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INDUSTRIAL AND ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
Vol. 23, No. 2
Accomplishments of the Medalist (Abstract) Frederick G . Keyes HOSE of us who have had the privilege of a long and intimate acquaintance with Doctor Little’s accomplishments, and have worked with him, either as colleague or collaborator, sharing the joys and tribulations characteristic of the paths leading from the naked idea to the perfected and productive process, know that he is a man in whom fine character, sound judgment, intelligent optimism, and abundant humor are combined with scientific imagination in a remarkably agreeable and effective manner. The young man entered upon his career a t a moment when the rapid social and industrial changes following the Civil War had begun to reach a steady state. It was, indeed, about the very beginning of the rational application of scientific methods to industry in this country, a period that a t first developed very slowly but which became immensely active during and since the last war. After leaving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, our colleague became the chemist and later superintendent of the first sulfite wood pulp mill in the United States, that of the Richmond Paper Company. This was a 10-ton plant a t Rumford, R. I., installed in 1884 a t a time when organized knowledge of chemical engineering was nonexistent. Imagine a digester, with a tissue lining of 5-pound lead crawling away from its shell, cracking, buckling, and adding, for digester repairs, 815 per ton to the cost of the product, and you will see good reason for the chemist’s initial loss of embonpoint a t the rate of 4 pounds per week. The process was inherently right, but the young superintendent’s task was to make right the engineering, inherently and completely all wrong. The disabilities of the original diA. D. gester design inspired, incidentally, A. D. Little’s first Datent. The period beginning with 1890 saw the introduction into the United States of many new industrial processes. Artificial silk produced by Count Chardonnet from nitrocellulose became known a t the Paris exhibition of 1889. The process of Cross, Bevan, and Beadle for artificial silk, now known as the viscose, process, was communicated to Doctor Little in 1893. He a t once saw the range and importance of the manifold applications of the cellulose thiocarbonates and derived products, and in 1894 reported an extraordinary amount of investigative work resulting in such products as a cellulose glue, dense masses of cellulose, films and various admixtures of the viscose solution with untreated fibers and mineral substances, besides many other applications. “Educated money” was immensely difficult to find thirtyfive years ago, and is still sufficiently difficult to find for the development of a new process. Not until about 1900, after extended development abroad, was an American company formed for the exploitation of viscose. By 1927, however, the world’s production of artificial silk from viscose was somewhat in excess of 200 million pounds. About the same period we find Doctor Little demonstrating the revolutionizing chrome-tanning process of Schultz, and a patent was issued on the process in 1893. The studies with viscose cellulose acetate and like products appeared to be progressing simultaneously, for I find, among others, a patent for carbon filaments from cellulose issued in 1895. Paper-making problems and manufacturing improvements continued to hold a large measure of attention. Patents for waterproofed and waxed papers bear the date 1902. Wood-waste utilization, alcohol production, casein products, electrolytic production of chlorine and soda, hypochlorites, and chlorates constituted the pioneering work for the most part, but a t the same time a prodigious amount of thought and effort was expended in carrying on the work of the industrial chemist in checking waste, increasing plant efficiency, and organizing and directing capital along the lines of new enterprises. Something over twenty years ago about the only companyowned industrial research laboratory was that of the General Electric Company, then but recently organized by Willis R. Whitney.
