CHEMISTRY AND ITS RELATION TO THE ENRICHMENT OF LIFE * THOMAS Rossea REEVES, Ja., UNIVERSITY on VIRGINIA.CIIARLO~TESV~LE. VIRGINIA An attempt to trace in untechnical terms the rapid advance of a purely technical science that has always remained more or less a mystery to the lay mind.
The old alchemist was writing; the top of the goosequill came almost up to his eyes as he scrawled upon the parchment a sentence that embodied the intricacies of his craft: "The fierce serpent is tamed and the dragon is so subjected as to oblige him to devour his own tail." That was his chemical formula. The guttering flame of an oil lamp threw weird shadows over the jumbled array of retorts and tubes and bottles; it shone upon the dirty astrological charts and the tattered row of mystic Latin books. As he wrote, the old fellow watched carefully the liquid that was seething in the pan over the fire. He was seeking t o make gold from the common metals; and he was groping in darkness. His art was a phantom process with few useful applications. Half dreamer, half auack, he clothed his acts with a foolish mysticism and struggled with a nebulous science closely interwoven with superstition. The world before his door was still a t grips with nature. Disease spread rapidly and there was no power to check it; man but clumsily wrested materials from the earth to build his houses and his machines; crops grew haphazardly; sanitation was an absurdity; everywhere man was taking things more or less as he found them. There was a sparsity and a crudeness to life, an unfinished roughness that somehow dulled the edge of things. The modern chemist was working in his laboratory.
* Prize-winning college essay,
1928-29.
He was trying to
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obtain phosphorus as a concentrated acid, so that by a reduction of inert materials in the known fertilizers agriculture all over the world would be stimulated and advanced. Smoothly working gas burners blew hot points of smokeless flame against tubes and beakers of clear glass; electric lights gleamed upon thousands of bottles of chemicals; a chart of the atoms hung upon the wall. With mathematical accuracy the chemist worked out his formulas; expertly and easily he balanced cubic centimeters against grams; he juggled with liters and atoms, temperatures and kilograms. Superstition and mysticism had vanished before a great science with thousands of practical and useful applications; the world before his door had pried deeply into the secrets of nature. Disease struggled against the barriers of preventive medicine; crops prospered under scientific fertilization; metals from the earth were made cheap and pure and plentiful through chemical means; fast automobiles in bright colors flashed along level roads of concrete; giant buildings with metal ribs reached dizzily into the sky; airships braced with metals stronger than steel and lighter than wood floated through the air. lherywhere there was a richness and a beauty to the world that bad been harsh and crude and dull.
*********** The secret of all this change lay with the chemist, the man who for centuries had toiled in the laboratory with his tubes and his furnaces, hisvapors and his smokes. He discovered facts; he applied them and changed the world. No single profession ever gave man so much. Intellectually he enriched life, for he gave men truth; economically he enriched life, for his knowledge nourished the industries; physically he enriched life, for medicine and chemistry marched hand in hand; esthetically he enriched life, for he learned to beautify things. The intellectual advance came first, for man sought for truth before he knew what truth would be. Step by step, sometimes by accident and sometimes by design, the chemist clutched small facts and began to piece them together until he could see where he was and where he wanted to go. Perhaps the discovery of sulfuric acid-which led to the finding of nitric and hydrochloric acids-helped most; but each successive find was employed in experimenting for other finds. The discoveries came slowly, but they came steadily. Mysticism crumbled: the elements were separated and defined, and men knew that the search for gold was a futile one. Moreover, the elements were arranged and measured and studied; it became apparent that they could be grouped, that each group had certain similarities and some groups were more complete than others. Perhaps this meant that there were elements yet undiscovered; if so, these were akin to those already known in that group. Working along these lines, and building up a vast technical structure by logical experimentation,
the chemist advanced in his craft. He learned to weigh and measure the atoms and the molecules; he began to understand the laws of structure; he began to classify the compounds that could be formed; he began to analyze the air. Not in a year, not in a hundred years, but by centuries of collection and classification of facts he made