J u n e , 1916
THE J O r R N A L OF I N D U S T R I A L A N D ENGINEERING C H E M I S T R Y
567
NOTES AND CORRLSPONDENCE CHEMISTRY AND PUBLICITY
Editor of the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry: In the New York Tribune of Sunday, May 14,1916, in which the Preparedness Parade, held in iYew York City the day before, was appropriately and extensively treated, there appeared as a leading editorial “Water Power and Preparedness,” based upon the Washington, D. C., meeting of the American Electrochemical Society and its symposium on hTiagara water power, In the course of this editorial occurred the following statements: “It is perhaps not unnatural that the public is ignorant of its interest in this vital question. Engineers and technical men are themselves largely responsible for the popular apathy since they have left the matter in the hands of ignorant legislators and met the restriction of power development with what could a t best be described as passive resistance. * * * * Yet our only hope a t present is in the scientific and technical men. They have been too easy-going and have not taken sufficient pains t o explain their aims and purposes to the public. It is only by doing so that they can hope to bring pressure to bear on legislators. * * * * In the recent meeting of the American Electrochemical Society there were signs of a clearer realization among technical men of their public responsibility in this matter. This is all to the good, for i t is only through their efforts that the public can be made to understand what they have a right to demand of their legislators.” Speaking from my own personal experience, I am convinced that the editors of our own daily papers are themselves in good measure responsible for the conditions referred to in the above quotation. I n February, 1911, acting as Secretary of the 8th International Congress of Applied Chemistry, to be held in Washington and New York in September, 1912, I sent to the editors of the daily papers of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, D. C., Chicago, Pittsburgh, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Omaha, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco, and other cities, a short history of the seven preceding Congresses and statistical information as to their labors, also copies of our first pamphlet describing our aims and purposes and organization; in all, 393 dailies all over the country were so approached. So far as I was able to learn, only two papers, in two different states, both west of the Mississippi, took any notice whatever. In June of that year I followed the February material up with more material and gave a short abstract of what we had accomplished and of what we hoped still t o do, and sent that also to these same papers and about I j o boards of trade and chambers of commerce, and 8,000 manufacturers all over the country. At intervals thereafter I reported progress to the daily press in about the same way. Up to the summer of 1912, not one single h’ew York daily took the slightest note of the matter sent to them. During that summer one daily did say something about the Congress, but only because we made very great personal efforts to arouse the interest of that paper. During the summer of 1912 one other New York daily did give about a quarter column to the Congress, printing a clipping out of the Consular Reports; but this clipped matter reached the Consular Reports because our Consul a t St. Petersburg, Russia, with whom I had been in very active correspondence about the Congress, sent this matter to Washington as a news item. I had sent precisely the same information to that same New York editor eight months before, but it had no value to his paper until he found it in the Consular Reports, even though it was then more than eight months old. When the Congress program was ready, I sent copies to every New York paper, and, as I recall it, only two took any notice during its sessions of what the Congress was trying to do. Towards the end of its session
they became a little more interested, but only in a lukewarm way. During this Congress two public lectures were given, whose combined attendance was something over 3,000; a t the first of these lectures an exhaustive and illustrative treatment was given of the Norwegian process of making nitric acid from air; a t the second lecture an experimental demonstration of the synthetic production of ammonia was given; these two things are probably as great achievements as have been accomplished within the last generation, yet the New York dailies took no note of it whatever, and it was not until a clever Chicago reporter lampooned it that the press took notice of it; the only way that synthetic nitric and synthetic ammonia could break into our daily papers was through such an extravagant statement, as, for instance, “Chemists Make Eggs Out of Air,” it certainly is a very long way from synthetic ammonia and synthetic nitric to synthetic eggs. This Congress was by no means a negligible affair; 28 countries took part in it; 18 different countries had organizations for preparation for the Congress, and these foreign organizations comprised 573 individuals and 5 j societies. The American organization numbered upwards of I joo technical and scientific men whose purpose was to promote the interests of the Congress We distributed our news service to 438 trade, technical and scientific publications the world over, and this exclusive of our news service to the daily press; altogether we sent out over 300,000 pieces of printed matter informing the public what our aims and purposes were; 151 public meetings were held in New York City during the week this Congres was in session. A t the New Orleans meeting of the American Chemical Society, in March and April, 191j, that is, after we had had eight months of the great war, there were nineteen short papers presented, each of them wholly in nontechnical language, on what the American chemists had done for nineteen American industries; advance proofs of each of these papers together with a short resume of each of them, and all printed, were sent to the editors of about thirty prominent dailies inclusive of New York dailies; outside of New Orleans I could find but one daily that took any notice whatever of the matter and that was done by the simple process of “lifting” one of the articles as an editorial without giving any credit whatever to the American Chemical Society. The first point of entry for publicity must be by way of the editors of our dailies; if they block the way nothing can be done, We must first educate our editors as to what the country should know, and then induce the editors to educate the public. The editors know better than any one else the mechanism for educating the public; if the editors will receive technical matter in a welcoming way, it is absolutely certain that the technical men will state their case in the language and form which the editors consider best fitted for instructing the public. I say this, even though it has happened to me that after spending nine hours with a n efficient editorial writer of a large New York daily, in explaining technical matters to him and in going over his manuscript and his copy and had boiled down a very technical story into fewer than Ijoo words, our combined effort was crowded out by the editor-in-chief because he needed the space for something else. However, I am not discouraged; I still believe that our editors can be educated up to the point of wanting technical matters, and if the editors will come only one-third the way, the technical men will gladly go the rest of the distance. BERNHARD C. HESSE 25 BROAD STREET, NEWYORK May 15, 1916
