Creative Chemistry Part 5

[Ill.u.s.tration: COMPARISON OF COAL AND ITS DISTILLATION PRODUCTS From Hesse's "The Industry of the Coal Tar Dyes," _Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry_, December, 1914]

The tar obtained from the gas plant or the c.o.ke plant has now to be redistilled, giving off the ten "crudes" already mentioned and leaving in the still sixty-five per cent. of pitch, which may be used for roofing, paving and the like. The ten primary products or crudes are then converted into secondary products or "intermediates" by processes like that for the conversion of benzene into aniline. There are some three hundred of these intermediates in use and from them are built up more than three times as many dyes. The year before the war the American custom house listed 5674 distinct brands of synthetic dyes imported, chiefly from Germany, but some of these were trade names for the same product made by different firms or represented by different degrees of purity or form of preparation. Although the number of possible products is unlimited and over five thousand dyes are known, yet only about nine hundred are in use. We can summarize the situation so:

Coal-tar --> 10 crudes --> 300 intermediates --> 900 dyes --> 5000 brands.

Or, to borrow the neat simile used by Dr. Bernhard C. Hesse, it is like cloth-making where "ten fibers make 300 yarns which are woven into 900 patterns."

The advantage of the artificial dyestuffs over those found in nature lies in their variety and adaptability. Practically any desired tint or shade can be made for any particular fabric. If my lady wants a new kind of green for her stockings or her hair she can have it. Candies and jellies and drinks can be made more attractive and therefore more appetizing by varied colors. Easter eggs and Easter bonnets take on new and brighter hues.

More and more the chemist is becoming the architect of his own fortunes.

He does not make discoveries by picking up a beaker and pouring into it a little from each bottle on the shelf to see what happens. He generally knows what he is after, and he generally gets it, although he is still often baffled and occasionally happens on something quite unexpected and perhaps more valuable than what he was looking for. Columbus was looking for India when he ran into an obstacle that proved to be America.

William Henry Perkin was looking for quinine when he blundered into that rich and undiscovered country, the aniline dyes. William Henry was a queer boy. He had rather listen to a chemistry lecture than eat. When he was attending the City of London School at the age of thirteen there was an extra course of lectures on chemistry given at the noon recess, so he skipped his lunch to take them in. Hearing that a German chemist named Hofmann had opened a laboratory in the Royal College of London he headed for that. Hofmann obviously had no fear of forcing the young intellect prematurely. He perhaps had never heard that "the tender petals of the adolescent mind must be allowed to open slowly." He admitted young Perkin at the age of fifteen and started him on research at the end of his second year. An American student nowadays thinks he is lucky if he gets started on his research five years older than Perkin. Now if Hofmann had studied pedagogical psychology he would have been informed that nothing chills the ardor of the adolescent mind like being set at tasks too great for its powers. If he had heard this and believed it, he would not have allowed Perkin to spend two years in fruitless endeavors to isolate phenanthrene from coal tar and to prepare artificial quinine--and in that case Perkin would never have discovered the aniline dyes. But Perkin, so far from being discouraged, set up a private laboratory so he could work over-time. While working here during the Easter vacation of 1856--the date is as well worth remembering as 1066--he was oxidizing some aniline oil when he got what chemists most detest, a black, tarry ma.s.s instead of nice, clean crystals. When he went to wash this out with alcohol he was surprised to find that it gave a beautiful purple solution. This was "mauve," the first of the aniline dyes.

The funny thing about it was that when Perkin tried to repeat the experiment with purer aniline he could not get his color. It was because he was working with impure chemicals, with aniline containing a little toluidine, that he discovered mauve. It was, as I said, a lucky accident. But it was not accidental that the accident happened to the young fellow who spent his noonings and vacations at the study of chemistry. A man may not find what he is looking for, but he never finds anything unless he is looking for something.

