W
Priorities in Chemicals1 HILE the wax effort has produced
the greatest boom we have ever had, i t is also producing growing bankruptcy and unemployment, and the further it goes the less of profit and the more of bankruptcy there are sure to be. For that reason it is wise to place our attention on the shortages that produce trouble, rather than on the tremendous purchases that produce the boom—in other words, to discuss dwindling civilian business rather than expanding military orders. Priorities are not devices of trade in time of peace. They are instruments in aid of military operations in time of war, the keystone of industrial mobilization and warfare. And both they themselves and the occasion that has required their creation are situations beyond the ordinary run of our experience, and quite out of keeping with our notions of the proper conduct either of business or of the affairs of nations. For that reason they sometimes seem motivated by unnecessary harshness and administered with reckless indifference to their consequences. But in fact they are motivated by necessity and administered by inexperience—and both the necessity and the inexperience are inescapable consequences of the situation of our American way of life and style of government. We Americans do not like to anticipate unpleasant things. So we do not have in existence a trained organization to furnish skilled business management to all the manifold industrial and business problems that underlie the successful prosecution of war. Such an organization takes time to build and years of effort directed toward one unequivocal goal. Such an effort was certainly not the policy either of the Government or the people of the United States prior to the destruction of the French armies in the spring of 1940. When the German armies reached the Atlantic ports of France the whole power relation of the world changed and every since we have been trying to improvise in haste what can at best only be done slowly· It has been a task that there was no one trained to do. Government personnel may perhaps be said t o have been trained in over-all political problems and business men in detailed economics. Neither alone, nor the sum of them, can compass entirely the complexity and far-reaching scope of the problem. I will make no explanation of the shortcomings of the government men. The shortcomings of the industrialists may not be realized so keenly, yet they bear with equal importance on the subject. Industrialists are accustomed—like military commanders—to acquiring their raw ma· * Presented before the Chicago Section of the AMEBIC AN CHBMICAX* SOCIBTT, October 24, 1041.
LAURENCE BROWN Chemical Section Division of Civilian Supply Office of Production Management Washinston, D. C.
terials by the simple and apparently reasonable process of purchasing them. But when there are no raw materials to buy, regardless of what you are willing to pay for them, regardless of priorities, then both the military and the business men are at somewhat of a loss. This was once a land of plenty. It is now a land of shortages, and in no field more gravely than in chemicals. And shortages are things with which we as a nation have no experience. What we used to call shortages in normal times were situations in which men could not buy things because they could not afford to pay the required price. Today it makes no difference how much you want a raw material, or what fantastic price you might be willing to pay for it, you cannot get it—in many fields—without a priority (except of course in defiance of law over the black market). Shortages in chemicals include all the solvents, drying oils and their substitutes, all the coal-tar acids, chlorine, and many of the nitrogen derivatives. But why there is the shortage and what can be done about it are of most pressing interest now. Why have these shortages happened so suddenly? We thought this was an economy of fuel and iron, but it turned out to be an economy based on chemicals. The fact was not realized because it is only in recent years that this has been so. The modern chemical industry and the great dependency of other industries upon it are modern indeed. It was also not realized for a rather human reason: fuel and iron seem simple things that the clerks and the brass hats, and even the lawyers, can understand with a minimum of inattention to their golf and office politics. But these horribly complicated chemical things with jaw-breaking names —it would upset everyone even to admit their possible significance. And so, we have the ironically amusing situation of solemn assignments of various scarce metals to make this and that important commodity, which cannot be made at all because some little chemical supply is missing and is likely to remain missing. I t turns out to the puzzlement of many people that there are an incredible number of important machines and of devices of
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all kinds that will not operates or cannot be built without some of these: chemicals— electric insulation, plastics, lacquers, solvents, rubber, dyes, glues. And unhappily these unpleasantly esoteric things are not mined with a steam shovel either. They are the fruit of great sldll and care, and their production usually requires intricate and often vast macliinery. With any commodity whatever there is obviously a limit to the amount that can be taken for military purposes. What that limit may be is certainly hard to determine, particularly in complicated things like chemicals. It is difficult in the first place even to figure the total of products we would class as chemicals that enter into the construction of a ship, a plane, or a tank. It is more difficult to figure exactly what will happen t o the civilian economy if the required quantities—assuming the miracle of figuring them— were to be taken away. As a result there is necessarily a great deal of confusion that is not likely to be quickly resolved. The limiting factors tend fco be applied officially in the simpler coiomodities like the metals, which in the end usually turn out not to be the real limiting factors at all. This has already happened in plastics, where allocation programs have already been shredded to ribbons and where November supplies indicate t~hat even the military allocations may be partly meaningless. In this situation priorities are beginning to break down and a system of complete allocation is beginndng to emerge. Priorities would work perfectly if everyone ordered once a year for am entire year's supply, but that is not the way it works. You set up a scale of priorities one month that postpones certain less important items a few months, but by the time delivery date for these delayed things rolls around a lot of new high priorities have been issued and delivery has to be pushed off again. Finally it works out in many commodities that low priorities are no priority at all. Allocation, on the other iiand, contemplates allocating—usually month by month—the entire production of a commodity in specific quantities. It is not widely in use now, though it is growing, and it is obviously a very difficult system to use when there are many producers and consumers of a commodity. Many men who come t*> Washington asking for an allotment of chemical supplies before their business closes fail to get what they seek. We cannot give it to them because there is nothing to give. We cannot talk chemicals into existence. We could give it to them only by taking it away from someone else;, someone who is using it either for direct war supplies or for some purpose deeme-d more vital to the whole economy of the country. Today if you obtain a chemical raw material, at
