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apparatus and to require only apparatus which is in universal use. By study of the conditions of precipitation i t may be possible to select for a considerable number of tests such concentrations of acid or alkali and of reagent that the precipitation is not influenced appreciably by the presence of the salt which is being tested. The effect of impurities in reagents used in the test is eliminated by the proposed type of definition. The severity of the standard of purity can be varied by taking different quantities of the chemical to be tested and by varying the quantity of the impurity in the solution used for comparison. SULFATE IN NITRIC ACID The definition of a standard for sulfate in nitric acid will be discussed as an example of the type of definition which has been suggested. Small quantities of sulfate are practically always estimated by the turbidity caused by barium sulfate. Conditions should be prescribed which will permit comparisons 10 or 16 min. after the addition of reagents. Many published directions for this test indicate that the effects of different concentrations of acid and barium chloride have not been fully recognized. Directions for the determination of sulfate by turbidity given by D. D. Jackson,l and followed in other publications, call for 1 cc. of 1: 1 hydrochloric acid and 1 g. of barium chloride crystals (BaCl2.2H~0)in 100 cc. of water. This is nearly the same as adding to a volume of 10 cc. 1 cc. of dilute hydrochloric acid (1 part strong acid diluted to 20) and 1 cc. of barium chloride solution containing 10 g. BaC12.2HzO in 100 cc. Under the conditions given above it may be possible to obtain a visible precipitate with 0.01 mg. of sob, but the turbidity is so slight and so little more than may be found without addition of sulfate that i t would not be well to recommend i t as a standard limit. With 0.03 mg. of sod, a definite turbidity is obtained consistently. With more than 0.05 mg., the turbidity is greater than is desirable in a limiting test. I n testing nitric acid for sulfate the bulk of the sample must be evaporated before testing. To prevent loss of sulfate a small
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quantity of sodium carbonate or other alkali is added. For testing fairly pure acid 0.010 g. NanCOa is sufficient to hold the sulfate. As little as 0.001 g. might be used, but the results are not so consistent. I f a 20-g. sample of acid is taken i t will weigh about 28 g. A limit of turbidity corresponding to 0.03 mg. of SO4 will represent 0.000107 per cent, or for all practical purposes 0.0001 per cent. This is not an impractical standard of purity and insures good enough acid for nearly every need. If a higher purity is demanded the size of sample for test can be increased. Details of the proposed standard and test are given in the following summary.
SUMMARY Standards for impurities in chemicals which depend on tests which produce a precipitate should require that a definite volume of a solution of the chemical to which the prescribed quantities of reagents are added shall show no more turbidity than is produced when the same quantities of reagents are added to an equal volume of distilled water containing a definite quantity of the impurity. If possible, the quantities of reagents should be such that the presence of the salt being tested will have no appreciable influence on the result. Any unavoidable effect of this nature must be recognized in the statement of the per cent of impurity represented by the test. So far as possible the tests should require no unusual apparatus or reagents. Reagent nitric acid should contain less than 0.0001 per cent of sulfate (504) as shown by the following test: To 20 cc. of nitric acid add 0.01 g. of sodium carbonate and evaporate to dryness. Take up in 2 or 3 cc. of water, filter, and make to a volume of 10 cc. in a test tube. Add 1 cc. of dilute hydrochloric acid (1 part of strong acid made to 20 parts) and 1 cc. of barium chloride solution (10 g. BaC12.2Hz0 in 100 cc.), and mix well. If the sodium carbonate is not known to be free from sulfate, evaporate a solution of 0.01 g. in a few cc. of water with sulfuric acid equivalent to 0.03 mg. SO1 and 0.1 cc. of the nitric acid, and treat the residue like that from the sample. If the sodium carbonate is known to be free from sulfate the standard may be made up without it. At the end of 10 min. compare the turbidities by viewing a dark background through the depth of liquid in the tubes. The turbidity due to the sample shall not be as great as that of the standard.