Mauve was a product of creative chemistry, for it was a substance that had never existed before. Perkin's next great triumph, ten years later, was in rivaling Nature in the manufacture of one of her own choice products. This is alizarin, the coloring matter contained in the madder root. It was an ancient and oriental dyestuff, known as "Turkey red" or by its Arabic name of "alizari." When madder was introduced into France it became a profitable crop and at one time half a million tons a year were raised. A couple of French chemists, Robiquet and Colin, extracted from madder its active principle, alizarin, in 1828, but it was not until forty years later that it was discovered that alizarin had for its base one of the coal-tar products, anthracene. Then came a neck-and-neck race between Perkin and his German rivals to see which could discover a cheap process for making alizarin from anthracene. The German chemists beat him to the patent office by one day! Graebe and Liebermann filed their application for a patent on the sulfuric acid process as No. 1936 on June 25, 1869. Perkin filed his for the same process as No. 1948 on June 26. It had required twenty years to determine the const.i.tution of alizarin, but within six months from its first synthesis the commercial process was developed and within a few years the sale of artificial alizarin reached $8,000,000 annually. The madder fields of France were put to other uses and even the French soldiers became dependent on made-in-Germany dyes for their red trousers. The British soldiers were placed in a similar situation as regards their red coats when after 1878 the azo scarlets put the cochineal bug out of business.

The modern chemist has robbed royalty of its most distinctive insignia, Tyrian purple. In ancient times to be "porphyrogene," that is "born to the purple," was like admission to the Almanach de Gotha at the present time, for only princes or their wealthy rivals could afford to pay $600 a pound for crimsoned linen. The precious dye is secreted by a snail-like sh.e.l.lfish of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. From a tiny sac behind the head a drop of thick whitish liquid, smelling like garlic, can be extracted. If this is spread upon cloth of any kind and exposed to air and sunlight it turns first green, next blue and then purple. If the cloth is washed with soap--that is, set by alkali--it becomes a fast crimson, such as Catholic cardinals still wear as princes of the church. The Phoenician merchants made fortunes out of their monopoly, but after the fall of Tyre it became one of "the lost arts"--and accordingly considered by those whose faces are set toward the past as much more wonderful than any of the new arts. But in 1909 Friedlander put an end to the superst.i.tion by a.n.a.lyzing Tyrian purple and finding that it was already known. It was the same as a dye that had been prepared five years before by Sachs but had not come into commercial use because of its inferiority to others in the market. It required 12,000 of the mollusks to supply the little material needed for a.n.a.lysis, but once the chemist had identified it he did not need to bother the Murex further, for he could make it by the ton if he had wanted to. The coloring principle turned out to be a di-brom indigo, that is the same as the substance extracted from the Indian plant, but with the addition of two atoms of bromine. Why a particular kind of a sh.e.l.lfish should have got the habit of extracting this rare element from sea water and stowing it away in this peculiar form is "one of those things no fellow can find out." But according to the chemist the Murex mollusk made a mistake in hitching the bromine to the wrong carbon atoms. He finds as he would word it that the 6:6' di-brom indigo secreted by the sh.e.l.lfish is not so good as the 5:5' di-brom indigo now manufactured at a cheap rate and in unlimited quant.i.ty. But we must not expect too much of a mollusk's mind. In their cheapness lies the offense of the aniline dyes in the minds of some people. Our modern aristocrats would delight to be ent.i.tled "porphyrogeniti" and to wear exclusive gowns of "purple and scarlet from the isles of Elishah" as was done in Ezekiel's time, but when any shopgirl or sailor can wear the royal color it spoils its beauty in their eyes. Applied science accomplishes a real democracy such as legislation has ever failed to establish.

Any kind of dye found in nature can be made in the laboratory whenever its composition is understood and usually it can be made cheaper and purer than it can be extracted from the plant. But to work out a profitable process for making it synthetically is sometimes a task requiring high skill, persistent labor and heavy expenditure. One of the latest and most striking of these achievements of synthetic chemistry is the manufacture of indigo.

