after
remedy, that came in the early years of the war, are still ringing in
the hearts of many of us. No wonder that our small army of chemists is
grimly determined not to give up the independence in chemistry which war
has achieved for us! Only a widely enlightened public, however, can
insure the permanence of what farseeing men have started to accomplish
in developing the power of chemistry through research in every domain
which chemistry touches.

The general public should realize that in the support of great chemical
research laboratories of universities and technical schools it will be
sustaining important centers from which the science which improves
products, abolishes waste, establishes new industries and preserves
life, may reach out helpfully into all the activities of our great
nation, that are dependent on the transformation of matter.

The public is to be congratulated upon the fact that the writer of the
present volume is better qualified than any other man in the country to
bring home to his readers some of the great results of modern chemical
activity as well as some of the big problems which must continue to
engage the attention of our chemists. Dr. Slosson has indeed the unique
quality of combining an exact and intimate knowledge of chemistry with
the exquisite clarity and pointedness of expression of a born writer.

We have here an exposition by a master mind, an exposition shorn of the
terrifying and obscuring technicalities of the lecture room, that will
be as absorbing reading as any thrilling romance. For the story of
scientific achievement is the greatest epic the world has ever known,
and like the great national epics of bygone ages, should quicken the
life of the nation by a realization of its powers and a picture of its
possibilities.

CREATIVE CHEMISTRY

La Chimie possede cette faculte creatrice a un degre plus
eminent que les autres sciences, parce qu'elle penetre plus
profondement et atteint jusqu'aux elements naturels des etres.

--_Berthelot_.

I

THREE PERIODS OF PROGRESS

The story of Robinson Crusoe is an allegory of human history. Man is a
castaway upon a desert planet, isolated from other inhabited worlds--if
there be any such--by millions of miles of untraversable space. He is
absolutely dependent upon his own exertions, for this world of his, as
Wells says, has no imports except meteorites and no exports of any kind.
Man has no wrecked ship from a former civilization to draw upon for
tools and weapons, but must utilize as best he may such raw materials as
he can find. In this conquest of nature by man there are three stages
distinguishable:

1. The Appropriative Period
2. The Adaptive Period
3. The Creative Period

These eras overlap, and the human race, or rather its vanguard,
civilized man, may be passing into the third stage in one field of human
endeavor while still lingering in the second or first in some other
respect. But in any particular line this sequence is followed. The
primitive man picks up whatever he can find available for his use. His
successor in the next stage of culture shapes and develops this crude
instrument until it becomes more suitable for his purpose. But in the
course of time man often finds that he can make something new which is
better than anything in nature or naturally produced. The savage
discovers. The barbarian improves. The civilized man invents. The first
finds. The second fashions. The third fabricates.

The primitive man was a troglodyte. He sought shelter in any cave or
crevice that he could find. Later he dug it out to make it more roomy
and piled up stones at the entrance to keep out the wild beasts. This
artificial barricade, this false facade, was gradually extended and
solidified until finally man could build a cave for himself anywhere in
the open field from stones he quarried out of the hill. But man was not
content with such materials and now puts up a building which may be
composed of steel, brick, terra cotta, glass, concrete and plaster, none
of which materials are to be found in nature.

The untutored savage might cross a stream astride a floating tree trunk.
By and by it occurred to him to sit inside the log instead of on it, so
he hollowed it out with fire or flint. Later, much later, he constructed
an ocean liner.

Cain, or whoever it was first slew his brother man, made use of a stone
or stick. Afterward it was found a better weapon could be made by tying
the stone to the end of the stick, and as murder developed into a fine
art the stick was converted into the bow and this into the catapult and
finally into the cannon, while the stone was developed into the high
explosive projectile. The first music to soothe the savage breast was
the soughing of the wind through the trees. Then strings were stretched
across a crevice for the wind to play upon and there was the AEolian
harp. The second stage was entered when Hermes strung the tortoise shell
and plucked it with his fingers and when Athena, raising the wind from
her own lungs, forced it through a hollow reed. From these beginnings we
have the organ and the orchestra, producing such sounds as nothing in
nature can equal.