SOCIAL INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS Social Research By H.W. Jordan SYRACUSE, N. Y.
unless i t be accompanied by constructive action. Through three centuries America has been a busy laboratory where earnest, conscientious men and women have experimented to attain the government and social life they believed best. Many of them, in early days all of them, came from countries of Europe where their opinions were considered destructive to the then existing order and their utterances were suppressed by imprisonment or worse. These people of vision, impelled by their convictions, transformed their criticism into action which resulted in our American republic. They secured a far higher average of success in their pioneer experiments than we chemists or engineers do in our technical research, because they worked in close harmony with the creative action of laws of biology, which have been recognized only recently as the eternal ruling forces of social evolution. The simple social and economic development of our country, up to the opening of the epoch of complex industrial specialization, was fashioned after the biological law that those individuals or species which prove most enduring are of generalized type. Our nation 1 U. S. Geological Survey, Water-Supply Paper 161 (1906). CRITICISM BECOMES PLATITUDE AND OF SMALL INFLUENCE
was unique and substantial because the people who composed it were individually versatile and self-reliant. The whole is the sum of its parts. THE EXTREME SPECIALIZATION that arose from intensive application of science to industry caused an abrupt departure from our distinctive American laboratory methods of social growth. The aggressive, far-sighted sort of folks who wrought our successful social experiment were drawn away, into leadership of the interesting, profitable, new pioneer domain of industrial science; America’s second frontier. Our social experiment began, about 1880, to be stripped of its creative men. Their elimination was well nigh complete ten years later. Since then our government and social institutions have existed on the humus of culture that accumulated in our social soil while cultivated by the first set of American pioneers Erom Elder Brewster, LaSalle, William Penn and Washington to John Marshall, Lincoln, John Sherman and Phillips Brooks. THE SITUATION HAS BECOME STEADILY WORSE in both America and England. As Alfred G. Gardiner says in the August Atlantic Moathly, “The transfer of power from the educated middle classes to the mass of the people, while a just and inevitable
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development of the democratic idea, was productive of results which were not wholly salutary. The appeal ceased to be to an instructed community, which could be reached by argument, and passed to the millions who had neither the taste nor the time for the consideration of affairs, and became interested in them only when passion was aroused.” OF THE THREE PROFESSIONS, MEDICINE ALONE, since 1880, has kept pace with indust.ry by means of persistent, profound research. Law and church stood still, lost influence and declined in esteem. They not only devised few methods of social research, but were indifferent to science. They ttceived little encouragement in research from static, financial powers. The recent social survey of industry, undertaken b! the interchurch organization, quickly ran onto financial rocks and sunk. Secondary education was equally impervious to science. Hence it came to pass that few effective social measures have been originated in accordance with constructive biology. With one exception, no new order of social life has been evolved in tune with modern, specialized industry. That exception is that most of our progressive, social measures have been those of sanitation and public hygiene, in the field of the physicians. The Panama Canal was impossible until physicians and engineers tackled it under Roosevelt, the last great American pioneer. Our governmental and social practices are largely those of the early nineteenth century New England village, stretched, distorted and torn by static legislation enacted wholly without regard to biology or evolution, in well-intentioned but hopeless efforts to cover twentieth century, dynamic, metropolitan civilization. When exploration, experiment and research stop in the chemical or physical laboratory, stagnation, mediocrity and retrogression quickly become supreme. The social laboratory reacts in like manner. The laws of social action, like those of physics and chemistry, are eternal and immutable, though but recently discovered. We can ignore them no longer. “THERE CAN BE K O REPUBLIC WHERE THERE IS NO FRONTIER.”