Indigo is one of the oldest and fastest of the dyestuffs. To see that it is both ancient and lasting look at the unfaded blue cloths that enwrap an Egyptian mummy. When Caesar conquered our British ancestors he found them tattooed with woad, the native indigo. But the chief source of indigo was, as its name implies, India. In 1897 nearly a million acres in India were growing the indigo plant and the annual value of the crop was $20,000,000. Then the fall began and by 1914 India was producing only $300,000 worth! What had happened to destroy this profitable industry? Some blight or insect? No, it was simply that the Badische Anilin-und-Soda Fabrik had worked out a practical process for making artificial indigo.

That indigo on breaking up gave off aniline was discovered as early as 1840. In fact that was how aniline got its name, for when Fritzsche distilled indigo with caustic soda he called the colorless distillate "aniline," from the Arabic name for indigo, "anil" or "al-nil," that is, "the blue-stuff." But how to reverse the process and get indigo from aniline puzzled chemists for more than forty years until finally it was solved by Adolf von Baeyer of Munich, who died in 1917 at the age of eighty-four. He worked on the problem of the const.i.tution of indigo for fifteen years and discovered several ways of making it. It is possible to start from benzene, toluene or naphthalene. The first process was the easiest, but if you will refer to the products of the distillation of tar you will find that the amount of toluene produced is less than the naphthalene, which is hard to dispose of. That is, if a dye factory had worked out a process for making indigo from toluene it would not be practicable because there was not enough toluene produced to supply the demand for indigo. So the more complicated napthalene process was chosen in preference to the others in order to utilize this by-product.

The Badische Anilin-und-Soda Fabrik spent $5,000,000 and seventeen years in chemical research before they could make indigo, but they gained a monopoly (or, to be exact, ninety-six per cent.) of the world's production. A hundred years ago indigo cost as much as $4 a pound. In 1914 we were paying fifteen cents a pound for it. Even the pauper labor of India could not compete with the German chemists at that price. At the beginning of the present century Germany was paying more than $3,000,000 a year for indigo. Fourteen years later Germany was _selling_ indigo to the amount of $12,600,000. Besides its cheapness, artificial indigo is preferable because it is of uniform quality and greater purity. Vegetable indigo contains from forty to eighty per cent. of impurities, among them various other tinctorial substances. Artificial indigo is made pure and of any desired strength, so the dyers can depend on it.

The value of the aniline colors lies in their infinite variety. Some are fast, some will fade, some will stand wear and weather as long as the fabric, some will wash out on the spot. Dyes can be made that will attach themselves to wool, to silk or to cotton, and give it any shade of any color. The period of discovery by accident has long gone by. The chemist nowadays decides first just what kind of a dye he wants, and then goes to work systematically to make it. He begins by drawing a diagram of the molecule, double-linking nitrogen or carbon and oxygen atoms to give the required intensity, putting in acid or basic radicals to fasten it to the fiber, shifting the color back and forth along the spectrum at will by introducing methyl groups, until he gets it just to his liking.

Art can go ahead of nature in the dyestuff business. Before man found that he could make all the dyes he wanted from the tar he had been burning up at home he searched the wide world over to find colors by which he could make himself--or his wife--garments as beautiful as those that arrayed the flower, the bird and the b.u.t.terfly. He sent divers down into the Mediterranean to rob the murex of his purple. He sent ships to the new world to get Brazil wood and to the oldest world for indigo. He robbed the lady cochineal of her scarlet coat. Why these peculiar substances were formed only by these particular plants, mussels and insects it is hard to understand. I don't know that Mrs. Cacti Coccus derived any benefit from her scarlet uniform when khaki would be safer, and I can't imagine that to a sh.e.l.lfish it was of advantage to turn red as it rots or to an indigo plant that its leaves in decomposing should turn blue. But anyhow, it was man that took advantage of them until he learned how to make his own dyestuffs.