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The industrial leader or business executive a t that time who could grasp the significance of persistent research effort over a long period of time was a remarkable rarity. It is easy to imagine that the firm of Griffin and Little, organized in 1886 for industrial research and control, must have somehow found the means of endowing itself with a wonderful self-renewing quality of faith and optimism. The firm prospered, was reorganized in 1900 under the name of Little and Walker, and the scope of its activities enlarged. At about this period, perhaps much earlier, A. D. Little must have been turning over in his mind the problem of meeting the need in industry for well-educated and thoroughly trained men. He evidently foresaw with clearness the period of rapid acceleration in the application of scientific principles to industry, which was well under way in the United States when the cataclysm of 1914 punctured the peace of $he world. The inauguration of the Research Laboratory of Applied Chemistry a t M. I. T. took place in 1905 and Doctor Little’s partner, William H. Walker, assumed the professorship of industrial chemistry. Doctor Little’s industrial contacts and activities were expanding steadily in the period from 1900 to 1914. By 1909 there had been brought into existence an organization consisting of a number of departments manned by specialists whose activities were correlated and brought to bear on a wide variety of industrial problems. By 1911 the business was eight times what it had been in 1904. I n 1914 the present model industrial research laboratory on Charles River Road i n Cam!,ridge, “Dedicated to Industrial Progress, was built and placed in full operation. It was an omortune moment. for the Little enormous expansib; of American industry caused by the huge demands for supplies of all sorts by England and France immediately emphasized the importance of research and scientific control of operations. Doctor Little’s effort after the American participation in the war, in its immediate and tangible aspects, centered around the development of airplane dopes, acetone production, and smoke filters. I believe his process of setting the smoke-filter fiber on the gas-mask canisters is now the approved process. That all these very practical results were important may be readily admitted. There was other even more important work to be done, and that of a kind few chemists do well. Some one has remarked that the man of science is the only one in the world with anything really important to say and he doesn’t know how to say it. Our colleague is, however, the conspicuous exception, for he always has something important to say and he certainly knows how to say it. I wonder, then, if his greatest contribution from 1915 on, has not lain in the stimulus, impetus, and direction given to industrial research through his well-composed addresses, papers, and essays. The beginning of the war was a moment when, German imports being cut o f f ,the United States was hamstrung for dyestuffs, scientific apparatus, synthetic drugs, and many other necessary products dependent for their production on highly organized and scientifically controlled processes. Certainly the brilliant series of papers during this period constitutes a wonderfully clear statement of the problems to be solved, the useful kinds of organizations to be developed, and the importance of cooperation, not only between the different branches of science, but between the exact sciences and economics and government. The subject of the conservation of natural resources of the country was studied and the facts correlated in an exceptionally clear, logical, and forceful form of expository literary style. The range of topics touches almost every practical problem of the complicated pattern of our industrial and social life. It was the most important kind of service, and needed, to awaken the consciousness of the discerning public to the importance of intelligent, immediate, and concerted action. It is interesting to observe that, besides being a skilled expositor of the scientific, A. D. Little perceives and presents, with ad-
February, 1931
INDUSTRIAL AND ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
mirable forcefulness, the dangers of allowing applied science to march out of step with social development. Interest in educational matters a t M. I. T. did not lag during the hectic years of the war. As chairman of the visiting committee of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Doctor Little was the active force that finally induced the adoption of the Chemical Engineering Practice School. The war, besides bequeathing us life without much joy, gave us a complex variety of evil changes and distressing disasters unparalleled in the aftermath of other wars. An intelligent man of sensitive and acute perceptions must have very uncommon internal sources for the nourishment of the soul to emerge from the experiences attending the conduct and prosecution of a modern war with unimpaired optimism and faith in the future of his civilization. Here we see a man with calm intelligence surveying the post-war problems in a world which still resembles nothing as much as a pot of spiders trying to devour one another. During the period from 1918 t o the present A. D. Little found time for some sixty papers and addresses. The stimulus to thought and action in all directions resulting from these admirable essays can probably never be quite fully measured. The sane and objective presentations of fact, the voluminous statistical information, the constructive criticisms of worn-out points of view and procedure, the clear indication of the danger signals with respect to our long misused but dwindling natural resources is a monument to constructive and sane intelligence. A volume containing some twelve essays has recently appeared under the title the Handwriting on the Wall.” It is to be hoped that the remaining essays will ultimately be collected and published in book form. After 1918 industrial research, new processes, technical investigations and matters pertaining thereto came under the attention of Doctor Little and his organization to an extent which would have been expected in view of the part the industries of the United States were destined to play in world commercial com-
