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NEW ENGLAND ASSOCIATION of CHEMISTRY TEACHERS Chemists, Capitalists, and Communists' WILLIAMS HAYNES Author of "This Chemical Age"
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half a dozen times. But those leaky little engines built our cities and our railways, created our great factories and our great corporations. They rewrote our laws and remade our ways of living, furnishing the very foundation of all that we are pleased to call our modern civilization. From the hunting and fishing stage to present-day industrialism this principle always holds: man's mode of living-all his social and political organizations, his customs, his finances, his l a w s a r e conditioned and controlled by the materials and techniques available at that particular time for making the best living with the least eRort. Also since the very beginning, men have always striven to tip the economic scales in their own favor. Force and trickery, religion and superstition, tyrannical edict and democratic law, every means to these selfish ends has been employed. Under every economic system man has exploited man, but no man or group of men have ever been able to dam the onward flow of material progress. If they succeed in diverting i t for a little time, its pent-up force sweeps them into oblivion. At this time, when we are obviously entering one of those disorganized periods of great change in human affairs, two groups are girding for the old effort again to control the economic system. We call them "capitalists" and "communists," elastic, emotional words, representing two different perceptions of human values, the individualistic and the communal, the integrity of the human being and the good of the human race. I submit to yon the premise that not capitalism or communism, but chemistry, will shape the world t o come. All that the application of power to man's tools has meant to us, we sum up conveniently as the "Industrial Revolution." Of late, we have begun to talk glibly about the "Chemical Revolution." If that apt phrase expresses a fact, we are dealing with an economic force as disruptive as a blockbuster. Just as the discoveries of ~ e w c o m hand Watt more profonndly afAddress before the sixth Annual Summer Conference, New ~ England Association of Chemistry Teachers, New London, Con- fected human history than all the campaigns of N leon or the peace treaty written by the Congress of necticut. August 24, 1941.
OMEWHEKE on earth are half a dozen chemists who m11 have more influence on the future of mankind than Stalin, Churchill, or Roosevelt, or any of the flock of generals whose names fill today's headlines. I cannot name these great chemists for you. If I were addicted t o prophecy I might make some guesses, but I will a t least hazard the patriotic prediction that two or three of them are Americans. It is not inconceivable that one of your own former students may be among them. New England has not lost the knack of turning out a real genius on occasion, and I am thinking of true chemical giants, men who--I repeat it-will more profoundly affect the course of human history than any politician or soldier who now "struts and frets his hour upon the stage." You do not believe me and I do not blame you. With diabolic perversity historians so frequently commemorate the wrong events, examine the wrong causes, remember the T o n g heroes, that it is difficult indeed to study history and not acquire an exceedingly warped historical perspective. That discouraging, dangerous fact should be a warning to teachers of chemistry because your students should not only learn chemistry from you, but they should also acquire through you a sound chemical perspective. In the world of tomorrow that knowledge will be valuable to them and important to this nation. Chemical perspective: that is what I want to discuss because I am anxious to persuade you that along with the principles and practice of chemistry you must also teach your students the meaning of chemistry, its economic, political, and social relationships to the world of tomorrow. To return very briefly to history, a century and a half ago the Napoleonic wars so filled the thoughts of all Europe that almost nobody noticed that in England half a dozen sputtering, primitive steam engines were beginning to pump water out of mines and turn spinninv wheels. Nanoleon redrew the maD of Europe 0
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Vienna, so what our chemists are doing today may well he the most important events of contemporary history. The mainspring of the Industrial Revolution was new machines, the essence of the Chemical Revolution is new materials. Synthetic, man-made-to-order materials of chemical origin are something really new in this old world of ours, things undreamt of in the philosophy of historian or economist, of statesman or financier, of industrialist or labor leader, or in the dreams of common man. In distinction to natural raw materials, man-made materials are not confined within the boundaries of any map. The vanilla vine flourishes only in the tropics. But a vanillin plant operates as efficiently in Rothschild, Wisconsin, as in Naugatuck, Connecticut, and its annual output is impervious alike to drought or flood, to insect pest or plant disease. The cosmic accident that placed deposits of fossil gums on the shores of the Baltic and in the heart of the Australian bush has no influence whatever upon the choice of a stragetic location for a synthetic resin factor. In the outskirts of Akron a synthetic rubber operation enjoys patent advantages in competition with a natural rubber plantation in distant Malaya. Commercial geography, as we studied it, has simply no meaning today and we must revise all our old conceptions about world trade. Obviously there need no longer he any have-not nations. We, the people of the United States, who before Pearl