Our independent ancestors got along so far as possible with what grew in the neighborhood. Sweetapple bark gave a fine saffron yellow. Ribbons were given the hue of the rose by poke berry juice. The Confederates in their b.u.t.ternut-colored uniform were almost as invisible as if in khaki or _feldgrau_. Madder was cultivated in the kitchen garden. Only logwood from Jamaica and indigo from India had to be imported. That we are not so independent today is our own fault, for we waste enough coal tar to supply ourselves and other countries with all the new dyes needed. It is essentially a question of economy and organization. We have forgotten how to economize, but we have learned how to organize.

The British Government gave the discoverer of mauve a t.i.tle, but it did not give him any support in his endeavors to develop the industry, although England led the world in textiles and needed more dyes than any other country. So in 1874 Sir William Perkin relinquished the attempt to manufacture the dyes he had discovered because, as he said, Oxford and Cambridge refused to educate chemists or to carry on research. Their students, trained in the cla.s.sics for the profession of being a gentleman, showed a decided repugnance to the laboratory on account of its bad smells. So when Hofmann went home he virtually took the infant industry along with him to Germany, where Ph.D.'s were cheap and plentiful and not afraid of bad smells. There the business throve amazingly, and by 1914 the Germans were manufacturing more than three-fourths of all the coal-tar products of the world and supplying material for most of the rest. The British cursed the universities for thus imperiling the nation through their narrowness and neglect; but this accusation, though natural, was not altogether fair, for at least half the blame should go to the British dyer, who did not care where his colors came from, so long as they were cheap. When finally the universities did turn over a new leaf and began to educate chemists, the manufacturers would not employ them. Before the war six English factories producing dyestuffs employed only 35 chemists altogether, while one German color works, the Hochster Farbwerke, employed 307 expert chemists and 74 technologists.

This firm united with the six other leading dye companies of Germany on January 1, 1916, to form a trust to last for fifty years. During this time they will maintain uniform prices and uniform wage scales and hours of labor, and exchange patents and secrets. They will divide the foreign business _pro rata_ and share the profits. The German chemical works made big profits during the war, mostly from munitions and medicines, and will be, through this new combination, in a stronger position than ever to push the export trade.

As a consequence of letting the dye business get away from her, England found herself in a fix when war broke out. She did not have dyes for her uniforms and flags, and she did not have drugs for her wounded. She could not take advantage of the blockade to capture the German trade in Asia and South America, because she could not color her textiles. A blue cotton dyestuff that sold before the war at sixty cents a pound, brought $34 a pound. A bright pink rhodamine formerly quoted at a dollar a pound jumped to $48. When one keg of dye ordinarily worth $15 was put up at forced auction sale in 1915 it was knocked down at $1500. The Highlanders could not get the colors for their kilts until some German dyes were smuggled into England. The textile industries of Great Britain, that brought in a billion dollars a year and employed one and a half million workers, were crippled for lack of dyes. The demand for high explosives from the front could not be met because these also are largely coal-tar products. Picric acid is both a dye and an explosive.

It is made from carbolic acid and the famous trinitrotoluene is made from toluene, both of which you will find in the list of the ten fundamental "crudes."

Both Great Britain and the United States realized the danger of allowing Germany to recover her former monopoly, and both have shown a readiness to cast overboard their traditional policies to meet this emergency. The British Government has discovered that a country without a tariff is a land without walls. The American Government has discovered that an industry is not benefited by being cut up into small pieces. Both governments are now doing all they can to build up big concerns and to provide them with protection. The British Government a.s.sisted in the formation of a national company for the manufacture of synthetic dyes by taking one-sixth of the stock and providing $500,000 for a research laboratory. But this effort is now reported to be "a great failure"

because the Government put it in charge of the politicians instead of the chemists.