Chemists and engineers need keep that fact ever in mind. America has explored and annexed two frontiers. The first was that of the wilderness, of the land of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown t3 California and back to Oklahoma. The wave of pioneer land exploration subsided into slack water with the homesteading of the last of the free land. With its subsidence, the inspiring urge of creative government and social institutions soon sank to level mediocrity. Our land pioneer epoch was that of the homesteader, the homebuilder, who was earnest and constructive in the arts of government, education and religion. Possession of land, that each settler had won from the wilderness, made those pioneers homeowning, conservative progressives. In Russia Bolshevism is subsiding, now that the peasants own the land they cultivate. In America, I. W. W. membership is recruited from the landless, homeless, unmarried, casual. laborers, who have given no hostages to society. “The rapid urbanization of the country population is a serious matter. It was the chief cause of the fall of Rome,” says Dr. John J. Tigert, United States Commissioner of Education. Nobody gets excited over a rented flat, or the third floor back, unless the janitor shuts off the heat. Then we get so mad that we go to a picture show. The rented flat, Greek restaurant, and the folding single bed loom large in OUR SECOND FRONTIER, WHICH IS THAT OF THE WILDERNESS OF SCIENCE APPLIED TO POWER DRIVEN INDUSTRY; ,
the wilderness of contact sulfuric acid, dynamo, gasoline engine, phonograph, automobile, cinema and aeroplane. The chemists’ and engineers’ development of this new territory has brought maximum physical comfort, with steadily diminishing home ties and declining intellectual, spiritual idealism, upon which America was built. OUR INDUSTRIAL PRONTIER HAS BEEN FULLY EXPLORED, stand-
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ardized and brought under automatic machine, volumetric titration control by scientific research. And superpressure of the World War forced plant construction and technical education far in excess of normal requirements for some years to come. Technical schools are turning out carload-lots of chemists and engineers, many of them misgulded youths whose mothers want a chemist in the family because the Gopher Prairie Gazette insists that this is a chemical engineering age. The future cannot possibly require a swelling volume of industrial research or of physical growth sufficient to employ such a steadily increasing proportion of chemists and engineers as did the past forty years. SINCE THE WORLD WAR, Wl3 ARE CONFRONTED BY A THIRD FRONTIER. It is the wilderness of social industrial relations, the
wilderness of government, secondary education and religion, with restoration of each to its former, necessary position of creative influence. Food, clothing, housing, immigration, home ownership and full utilization of land; creative forces of world cooperative peace, rather than nationalistic forces of mutual destruction; these are subjects to which the chemist and engineer of the next two score years must apply his research. He needs to attune them with the industrial world which he brought into existence the past four decades. How can he do this task? By the same agency through which he evolved catalytic maleic acid, gasoline engine and aeroplane. By experimentation and scientific research, by science applied to the social arts, as it has been applied to the mechanic arts. Our next article will present a practical, proven, workable plan, by which this can be done.
“The Engineers and The Price System” is the title of a recent, timely book by Thorstein Veblen. I n it the author discusses nonresident, arbitrary, financial control of the great technical industries which the present generation of chemists and engineers have evolved by scientific research. “It is still the unbroken privilege of the financial management and :ts financial agents to hire and fire,” says Veblen. “Right lately the technologists have begun to become uneasily class conscious and to reflect that they together constitute the indispensable General Staff of the industrial system. Their class consciousness has taken the immediate form of a growing sense of waste and confusion in the management of industry by the financial agents of the absentee owners. They are beginning to take stock of that allpervading mismanagement of industry that is inseparable from its control for commercial ends. All of which brings home a realization of their own shame and of damage to the common good. So the engineers are beginning to draw together and ask themselves, WHAT ABOUT IT?” One answer that engineers are giving is that of the Federated Engineering Council in the recent disclosures made by their Committee on the Elimination of Waste in Industry. The widespread realization of these conditions is further proved by an article-“Root, Hog, or Die,” by Philip Cabot in the August Atlantic Molzthly where, in discussing the collapse of New England railroads, he attributes their desperate condition to nonresident management and conflicting government control. Describing the spirit of their operation in the profitable days when Boston and Maine, and New Haven, sold for years far above par, Mr. Cabot says, “It was the result of a great local enterprise, owned, managed and operated by local men, on whom the responsibility for success had been squarely placed, and who had been allowed relative freedom of action.” And, we may add, who were assured life-long careers as railroad men. “Current argument is largely controlled and its lines directed by the hoary tradition that the problem is a financial one, to be settled like a sum in arithmetic, notwithstanding the crop of failures which this method has produced in the past. But one is tempted to suggest that an experiment in dealing with it primarily as a