Harbor regularly bought more than half the world's supply of ruhber, quinine, cinnamon, and pyrethrum, will not need to buy any of these great commodities of international trade after the war. In 1939 we paid out nearly 187 million dollars for these four items; that is, roughly two-thirds of all our imports of all raw materials from the entire Far East. If we import but half as much ruhber, quinine, cinnamon, and pyrethrum we will upset the economics of Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and Ceylon, threatening the livelihood of more than 70 million people. That is a sobering thought. Pondering it, our Secretary of State proposes to assure world peace by restoring free exchange of goods in international trade and to create world prosperity by encouraging the greatest possihle production of these raw materials to he exchanged for our manufactured wares. Splendid ideals inspire this program, hut it is dangerously reactionary. I t would revive outworn mercantilist ideas of world trade, thinking that would revivify the expiring colonial system, and lead inevitably to unilateral trade agreements-coconuts for cotton cloth; tin for typewriters-which we know now were contributing factors in the world-wide depression of the thirties. For all its apparent liberalism a postwar plan for world prosperity based on the greatest possible exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods is the perfect scheme for keeping the so-called backward nations backward. They themselves will repudiate it, as we revolted in 1776 against the mer-
cantilist system England imposed on her American colonies. It is no more possible for us to conceal the material benefits of modern industrialism from the rest of the world than to hide an elephant in a cabbage patch. There is no monopoly in science and we have lentleased the know-how of mass production methods all the way from Russia to New Zealand. To China, India, Australia, and the whole of South America the great lesson of this merchandised war is that their economic salvation depends upon industrializing themselves as quickly and as completely as they can. So long as he had only his naked hands, even after he had an ox and an ass, some windmills and waterwheels to help him, man has never been able to wrest a decent living from niggardly, menacing Nature. For nine out of ten of all the men, women, and children on this planet the crying need is-and always has beenfor food, and certainly chemists should not forget that when synthetic indigo "ruined" the great, profitable, indigo plantations, it released nearly a million and a half acres for the growing of millet. That made a notable contribution to alleviating the recurrent horrors of the Indian famine. I t is a plain lesson what might he done if we helped backward economies to acquire power tools and stopped tempting hungry .people to grow rubber and quinine, insecticides and condiments, yes, even hemp and sisal, industrial materials that, thanks to chemistry, we no longer need. And yet, many influential postwar global planners subscribe to these reactionary tenets and active steps have been taken to enforce them. We have, for example, spent millions-some say as many as three hundred-to resurrect ruhber in Brazil, a supply of a natural raw material that was killed 30 years ago by greedy, bloodstained exploitation of trees and natives. To foster this uneconomic revival we have written into that declaration of good neighbor policy, the Rio de Janeiro agreement, a promise to scrap our synthetic ruhber plants. To any American chemist that is a silly promise, a wicked promise to any sincere citizen. For the sake of our national honor it should never have been made, for i t will not be kept. It would never have been made if our statesmen had the foggiest notion of what the Chemical Revolution means. It is possible to thwart progress by law, but only a little and for a very short time. Any synthetic material that gains a toehold in the world's market places represents real chemical and economic progress. It must he better or cheaper, often both, than the natural product it replaces. Synthetic rubber is here to stay. Inevitably it will become better and cheaper. Politicians, and planters, too, should he warned that no manufacturer has ever started to use a synthetic product and then gone hack to the natural material that i t replaced. From the first synthetic dye to the latest synthetic drug there is no exception to that rule. Unless we reckon rightly with such chemical facts our future international relations will become an unholy
mess; our plans for a brave new world a howling failure. The ability of synthetic materials to cancel geographic limitations upon natural resources is not their only revolutionary attribute. They possess chemical and physical characteristics quite a t variance with other laws of nature, and these new properties made possible entirely new industrial techniques. All our most ingenious, automatic machine tools are, after all, only cunning mechanical elaborations to save the age-old labors of the handicrafts. They spin and weave fibers, form metals into new shapes, chip or carve stone, saw and plane wood, all artfully designed to fabricate these materials more to our liking. But since few of these materials lend themselves to continnous, automatic manipulation and not one of them is in every respect ideal for our uses, it follows inevitably, first, that the machines themselves are restricted, and second, that the goods they produce are never wholly satisfying. Remove these twin handicaps inherent in our raw materials and our industries are set for another burst of developments. In ways that no natural material can ever fulfill, synthetic materials fit into modern mass production methods as a piston slips into a well-oiled cylinder. Compare rattan with Saran. The canes of the Asiatic palm known to botanists as Calamus rotang come to us from