The United States, like England, had become dependent upon Germany for its dyestuffs. We imported nine-tenths of what we used and most of those that were produced here were made from imported intermediates. When the war broke out there were only seven firms and 528 persons employed in the manufacture of dyes in the United States. One of these, the Schoelkopf Aniline and Chemical Works, of Buffalo, deserves mention, for it had stuck it out ever since 1879, and in 1914 was making 106 dyes. In June, 1917, this firm, with the encouragement of the Government Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, joined with some of the other American producers to form a trade combination, the National Aniline and Chemical Company. The Du Pont Company also entered the field on an extensive scale and soon there were 118 concerns engaged in it with great profit.

During the war $200,000,000 was invested in the domestic dyestuff industry. To protect this industry Congress put on a specific duty of five cents a pound and an ad valorem duty of 30 per cent. on imported dyestuffs; but if, after five years, American manufacturers are not producing 60 per cent. in value of the domestic consumption, the protection is to be removed. For some reason, not clearly understood and therefore hotly discussed, Congress at the last moment struck off the specific duty from two of the most important of the dyestuffs, indigo and alizarin, as well as from all medicinals and flavors.

The manufacture of dyes is not a big business, but it is a strategic business. Heligoland is not a big island, but England would have been glad to buy it back during the war at a high price per square yard.

American industries employing over two million men and women and producing over three billion dollars' worth of products a year are dependent upon dyes. Chief of these is of course textiles, using more than half the dyes; next come leather, paper, paint and ink. We have been importing more than $12,000,000 worth of coal-tar products a year, but the cottonseed oil we exported in 1912 would alone suffice to pay that bill twice over. But although the manufacture of dyes cannot be called a big business, in comparison with some others, it is a paying business when well managed. The German concerns paid on an average 22 per cent. dividends on their capital and sometimes as high as 50 per cent. Most of the standard dyes have been so long in use that the patents are off and the processes are well enough known. We have the coal tar and we have the chemists, so there seems no good reason why we should not make our own dyes, at least enough of them so we will not be caught napping as we were in 1914. It was decidedly humiliating for our Government to have to beg Germany to sell us enough colors to print our stamps and greenbacks and then have to beg Great Britain for permission to bring them over by Dutch ships.

The raw material for the production of coal-tar products we have in abundance if we will only take the trouble to save it. In 1914 the crude light oil collected from the c.o.ke-ovens would have produced only about 4,500,000 gallons of benzol and 1,500,000 gallons of toluol, but in 1917 this output was raised to 40,200,000 gallons of benzol and 10,200,000 of toluol. The toluol was used mostly in the manufacture of trinitrotoluol for use in Europe. When the war broke out in 1914 it shut off our supply of phenol (carbolic acid) for which we were dependent upon foreign sources. This threatened not only to afflict us with headaches by depriving us of aspirin but also to removed the consolation of music, for phenol is used in making phonographic records. Mr. Edison with his accustomed energy put up a factory within a few weeks for the manufacture of synthetic phenol. When we entered the war the need for phenol became yet more imperative, for it was needed to make picric acid for filling bombs. This demand was met, and in 1917 there were fifteen new plants turning out 64,146,499 pounds of phenol valued at $23,719,805.

