ORGANICS
. . . A M O N G SOME Fuss and bother cheerfully undertaken . . .
Don't think that all Eastman Organic Chemicals are manufactured out of whimsy, just to see whether or not anybody wants to buy them. Some of them, yes. For others, where the volume of demand stands in a certain relationship to the degree of fuss and bother required in the preparation of the item, business isn't bad. If the volume of one of these items ever reaches the point at which the fuss and bother lose their frightfulness for other chemists, we sort of lose inter est in it. This weird policy is one of the marks that distinguish Eastman Organic Chemicals from other chemi cal houses, including our own corpo rate relatives of similar name who make bulk chemicals, think in terms of carloadings, and don't get as ex cited over a 10-kilo order as we do. A typical variety of fuss and bother that a grateful clientele is glad to have us suffer for them is encountered with our eight aliphatic acetates: Methyl Acetate (Eastman 520), η-Propyl Ace tate (Eastman 747), iso-Propyl Ace tate (Eastman 279), sec-Butyl Acetate (Eastman 805), η-Butyl Acetate (East man 710), iso-Butyl Acetate (Eastman 49), n-Amyl Acetate (Eastman 2360), and iso-Amyl Acetate (Eastman 298). You can buy these esters in the "solvents" market in excellent quality with no more than 10% free alcohol; but excellent as these commercial sol vents are, we don't dare even use them as starting points for purifica tion. Instead, we start from the purest grades of the corresponding alcohols that we can produce, esterify with a large excess of our own pure acetic anhydride, and from the equilibrium mixture spin out a long chain of stratagems to bring the alcohol gen erally below 0.1 %, convert all the ex cess anhydride to acid, and then get rid of all the acid arid water. There is a matter of judgment involved in all this ; and, since there is no such thing as absolute success in matters of judgment, all we can do is to offer the result as characteristic of the
fruits of our best judgment. The judg ment, and the fuss and the bother drive the price up, but it's still a bar gain to chemists responsible for such ultra-meticulous enterprises as the preparation of TV picture tube screens, pharmaceuticals, or fluids for precision instruments. For Barbara . . .
According to a charming tale, the great von Baeyer named barbituric acid for Barbara, a friend of his. Then someone came along and replaced one of its three ketonic oxygens with sulfur, creating 2-thiobarbituric acid. 0 = C — NH CH2 C = S 0 = C — NH Then someone else added 2-thio barbituric acid to fructose and got a yellow precipitate. Then some medi cal school people obtained an entirely different orange-red precipitate by re acting 2-thiobarbituric acid with in cubated brain tissue and proceeded to prove that the reaction was with a 3-carbon fragment of an oxidized double-bonded fatty acid moiety of the lecithin in the tissue. Then some dairy chemists conceived the idea that this property of 2-thiobarbituric acid might make a convenient test for oxidative deterioration in fats. Then some agricultural chemists worked out the details for using 2-thiobarbi turic acid to find out objectively when cheddar cheese has gone bad. Or powdered whole milk or butter. Then we prepared a procedural abstract of their method to give away in order to help us sell our 2-Thiobarbituric Acid (Eastman 660) at $2.25 for 25 grams.
Mopping up ions . . . One of the canons of polite industrial society is that you don't name your competitors in print. This prevents us from rendering due obeisance to a very fine chemical company with whom we happen to be at swords' points in another field. In one of their recent ads they call attention to their brand of activated carbon for removing trace metals in directly by adsorbing organic precipi tates of unwanted ions. For example, to mop up iron or copper from a so lution, one stirs in about 25% more than the stoichiometric proportion of mercaptobenzothiazole, then adds about 1 % of the solution weight of high purity carbon. Our contempo rary finds there is no residual contami nation because their carbon adsorbs the excess reagent as well as the complexed metal. Other precipitating or ganic reagents, such as dimethylglyoxime for nickel, should work in the same way, they suggest. Chelate com pounds, on the other hand, are not adsorbed well on carbon. Perhaps it will not be resented if we crowd in on this act to remind who ever wishes to develop this technique for himself that 2-Mercaptobenzothiazole is obtainable as Eastman 2638, Dimethylglyoxime as Eastman 98, 2-{o-Hydroxyphenyl)benzothiazole as Eastman 7005 (for copper), Nitron as Eastman 1077 (an atrociously com plex complexing agent which precipi tates N0 2 ", in case you want to see whether the scheme works with anions). We can also supply Carbon, De colorizing, which we obtain from sources other than the people who set us off on this tack. Ethics restrains us from recommending it here. Our shop is open. Our inventory shows some 3500 Eastman Organic Chemicals. You buy by mail from our List No. 39. You get a copy from Distillation Products Industries, East man Organic Chemicals Department, Rochester 3, Ν. Υ.
Price quoted is subject to change without notice.
DPi
Eastman Organic Also...vitamins
Distillation Products Industries 22 A
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Chemicals
Ε in b u l k . . . d i s t i l l e d
is a division of
monoglycerides
Eastman Kodak Company ANALYTICAL
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