India in bundles six, ten, fifteen feet in length. Ohedient to the first law of nature, infinite variety, no two of these split, dried reeds are the same length, the same thickness, or the same breadth. Every one differs in the toughness of its outer covering, its tensile strength, its resistance to flexing or to rubbing, to water or to acids and alkalies, in scores of chemical and physical points important when we come to weave i t by machinery into seat covers. That is rattan's great use, and admittedly of all weavable wands it makes the smoothest, toughest, most easily cleaned, best-looking seat cover, so it has been selected for exceedingly exacting duty in public conveyances. Saran, a polyvinyl plastic, can be extruded into thin wandlike strips and woven closely in the ancient basketweave pattern. It may be produced any size, shape, width, or thickness, a thin flat ribbon or a fat round thread, concave or convex, or, if you wish, rounding on one side and flat on the other. Whatever shape is selected, once the dies are set, that extruded strip may be shoved out like spaghetti for indefinite lengths, wound on great spools, and every single inch in a million yards will he exactly-chemically and physicallylike every other inch; uniformity to the nth degree, absolutely standard quality. Even overlooking that rattan after being graded must be soaked and then inspected before it can be woven a t all, the advantages of feeding hundreds of feet of identical strips off spools into the weaving machines are self-evident. From its origin in an American chemical plant, as contrasted with a fever-soaked bamboo jungle in South Asia, to its fabrication into a subway seat cover, Saran fits this age of outs better than rattan. This fine adaptability of synthetic materials to
modern production techniques is as significant, though less emphasized, as their economy. Their perfect uniformity means that industry can with confidence develop standardized formulas and machines. But though uniform they can be varied. Physically the rayons exemplify this deliberate variation perfectly with continuous or cut fibers, permanent twists and spirals; flat, curved, or round filaments; alternately thick and thin as the flow through the spinuerettes is automatically pulsated. Synthetic resins have a similar range of chemical properties, making possible particularized coatings adapted to such diverse conditions of use as the bottom of a battleship or the wingtip of a plane; the inside of a refrigerator or the outside of a baby's rattle. To spread paper-thin plastic-plywood sheets over a form and then set them by steam pressure in a rubber hag is a brand new industrial technique, predicated upon new types of man-made materials. From new materials has always come the prime impetus to man's materialistic progress. Since the first flint was chipped, the first bundle of reeds woven into a basket, our new skills have always been acquired in order to manipulate new materials. As the common drinking vessel has evolved from shell or gourd, to baked clay, to fused silica, to synthetic plastic, or the common writing instrument from goose quill, to steel nib and wooden holder, to fountain pen, so all our everyday utensils, our homes, our clothes, our fuels, our weapons, even our foods and medicines, all follow the same double pattern of increasing complexity in both materials and manipulation. The invariable evolution has been from a natural object used "as is" to a highly processed substance most intricately fashioned. Now, we are producing our own materials, creating them by the thousands every year, made-to-order to suit our needs. Having turned tools into machines by employing power, we have so enormously multiplied and speeded up the production of all sorts of goods, cutting costs so sensationally, effecting such enormous savings of time and labor, that a decent living for every human being on earth is no longer a Utopian dream. Nobody with chemical perspective dares to be a pessimist today. A new frontier is opening before us, because these new synthetic chemical products of ours are the very stuffs of abundance. Chancy crops grown on worn-out soils, the failing forests, depleted mines, those are the materials of an economy of scarcity. But synthetic materials know no law of diminishing returns. They defy the law of supply and demand, for they become cheaper and cheaper as we want more and more of them. They are apt to blow up the very foundations of established economics. Even a torpid imagination can picture a vastly diierent world if there were enough to go 'round. What a great area of conflict would vanish if there were no have-not nations! What a difference in life if the billion and a half human beings who normally in peacetime live and die chronically undernourished had enough to eat! What a profound change in human rela-
tions if the able man who acquires wealth were not compelled to do so by taking more than his share from a supply insufficient for all! A life of abundance--at least we have the machines and the materials to make i t a reality. Obviously we do not agree who is to control the materials or run the machines. Starry-eyed visionaries are planning and hard-boiled realists are plotting, both blissfully ignorant that we are on the threshold of the Chemical Age, a new economic epoch in which ideals must have chemical perspective and realities will be conditioned by chemical values. The abundant life almost within our grasp must not become a political football, whether kicked by capitalist or communist. The promise of social security is one of the oldest political gags. "No Roman citizen shall starve," said August Caesar. "A chicken in every pot every Sunday," promised H e ~ of y Navarre. " Two cars in every garage," was Calvin Coolidge's slogan. And now that ancient platform pledge has been boosted to the absurdity of "a bottle of milk for every Hottentot every