Some of the coal-tar products, as we see, serve many purposes. For instance, picric acid appears in three places in this book. It is a high explosive. It is a powerful and permanent yellow dye as any one who has touched it knows. Thirdly it is used as an antiseptic to cover burned skin. Other coal-tar dyes are used for the same purpose, "malachite green," "brilliant green," "crystal violet," "ethyl violet" and "Victoria blue," so a patient in a military hospital is decorated like an Easter egg. During the last five years surgeons have unfortunately had unprecedented opportunities for the study of wounds and fortunately they have been unprecedentedly successful in finding improved methods of treating them. In former wars a serious wound meant usually death or amputation. Now nearly ninety per cent. of the wounded are able to continue in the service. The reason for this improvement is that medicines are now being made to order instead of being gathered "from China to Peru." The old herb doctor picked up any strange plant that he could find and tried it on any sick man that would let him. This empirical method, though hard on the patients, resulted in the course of five thousand years in the discovery of a number of useful remedies. But the modern medicine man when he knows the cause of the disease is usually able to devise ways of counteracting it directly. For instance, he knows, thanks to Pasteur and Metchnikoff, that the cause of wound infection is the bacterial enemies of man which swarm by the million into any breach in his protective armor, the skin. Now when a breach is made in a line of intrenchments the defenders rush troops to the threatened spot for two purposes, constructive and destructive, engineers and warriors, the former to build up the rampart with sandbags, the latter to kill the enemy. So when the human body is invaded the blood brings to the breach two kinds of defenders. One is the serum which neutralizes the bacterial poison and by coagulating forms a new skin or scab over the exposed flesh. The other is the phagocytes or white corpuscles, the free lances of our corporeal militia, which attack and kill the invading bacteria. The aim of the physician then is to aid these defenders as much as possible without interfering with them. Therefore the antiseptic he is seeking is one that will a.s.sist the serum in protecting and repairing the broken tissues and will kill the hostile bacteria without killing the friendly phagocytes. Carbolic acid, the most familiar of the coal-tar antiseptics, will destroy the bacteria when it is diluted with 250 parts of water, but unfortunately it puts a stop to the fighting activities of the phagocytes when it is only half that strength, or one to 500, so it cannot destroy the infection without hindering the healing.

In this search for substances that would attack a specific disease germ one of the leading investigators was Prof. Paul Ehrlich, a German physician of the Hebrew race. He found that the aniline dyes were useful for staining slides under the microscope, for they would pick out particular cells and leave others uncolored and from this starting point he worked out organic and metallic compounds which would destroy the bacteria and parasites that cause some of the most dreadful of diseases.

A year after the war broke out Professor Ehrlich died while working in his laboratory on how to heal with coal-tar compounds the wounds inflicted by explosives from the same source.

One of the most valuable of the aniline antiseptics employed by Ehrlich is flavine or, if the reader prefers to call it by its full name, diaminomethylacridinium chloride. Flavine, as its name implies, is a yellow dye and will kill the germs causing ordinary abscesses when in solution as dilute as one part of the dye to 200,000 parts of water, but it does not interfere with the bactericidal action of the white blood corpuscles unless the solution is 400 times as strong as this, that is one part in 500. Unlike carbolic acid and other antiseptics it is said to stimulate the serum instead of impairing its activity. Another antiseptic of the coal-tar family which has recently been brought into use by Dr. Dakin of the Rockefeller Inst.i.tute is that called by European physicians chloramine-T and by American physicians chlorazene and by chemists para-toluene-sodium-sulfo-chloramide.

This may serve to ill.u.s.trate how a chemist is able to make such remedies as the doctor needs, instead of depending upon the accidental by-products of plants. On an earlier page I explained how by starting with the simplest of ring-compounds, the benzene of coal tar, we could get aniline. Suppose we go a step further and boil the aniline oil with acetic acid, which is the acid of vinegar minus its water. This easy process gives us acetanilid, which when introduced into the market some years ago under the name of "antifebrin" made a fortune for its makers.

The making of medicines from coal tar began in 1874 when Kolbe made salicylic acid from carbolic acid. Salicylic acid is a rheumatism remedy and had previously been extracted from willow bark. If now we treat salicylic acid with concentrated acetic acid we get "aspirin." From aniline again are made "phenacetin," "antipyrin" and a lot of other drugs that have become altogether too popular as headache remedies--say rather "headache relievers."

Another cla.s.s of synthetics equally useful and likewise abused, are the soporifics, such as "sulphonal," "veronal" and "medinal." When it is not desired to put the patient to sleep but merely to render insensible a particular place, as when a tooth is to be pulled, cocain may be used.

This, like alcohol and morphine, has proved a curse as well as a blessing and its sale has had to be restricted because of the many victims to the habit of using this drug. Cocain is obtained from the leaves of the South American coca tree, but can be made artificially from coal-tar products. The laboratory is superior to the forest because other forms of local anesthetics, such as eucain and novocain, can be made that are better than the natural alkaloid because more effective and less poisonous.