a brilliant spotlight that cut a wide swath in the darkness that was ignorance. He deepened the knowledge of men; he emancipated truth; he provided a healthy stimulus for the philosophies of the races; he interpreted nature through the medium of the test tube. Fundamentally, then, the chemist enriched life intellectually. But all this knowledge was not merely a thing to be known. The chemist was quick to find that his science had practical applications. Often necessity showed the way, as in the case of France, when a war cut off her supply of sodium-carbonate-bearing plants from the salt marshes of Spain. The great glass factories faced a crisis; but Le Blanc, a chemist, by the use of sulfuric acid, learned to make sodium carbonate from common salt. The process that France invented in her extremity spread to England and later became a large and powerful industry. The sodium carbonate was treated with cheap slaked lime and resulted in caustic soda; the soap industry was stimulated and advanced. Glass and soap! Two common commodities that have enormously enriched life for mankind. And, on the whole, when one comprehensively reviews the applications of chemistry in the service of mankind, it is to these little things that life is indebted. Light, soap, heat, medicine, inks, glues, metals, explosiveswe live the more pleasurably because of them. Chemistry alone made progress of this kind possible. Without sulfuric acid, nitric and hydrochloric acid, other means would have to be found to purify gasoline and lubricating oils; there would be no railroads, automobiles, telephones, reenforced concrete, because the metals could not be blasted from the earth without the explosives that the acids help to produce. The textile industries would be crippled; tin cans, paper, galvanized iron, quick-acting phosphates for fertilizers, dyestuffs, celluloid, many medicines-none of these wonld have materialized. The chemist found that by means of an electric current he could split a solution of salt into the elements of sodium and chlorine. The soap industry stepped forward again; the world learned the process of mercerizing, of manufacturing artificial silk, and the making of dynamite. The cotton industries trebled their speed of production, for chlorine bleached quickly and excellently. It even purified water. Carborundum, an artificial abrasive of terrific hardness, was discovered. It was evident that it would change the art of grinding, but it was too expensive. The chemist who produced it did more: he found out cheaper means of producing it; and the price fell from eighty dollars to fifteen cents
a pound1 The results were manifold. From victrola needles to locomotives, the new abrasive extended in scope and possibilities. It surfaced and beveled glass; i t changed the processes of working marble and granite and onyx; it polished jade, hulled rice, finished fine leather, made fountain pens, ball bearings, harvesters, steel crank-pins, spindles, and wearing parts of machinery that could not be turned upon a lathe. The mechanical perfection of the automobile was made possible by the carborundum grinding wheel: i t gave such a delicate accuracy to machine parts that a permanent film of oil was possible, resulting in low friction and long life. From such organic growths as sugar cane, corn, potatoes, and beets the chemist derived alcohol. Hundreds of thousands of applications were found; each and every one contributed to the enrichment of life. Guncotton was made, and many things came from this nitrocellulose industry: brushes, combs, pin trays, billiard balls, buttons, mirrors, napkin rings. Food preservatives were made from alcohol; and i t was found that oranges ripened quickly when in contact with ethylene gas. Cosmetics, liquid soaps, shaving creams, tooth pastes, deodorants, linoleum, inks, pencils, glues, paints, steel pens, and rubber goods demanded it. It bettered motor fuels; i t made possible the fabric for airplane wings; it gave the pilot non-shattering goggles and the motorist an unbreakable windshield; it gave the photographer his film. Man was making cloth from cotton, but he was throwing away the seeds. The chemist turned to the industry. From the rejected seeds he made washing powders, roofing tar, dyestuffs,paint, soap, feed for animals, yarns, writing paper, rope, carpets, fertilizer, and oils of all kinds. He saved millions of dollars that had been regularly going to waste. From coal he extracted every tiny ounce of possible good. Every gas and vapor he turned to account. Perfumes, aspirin, flavoring, tar, illuminating gas, fertilizers, and a long list of brightly colored dyes came from what had before been only a dirty fuel. There was, indeed, no industry in which the chemist did not in some way work for the betterment of production and the enrichment of life. His knowledge of the purity of the materials of construction, for instance, assisted wherever buildings rose from the ground. He advanced manufacture and gave industry a new and throbbing heart with an abundance of rich red blood. By the right catalyst Haber discovered fixation of nitrogen; by the right catalyst the hydrogenation of fats was made possible; the right catalyst speeded up the production of the vastly valuable sulfuric acid; the right catalyst showed that acetic acid could be made in great quantities from acetylene, a cheap and plentiful substance; and by the right catalyst astute Germans showed that pure wood alcohol could be made from water gas and steam. It was the chemist who pointed out these right catalysts. Encyclopedias could be filled by a mere enumeration of the things the
