Creative Chemistry Part 1

Creative Chemistry.

by Edwin E. Slosson.

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.

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 subst.i.tutes 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 a.s.sertion: 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 compet.i.tion 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 fa.r.s.eeing 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing 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 fas.h.i.+ons. 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, gla.s.s, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 G.o.ds in his own image, and so sculpture and painting grew until now the creations of futuristic art could be wors.h.i.+ped--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 coc.o.o.n 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 const.i.tuent 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 a.n.a.lysis." The German chemist Gerhardt in 1844 said: "I have demonstrated that the chemist works in opposition to living nature, that he burns, destroys, a.n.a.lyzes, 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 a.n.a.lysis _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 a.s.sumed, 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, antic.i.p.ating you and your "Creative Chemistry," has shown the utter untenableness of your position:

Nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: so o'er that art, Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art That nature makes.