I must not forget to mention another lot of coal-tar derivatives in which some of my readers will take a personal interest. That is the photographic developers. I am old enough to remember when we used to develop our plates in ferrous sulfate solution and you never saw nicer negatives than we got with it. But when pyrogallic acid came in we switched over to that even though it did stain our fingers and sometimes our plates. Later came a swarm of new organic reducing agents under various fancy names, such as metol, hydro (short for hydro-quinone) and eikongen ("the image-maker"). Every fellow fixed up his own formula and called his fellow-members of the camera club fools for not adopting it though he secretly hoped they would not.

Under the double stimulus of patriotism and high prices the American drug and dyestuff industry developed rapidly. In 1917 about as many pounds of dyes were manufactured in America as were imported in 1913 and our _exports_ of American-made dyes exceeded in value our _imports_ before the war. In 1914 the output of American dyes was valued at $2,500,000. In 1917 it amounted to over $57,000,000. This does not mean that the problem was solved, for the home products were not equal in variety and sometimes not in quality to those made in Germany. Many valuable dyes were lacking and the cost was of course much higher.

Whether the American industry can compete with the foreign in an open market and on equal terms is impossible to say because such conditions did not prevail before the war and they are not going to prevail in the future. Formerly the large German cartels through their agents and branches in this country kept the business in their own hands and now the American manufacturers are determined to maintain the independence they have acquired. They will not depend hereafter upon the tariff to cut off compet.i.tion but have adopted more effective measures. The 4500 German chemical patents that had been seized by the Alien Property Custodian were sold by him for $250,000 to the Chemical Foundation, an a.s.sociation of American manufacturers organized "for the Americanization of such inst.i.tutions as may be affected thereby, for the exclusion or elimination of alien interests hostile or detrimental to said industries and for the advancement of chemical and allied science and industry in the United States." The Foundation has a large fighting fund so that it "may be able to commence immediately and prosecute with the utmost vigor infringement proceedings whenever the first German attempt shall hereafter be made to import into this country."

So much mystery has been made of the achievements of German chemists--as though the Teutonic brain had a special lobe for that faculty, lacking in other craniums--that I want to quote what Dr. Hesse says about his first impressions of a German laboratory of industrial research:

Directly after graduating from the University of Chicago in 1896, I entered the employ of the largest coal-tar dye works in the world at its plant in Germany and indeed in one of its research laboratories. This was my first trip outside the United States and it was, of course, an event of the first magnitude for me to be in Europe, and, as a chemist, to be in Germany, in a German coal-tar dye plant, and to cap it all in its research laboratory--a real _sanctum sanctorum_ for chemists. In a short time the daily routine wore the novelty off my experience and I then settled down to calm a.n.a.lysis and dispa.s.sionate appraisal of my surroundings and to compare what was actually before and around me with my expectations. I found that the general laboratory equipment was no better than what I had been accustomed to; that my colleagues had no better fundamental training than I had enjoyed nor any better fact--or manipulative--equipment than I; that those in charge of the work had no better general intellectual equipment nor any more native ability than had my instructors; in short, there was nothing new about it all, nothing that we did not have back home, nothing--except the specific problems that were engaging their attention, and the special opportunities of attacking them. Those problems were of no higher order of complexity than those I had been accustomed to for years, in fact, most of them were not very complex from a purely intellectual viewpoint.

There was nothing inherently uncanny, magical or wizardly about their occupation whatever. It was nothing but plain hard work and keeping everlastingly at it. Now, what was the actual thing behind that chemical laboratory that we did not have at home?

It was money, willing to back such activity, convinced that in the final outcome, a profit would be made; money, willing to take university graduates expecting from them no special knowledge other than a good and thorough grounding in scientific research and provide them with opportunity to become specialists suited to the factory's needs.

It is evidently not impossible to make the United States self-sufficient in the matter of coal-tar products. We've got the tar; we've got the men; we've got the money, too. Whether such a policy would pay us in the long run or whether it is necessary as a measure of military or commercial self-defense is another question that cannot here be decided.