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petition. It seems that the vapor-phase cracking of petroleum worked out by A. D. Little and his organization marks an important step in petroleum chemistry. The subsequent smallscale commercial operation of the process a t Tiverton, R. I., gave, without carbon deposition, besides high-quality antiknock gasoline, tertiary butyl alcohol and secondary alcohols, propylene, and other unsaturated olefins. It seems clear that the further development of this process and its offshoots may usher in an era of industrial development in which the aliphatic compounds derivable from petroleum may prove as interesting and important as the aromatic compounds from coal tar. A. D. Little served the AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY as president for two years (1912-1914). He was president of the Institute of Chemical Engineers in 1919, and president of the Society of Chemical Industry in 1928. The University of Pittsburgh conferred upon him the degree of doctor of chemistry in 1918. The University of Manchester gave evidence of its appreciation in the form of an honorary doctor of science degree in 1929, while the College of Technology of Manchester have him as their honorary associate. He has served as chairman of the Commission on the Economy of Fuel and Raw Materials of the American Section of the International Chamber of Commerce, as vice chairman of the Engineering Foundation Board, as a member of the Division of Engineering and Industrial Research of the National Research Council, besides other national committees. A very important work was that of organizing the National Resources Survey for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1916 and 1917. He is a life member of the M. I. T . Corporation and has served the Harvard Department of Chemistry as a member of its visiting committee, as well as the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at his own Alma Mater. Doctor Little is a member of more scientific and technical societies than any one I have ever known and, what is more remarkable, he finds time-to contribute to all of them pretty regularly and effectively.
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The Evaluation of Chemical Projects Arthur D. Little AR+HT.R D. LITTLE,INC.. CAMBRIDGE, ASS.
HEX we search for the fundamental basis upon which our whole industrial structure has been reared, we find, in the last analysis, t h a t it rests upon a bed rock of chemical processes. We practice agriculture only because the growing plant, under the influence of sunlight, transforms by subtile chemical processes its raw materials in soil and air into the starch and sugar and oils and proteins required for our purposes. We have a lumber industry because the tree, by a chemistry which far transcends our own, converts water and carbon dioxide into the cellulose which is the physical basis of its structure. The coal and oil and gas upon which our civilization is so definitely founded are themselves the products of chemical processes operating in ages long since past, and neither coal, nor oil, nor gas would be of interest or value t o us except for the typically chemical process of combustion. The ores we mine are what they are because of a long succession of chemical changes which had their remote beginnings even before the earth was formed. We obtain them by the aid of chemical explosives and we win their values b y methods which are largely chemical. In short, we go back to chemistry for all our basic raw materials. Chemistry similarly pervades that second line of industry in which these raw materials are converted into things of higher value and more immediate usefulness. It would be difficult indeed to find a manufacture which is without some chemical aspect. Many, like the smelting of iron and the making of steel, are as chemical as a sulfuric acid plant, although not commonly so regarded. Impossible though it may be to draw any strict line of demarcation, there is a large and highly important group of manufacturing activit,ies which constitutes what are generally accepted as the chemical industries. It includes those con-
cerned with the making of acids, alkalies, and salts, dyes and synthetic products, solvents, explosives, and the multitude of compounds utilized by others for producing chemical effects. It may, although with less general acceptance, be extended to include many specific industries where the product, like celluloid or cellophane or rayon, is the result of processes which are predominantly chemical. Sulfur, although obtained by methods in which chemistry is not involved, is so vitally essential to the chemical industries that the companies producing it are naturally associated with the group. Taken as a whole, the chemical industry presents characteristics which, from the point of view of the investor, differentiate its members from industry in general, and which invite and well repay his serious study. Financial Considerations The importance of the chemical industries, both in the financial sense and from the investor’s standpoint, may be gaged from the brief summary of significant items which follows. At the end of 1928 the total tangible assets of fifty American chemical companies were in the neighborhood of $1,800,000,000. About 40 per cent of this must be credited t o three companies-Allied Chemical and Dye, Union Carbide, and du Pont when the du Pont investment in General Motors is excluded, as it was from the grand total. The remainder is distributed among the forty-seven remaining companies in proportions ranging from 5 per cent down. It is particularly noteworthy that these smaller companies are by no means throttled by the giants. They often show of Drofit than anv of the three. while a higher - Dercentage offering promise ofla greater percentage-of future expansion.