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human problem could not be a worse failure, and might succeed. The railroads of New England must be owned, managed, and operated by men whose homes and hearts, as well as their heads, are in New England,” says Cabot. Veblen’s “Engineers and The Price System” is a frank, searching analysis of social industrial conditions, well worthy of careful reading and consideration. “The Fruits of Victory,” by Norman Angell, just published by The Century Company, should be read in conjunction with Veblen’s book. Mr. Angell is a prophet whose prophecies have come true. He calls attention to the breakdown of the transport and credit system, in Europe as in America; to the pressure of industrial city populations upon the means of subsistence, a biological pressure that is raising questions of American and world statesmanship that cannot be relieved, nor diverted to constructive work, by static, standpat, unscientific, selfish, partisan, class legislation. He cites the world general trend toward village and farm life, a movement impelled by the need to be close to food supply. “All else can be jettisoned in our complex civilization, provided only that the stomach can be filled.” The collapse of financial and governmental unscientific management brings the engineers’ industrial world to the condition that, “On the one side millions are perishing for lack of corn or
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cotton; while on the other corn and cotton are in such abundance that they are burned, and their producers face bankruptcy.” “Much of the dense population of Europe,” and we may include that of industrial America, “can only live a t a standard necessary for civilization-leisure, social peace, individual freedom-by means of certain cooperative processes, which must be carried on largely across frontiers.” Continuance of profitable business depends upon raising the cultural standards of the world’s people; the standards, not of the few, but of the many. HIS CONCLUSIONS ARE ALMOST IDENTICAL WITH THOSE OF Conklin, Korzybski and other social biologists, that we need devise new social economic methods, based on the law of evolution that specialization be counterbalanced by cooperation, else it destroy us; and that ancient methods of finance, diplomacy Rnd government must give way, under biological pressure, to science applied to the social and economic arts. That the individual shall be restored to full, normal individuality, like that of the American pioneer, even though this may involve the unscrambling of some existing huge economic aggregations and their reversion, in accordance with biology, to smaller units working as in Denmark, in complete national cooperation; and that public opinion shall be founded on whole facts made clear by science, rather than on half truths muddled by a sensational press.
SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES Sixty-second Meeting, American Chemical Society, New York, N. Y., September 6 to 10, 1921 Program of Papers GENERALMEETING E. TEEPLE,Chairman New York Section. Address of Welcome. EDGAR F. SMITH,President, American Chemical Society. Response. FRANCIS P. GARVAN, President, Chemical Foundation. Chemistry and the State. SIR WILGIAMJ. POPE. Modern Developments in War Making. PROFESSOR R. F. RUTTAN. Organization of Industrial Research in Canada. JOHN
INTERNATIONAL MEETING Chemistry and Civilization. DR. EDGARF. SMITFI,Provost Emeritus, University of Pennsylvmia, in the chair. CHAS.BASKERVILLE, Director of the Laboratories, College of the City of New York; Chairman, International Committee. Science an3 Civilization: The Role of Chemistry. A. D. LITTLE,Chemical Engineer and Technologist, Boston, Mass. Energy: ’ Its Sources and Future Possibilities. LEO H. BABKBLAND, Honorary Professor of Chemical Engineering, Columbia University. The Engineer: Human and Superior Direction of Power. SIR WILLIAMPOPE, Professor of Chemistry, Cambridge University. Chemistry and Life, WILLISR. WEITNEY,Head of Research Department, General Electric Company. Theories. C. E. K. MEES, Head of Research Department, Eastman Kodak Company. Research Applied to the World’s Work, ERNSTCOHEN,Professor of Chemistry, University of Utrecht. Problem of Diffusion and Its Bearing o n Civilization. Professor of Physical Chemistry, Cornel1 University. W. D. BANCROFT, Catalysis: The New Economic Factor. PUBLIC MEETING Presentation of Priestley Portrait by C. A. BROWNS. F. SWITH. President’s Address-Progress in Chemistry. EDGAR AGRICULTURAL AND FOOD CHEMISTRY DIVISION C. E. COATES,Chairman T. J. BRYAN, Secretary 1. CLARKEE. DAVIS AND EARL T.OAKES.The Testing and Grading of Food Gelatins. 2. HARRISON HALE AND WM. L. BLEBCKER. Chlorine a s a Germicide for Milk and Milk Products. 3. H. E. BARNARD.The Inadequacy of Analytical Data.