chemist did for the world along similar lines. In every branch of commerce, industry, and art he made his presence known. From scientific refrigeration, which made possible the transportation of highly destructible foods, to the turning of casein into such things as glue, plastic materials, celluloid, and rubber, which alone saved millions of dollars, the chemist has revolutionized and bettered. The value, for instance, of modern lubricants, Portland cement, soap, dynamite, or glass alone cannot he estimated. The world would he crippled without them. And so by his elimination of wastes and his utilization of hitherto useless materials the chemist has affected very profoundly the economic side of the world. The financial and the industrial are one indivisible unit, and the majority of the lesser institutions of the world progress or stand still in the same proportion that the financial and the industrial institutions function. And when wealth through industry means better social, educational, cultural, and physical life for the people affected, and when it is to the chemist that we must attribute much of the world's industrial advance, it cannot be well denied that economically the chemist ha? been a dynamic factor in the enrichment of life. Physically, the chemist has enriched life; for medicine and chemistry have ever been kindred sciences, and it is through chemical mediums that medicine has been able to interpret and remedy bodily miseries. From alcohol alone came over four thousand very valuable medicines; three of these-antipyrin, salvarsan, and insulin-by themselves have erected a huge barrier against disease and helped wipe out afflictionsthat have been scourges for centuries. How incalculahly anesthetics have enriched life by the alleviation of pain will never be estimated; billions of humans yet unborn will find that life has been made easier for those who must pass under the surgeon's knife. From the curing of deep-seated wounds by means of hypochlorons acid, to the sanitation of the water-purification plants in the great cities, the chemist has given man a longer and less harsh span of years. How the chemist has featured in the esthetic scheme of things has ever been unappreciated. As a cherished inheritance from the past man has a desire for color in his surroundings. Life would he a dreary waste without it; there would he no subtle music that could be enjoyed by the eye. It is useless to enumerate specific things on which the chemist has lavished the endowment of beauty; for they are universally manifold. The ugliness and crudities of man-made things have been glossed-over: the desire for beauty has been fulfilled. And life, subsequently, has been enriched in the esthetic sense-an enrichment which cannot be instantly appreciated, but without which existence would lose all glamor and glow. It is but natural that the chemist should be the most vital factor behind all of these changes, for he deals with the structure of matter, and matter
embraces all things. A nation may be judged by the excellence of its chemists; for chemical progress has come to symbolize the advancement of truth, the march of civilization, the enrichment of life. The chemist has enriched life economically; the chemist has enriched life intellectually; the chemist has enriched life physically; the chemist has enriched life culturally. . . And still the man behind the test tube toils on. New and more lofty peaks of achievement tower before him. The realization that the elements are not, after all, the fundamental bricks out of which matter is made has opened new vistas. He is like a musician a t the console of a. vast universal organ; so far he has touched only a few of the keys. The acclamation of the multitude has never been his, despite the fact that he has so greatly contributed to civilization and the enrichment of the lot of his fellow beings. But chemists are odd mortals, and have rewards of their own. Old Johann Joachim Becher-a true member of the brotherhoodspoke for them all when he said: "The chymists are a strange class of mortals impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapor, soot and flame, poisons and poverty, yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that I may die if I would change places with the Persian king."
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