November 25, 1941 least many of them, you obtain it at the expense of someone else who has as acute a business need for it' as you have. In problems of that kind in wartime ques tions of fairness or of monetary loss do not enter. The only question is the relative necessity for each of the possible things that can be made from a particular raw material. These men to whom we must refuse supplies, whom we must sometimes bankrupt, rarely talk politics, but the ex pression of their faces talks for them. Their faces say that they dislike Hitler, dislike him very much, but that they dis like their own personal ruin somewhat more. You can hardly blame them, and if the case rested solely upon likes and dislikes it would be a hard one indeed. But it does not. To men in that position there is only one proper explanation. They are the economic casualties of war, a war that if it is lost will produce economic casualties in defeat far worse than those suffered in the fighting. This is none too well real* ized, because the intimate interrelation ship between military power and eco nomic opportunity is something American public opinion for nearly a generation has been loathe to admit. But it is so. Ag gressors have tangible economic objectives that are an essential part of their military programs. It is so long since our forefathers used guns as a means of getting wealth that we have forgotten that guns are a well-tested method of acquiring wealth. Studied from the view of power politics,
if&.MECROLOGy..^ Louis Klein Τ ouïs KLEIN, director of clinical research at Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc., Nutley, N. J., died October 24 at the age of 56. From 1920 to 1935 he was associated with Parke, Davis & Co., and since 1935 had been research director of Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc., where he was also editor of the Roche Review. J-1
NEWS
EDITION
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there is an interesting thread of similarity that runs through many of these chemical shortages. Tin, rubber, silk, tung oil, nitrates, chrome, bones, manganese, molasses, hemp, jute, pulp, glycerol, soap oils, and supplementary supplies of iron ore and copper are normally brought here by ship from every part of the world. The loss of the metallic imports, particularly the nonferrous metals, is immediately of consequence in the intense pressure of plastics. Jute, hemp, and pulp affect paper, textiles, and above all cellulose. Molasses means alcohol and all its derivatives and related products. Lack of silk means pressure on acetate and phenol. Tung oil means phthalic anhydride, bones mean glue, nitrates mean ammonia. You can readily see how important in the chemical shortages is the state of semi* blockade in which we find ourselves today. Even in the city of Chicago sea power shows its pervasive influence and again the lesson is apparent that a nation in complete control of its foreign situation need have no trouble with its domestic. But unhappily today we are not in control of the sea power we require. We cannot enforce our decision concerning what we desire to be moved over the seas, and one of the consequences of that is a large factor in our chemical shortages. In a sense what has happened is that we have been thrown back into the necessity of dealing with history. We are forced to realize that power is the decisive factor in political and therefore economic events. We are forced to recognize that mainte* nance of power is an expensive operation.
Henry Adams called the structure of the world of his time the Atlantic System. That was his name for the relations, eco nomic, military, and naval, that held the world of the 90's in an orderly pattern. I would prefer to call it rather the Atlantic Imperium, because it described a system of trade and politics that depended, like every other such system, upon power. It is true that in this Imperium gun fire was seldom heard, but the guns were in the Atlantic and there was little doubt in anyone's mind when or why they would be used. And so we had the great peace of the Atlantic and men lived out their lives in unbroken, unhurried peace under the shadow of those distant ships of war. It came to be forgotten by what immense toil the command of the seas had been won and it seemed that the wealth that flowed from this command Tiras rather the source than the product of it, and what was in fact an Imperium, a deliberately created order of society, came to be thought of as a phe nomenon of nature—convention, if you please, but conventions related to the un changing realities. But now under chal lenge we find it was a man-made system after all and one that can be held together by risk and expense. We have accepted the challenge and we will not have our Imperium shattered, knowing well that the cost of saving it will be great. And we do not intend to have it again so easily endangered. When we re-establish the sea power that is the basis of our wealth and strength, this time we intend to keep it.
His scientific interests, aside from his teaching activities, were varied and extensive. He is perhaps best known, however, as the inventor of the autogenous process of wood carbonization known as the Stafford process. As a result of his extensive investigations in this field he became recognized as an authority on wood distillation as well as on wood waste utilization in general. He held membership in the AMERICAN
consultant, Haller Engineering Associates, Plainfield, N. J. Member since 1921. Nicolai N. Iwanoff, professor, Univer sity of Leningrad, Leningrad, Russia. Member since 1940. G. H. Jones, president, Hillside Fluor Spar Mines, Chicago, 111. Member since 1931. Charles M. Knight» vice president, Hlages Coal & Ice Co., Akron, Ohio. Member since 1909. John A. Roberts, director of research, Florida Fruit Canners, Inc., Frostproof, Fla. Member since 1935. George L. Schaefer, retired, 60 Sunnyside Ave., Brooklyn, Ν. Υ. Member since 1938. Rudolf Schoeaheimer, associate profes sor, Columbia University, New York, Ν. Υ. Member since 1935. Frederick Stone, research chemist, Benzol Products Co., Newark, N. J. Member since 1934.
CHEMICAL SOCIETY, American Association
of University Professors, Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and was a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Orin F. Stafford
e^®
(^RiN F. STAFFORD,.dean of science and ^ h e a d of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oregon, died in his sleep at Eugene, Ore., September 17, after an illness of two months. He was 68 years old. Dean Stafford held the degrees of A.B. and A.M. from the University of Kansas. He had been connected with the chemistry department at Oregon since 1900. He became head of the department in 1906 and dean of science and lower division in 1933.
ANNOUNCE with regret the death of the following: James W. Chewning, chemist, William Cooper & Nephews, Chicago, ΠΙ. Mem ber since 1937. £ · £ · Currier, production superintend ent, Gray Chemical Co., Roulette, Penna. Member since 1936. Wilbur M. Dozier, refinery engineer, Stanolind Oil & Gas Co., Vivian, La. Member since 1938. H. P. Hayden, manager, director, and