4. CLARKE E. DAVISAND D. J. MAVEETY. The Chemistry of Leavening
Agents. (Lantern.) 6. N. E. GORDON.Availability of Salts in Soils. (Lantern.) 6 . C. A. PETERS AND R. K. STRATFORD. The Effect of Pectin, Acid and Sugar on the Character of Gels. (Lantern.) 7. J. W. READAND BARNETTSURE. Nutritive Value of the Georgia Velvet Bean (Stieilobium deeringanum) : Supplementary Relationship of Whole and Skimmed Milk to the Hulled Seed and the Whole Plant. (Lantern.) SUREAND J. W. READ. Nutritive Value of the Georgia Vel8. BARNETT vet Bean (Stieilobium deerinpanurn) : ( a ) Supplementary Relationship of Leaf and the Hulls to Seed; (b) Nutritive Value of the Whole Plant. (Lantern.) 9. J. W. READ AND BARNETTSURE. Calcium Chloride a s a Mineral Supplement In the Ration. (Preliminary Report.) 10. C. E. COATESAND A. F. KIDDER. Sugar Beets in Louisiana. 11. EDWARD F. KOHMAN. Causes of Hominy Black. 12. L. W FERRIS. The Volatile Acids and the Volatile Oxidizable Substances of Cream and Experimental Butter. 13. L. W. FERRIS.Some Determinations on the Soluble Nitrogen Compounds of Cream and Butter. 14. L. W. FERRIS.A Method fortbe Determination of Amino Nitrogen and Ammonia in Cream and Butter. 13. 0. L. EVENSONAND L. W. FERRIS.The Viscosity of Natural and Remade Milk. 16. H. A. NOYES. Composition Basis for Considering the Water Requirements of Plants. BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY DIVISION ARTHURW. Dox, Chairman HOWARD B. LEWIS,Secrelary I-Symposium on Vitamines. HENRYC. SHERMAN, Chairman 1. CasrMIR FUNK.The Antineuritic Vitamine. 2. ATEERTONSEIDELL.Experiments on the Isolation of Crystalline Antineuritic Vitamine. 3. A. F. HESS. The Antiscorbutic Vitamine. 4. R. ADAMSDUTCHBR. Factors Influencing the Vitamine Content of Food Materials. 6. A. D. EMMETT.Standardized Methods for the Study of Vitamines. 6. R. R. WILLIAVS. Vitamines from the Standpoint of Structural Chemistry. 7. V. K.LA MER. Vitamines from the Standpoint of Physical Chemistry. General Discussion: KATHERINEBLUNT, G. H. A. CLOWESAND OTEBRS. 8. J. S. HUGHES,J. B. FITCH A N D H. W. CAVE. The Influence of the Vitamine Content of a Feed on the Nutritive Value of the Milk Produced. (Lantern.) 9. R. A. DUTCHER AND C. W. ACKERSON.The Influence of Excessive Oxidation upon the Nutritive and Antiscorbutic Properties of Cow’s Milk. (Lantern)