day." Throughout the ages the politicians have found no way of fufilling these promises save the very one devised by Angustus Caesar himself: bread and circuses. And in the end bread and circuses ruined the Roman Empire. Contrast that promise with the performance of the doers, the explorers and inventors, the merchants and manufacturers, the chemists and the engineers, the men who have conceived boldly and venture bravely to make those promises come true. The surest promise of plenty for tomorrow is being made today by the chemist in the research laboratory and fnlfiIled by the engineer in the plant. That is what I mean by chemical perspective, and that is what I urge you pass on to your students. A dozen years ago an important chemist who was a great teacher of chemistry gave us the classic example of chemical value. The munitions program of the war has so radically and typically revised his example that today i t is doubly apt. Charles Herty asked the leading question: "If purified cellulose from spruce sells for 4'/% cents a pound, what is cotton worth?" On the basis of chemical values clever rayon chemists worked out the answer, "about 5 cents"; but on the basis of parity values smart bureaucrats figured that to American planters cotton was worth 15 cents. That artificial price was maintained in the United States by law, but thanks to more cotton from India and Egypt and new cotton from Brazil and Mexico, the open, world-market price of cotton, just prior to the war, was actually 5'/2 cents gold. In producing 9,000,000 pounds of smokeless powder daily-from wood cellulose, note well, not from cotton cellulose-the price of wood cellulose has been brought down so that after the war i t may sell as low as 3lI2 cents a pound. What then will cotton be worth? The correct answer is certainly not "about 20 cents" which is the present law-controlled price of a commodity, the control of whose price has definitely passed
its chemical competitor. Yet a correct answer to this problem in chemical economics is imperative to the prosperity of the South. Equally live, complicated qnestions are raised by the chemical values of corn and peanuts, rubber and hemp, sugar and starch, a dozen different metals. You can see how important it is to discuss in the classroom the political, economic, social implications of chemical values to each of us, to this country of ours, to the whole wide world. In a Chemical Age, chemical values are bound eventually to prevail. Almost without exception, the prefaces to textbooks of elementary chemistry contain the statement that one of its purposes is to instruct the student in the scientific method and to give him an appreciation of the scientific spirit. Those are certainly worth-while objectives, especially important a t this very moment when we need so sorely to study objectively the many problems that confront us and to seek their solution by realistic methods. We have the machines and the materials; we alone shall be to blame if we do not attain the goal that our forefathers back to the caveman have sweated and strained to reach. In one sphere of activity we have learned to find the facts first, to base our conclusions upon accurate data, to act rationally from logical premises. The accelerating progress made in machines and materials during the past century testifies impressively to the practical value of the scientific approach to human problems. The practical application of research has been a quickening leaven in all the thinking of businessmen. We snicker a t the advertising agency that counts the crosseyed stepchildren in Scranton and calls i t "research." But a t least that is a factnl approach, and, after all, maybe their "silly statistics" are of value in sociology or optics. How pitifully seldom do we have even this faint glimmer of scientific spirit in approaching our problems! We emote violently to questions of religion or politics. Group interests blind us to the most obvious facts. Ow egoism is impervious to the most fundamental truths. We habitually use sentiment and prejudice as substitutes for realistic thinking. What research has done for business thinking should encourage us to hope that possibly the next generation might acquire the ability to think objectively in at least one other area. From research to industrial chemistry is a short step. Might it not be that a sound comprehension of the causes and effects of the Chemical Revolution through which we are living could encourage the everyday use of a scientific approach to many problems? That would be a glorious fulfillment of the promise of the textbooks. I t would be a greater victory than the defeat of Naziism, for if the Chemical Revolution is to change our entire economic and social systems, the world will surely need all the chemical understanding it can muster. At the birth of a new era we are groping blindly. The capitalists have no chemical perspective. The communists blithely ignore chemical values. Both at-
tempt to legislate an economic system. Capitalists and communists alike are ignorant that chemical forces are accumulating that are perfectly capable of making them both as obsolete as the hunters and the herdsmen who vied for supremacy in the days of primitive economic society, as outmoded as the feudal lords and the medieval guildsmen who were both literally blasted out of history by gunpowder, a chemical discovery. But chemists ought to know these facts and should be able to draw from them logical conclusions; what a
responsibility and what an opportunity. Pass on to your students, I beg of you, a vision of the chemical future before us all. Notes The 228th meeting of the N.E.A.C.T. will be a combined meeting of chemistry, biology, and physics teachers in conjunction with the New England Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. The meeting will be held on December 9, 1944, a t the Brookline High School, Brookline, Massachusetts.