The first idol was doubtless a meteorite fallen from heaven or a
fulgurite or concretion picked up from the sand, bearing some slight
resemblance to a human being. Later man made gods in his own image, and
so sculpture and painting grew until now the creations of futuristic art
could be worshiped--if one wanted to--without violation of the second
commandment, for they are not the likeness of anything that is in heaven
above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the
earth.

In the textile industry the same development is observable. The
primitive man used the skins of animals he had slain to protect his own
skin. In the course of time he--or more probably his wife, for it is to
the women rather than to the men that we owe the early steps in the arts
and sciences--fastened leaves together or pounded out bark to make
garments. Later fibers were plucked from the sheepskin, the cocoon and
the cotton-ball, twisted together and woven into cloth. Nowadays it is
possible to make a complete suit of clothes, from hat to shoes, of any
desirable texture, form and color, and not include any substance to be
found in nature. The first metals available were those found free in
nature such as gold and copper. In a later age it was found possible to
extract iron from its ores and today we have artificial alloys made of
multifarious combinations of rare metals. The medicine man dosed his
patients with decoctions of such roots and herbs as had a bad taste or
queer look. The pharmacist discovered how to extract from these their
medicinal principle such as morphine, quinine and cocaine, and the
creative chemist has discovered how to make innumerable drugs adapted to
specific diseases and individual idiosyncrasies.

In the later or creative stages we enter the domain of chemistry, for it
is the chemist alone who possesses the power of reducing a substance to
its constituent atoms and from them producing substances entirely new.
But the chemist has been slow to realize his unique power and the world
has been still slower to utilize his invaluable services. Until recently
indeed the leaders of chemical science expressly disclaimed what should
have been their proudest boast. The French chemist Lavoisier in 1793
defined chemistry as "the science of analysis." The German chemist
Gerhardt in 1844 said: "I have demonstrated that the chemist works in
opposition to living nature, that he burns, destroys, analyzes, that the
vital force alone operates by synthesis, that it reconstructs the
edifice torn down by the chemical forces."

It is quite true that chemists up to the middle of the last century were
so absorbed in the destructive side of their science that they were
blind to the constructive side of it. In this respect they were less
prescient than their contemned predecessors, the alchemists, who,
foolish and pretentious as they were, aspired at least to the formation
of something new.

It was, I think, the French chemist Berthelot who first clearly
perceived the double aspect of chemistry, for he defined it as "the
science of analysis _and synthesis_," of taking apart and of putting
together. The motto of chemistry, as of all the empirical sciences, is
_savoir c'est pouvoir_, to know in order to do. This is the pragmatic
test of all useful knowledge. Berthelot goes on to say:

Chemistry creates its object. This creative faculty, comparable
to that of art itself, distinguishes it essentially from the
natural and historical sciences.... These sciences do not
control their object. Thus they are too often condemned to an
eternal impotence in the search for truth of which they must
content themselves with possessing some few and often uncertain
fragments. On the contrary, the experimental sciences have the
power to realize their conjectures.... What they dream of that
they can manifest in actuality....

Chemistry possesses this creative faculty to a more eminent
degree than the other sciences because it penetrates more
profoundly and attains even to the natural elements of
existences.

Since Berthelot's time, that is, within the last fifty years, chemistry
has won its chief triumphs in the field of synthesis. Organic chemistry,
that is, the chemistry of the carbon compounds, so called because it was
formerly assumed, as Gerhardt says, that they could only be formed by
"vital force" of organized plants and animals, has taken a development
far overshadowing inorganic chemistry, or the chemistry of mineral
substances. Chemists have prepared or know how to prepare hundreds of
thousands of such "organic compounds," few of which occur in the natural
world.

But this conception of chemistry is yet far from having been accepted by
the world at large. This was brought forcibly to my attention during the
publication of these chapters in "The Independent" by various letters,
raising such objections as the following:

When you say in your article on "What Comes from Coal Tar" that
"Art can go ahead of nature in the dyestuff business" you have
doubtless for the moment allowed your enthusiasm to sweep you
away from the moorings of reason. Shakespeare, anticipating you
and your "Creative Chemistry," has shown the utter
untenableness of your position:

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