But whatever share we may have in it the coal-tar industry has increased the economy of civilization and added to the wealth of the world by showing how a waste by-product could be utilized for making new dyes and valuable medicines, a better use for tar than as fuel for political bonfires and as clothing for the nakedness of social outcasts.

V

SYNTHETIC PERFUMES AND FLAVORS

The primitive man got his living out of such wild plants and animals as he could find. Next he, or more likely his wife, began to cultivate the plants and tame the animals so as to insure a constant supply. This was the first step toward civilization, for when men had to settle down in a community (_civitas_) they had to ameliorate their manners and make laws protecting land and property. In this settled and orderly life the plants and animals improved as well as man and returned a hundredfold for the pains that their master had taken in their training. But still man was dependent upon the chance bounties of nature. He could select, but he could not invent. He could cultivate, but he could not create. If he wanted sugar he had to send to the West Indies. If he wanted spices he had to send to the East Indies. If he wanted indigo he had to send to India. If he wanted a febrifuge he had to send to Peru. If he wanted a fertilizer he had to send to Chile. If he wanted rubber he had to send to the Congo. If he wanted rubies he had to send to Mandalay. If he wanted otto of roses he had to send to Turkey. Man was not yet master of his environment.

This period of cultivation, the second stage of civilization, began before the dawn of history and lasted until recent times. We might almost say up to the twentieth century, for it was not until the fundamental laws of heredity were discovered that man could originate new species of plants and animals according to a predetermined plan by combining such characteristics as he desired to perpetuate. And it was not until the fundamental laws of chemistry were discovered that man could originate new compounds more suitable to his purpose than any to be found in nature. Since the progress of mankind is continuous it is impossible to draw a date line, unless a very jagged one, along the frontier of human culture, but it is evident that we are just entering upon the third era of evolution in which man will make what he needs instead of trying to find it somewhere. The new epoch has hardly dawned, yet already a man may stay at home in New York or London and make his own rubber and rubies, his own indigo and otto of roses. More than this, he can make gems and colors and perfumes that never existed since time began. The man of science has signed a declaration of independence of the lower world and we are now in the midst of the revolution.

Our eyes are dazzled by the dawn of the new era. We know what the hunter and the horticulturist have already done for man, but we cannot imagine what the chemist can do. If we look ahead through the eyes of one of the greatest of French chemists, Berthelot, this is what we shall see:

The problem of food is a chemical problem. Whenever energy can be obtained economically we can begin to make all kinds of aliment, with carbon borrowed from carbonic acid, hydrogen taken from the water and oxygen and nitrogen drawn from the air.... The day will come when each person will carry for his nourishment his little nitrogenous tablet, his pat of fatty matter, his package of starch or sugar, his vial of aromatic spices suited to his personal taste; all manufactured economically and in unlimited quant.i.ties; all independent of irregular seasons, drought and rain, of the heat that withers the plant and of the frost that blights the fruit; all free from pathogenic microbes, the origin of epidemics and the enemies of human life. On that day chemistry will have accomplished a world-wide revolution that cannot be estimated.

There will no longer be hills covered with vineyards and fields filled with cattle. Man will gain in gentleness and morality because he will cease to live by the carnage and destruction of living creatures.... The earth will be covered with gra.s.s, flowers and woods and in it the human race will dwell in the abundance and joy of the legendary age of gold--provided that a spiritual chemistry has been discovered that changes the nature of man as profoundly as our chemistry transforms material nature.

But this is looking so far into the future that we can trust no man's eyesight, not even Berthelot's. There is apparently no impossibility about the manufacture of synthetic food, but at present there is no apparent probability of it. There is no likelihood that the laboratory will ever rival the wheat field. The cornstalk will always be able to work cheaper than the chemist in the manufacture of starch. But in rarer and choicer products of nature the chemist has proved his ability to compete and even to excel.