Many ideas and projects—big and little—can influence you, give you ideas for use in your work, and provide useful information for "current awareness." Each month I/ECs field editors and Washington staff select for detailed report and analysis, in easy reading style, some of the most timely, in research and commercial development, process design, engineering, production, and marketing areas in the chemical process industries. We present also our comments on other interesting happenings of business and professional interest.
The Chemical World Today consumer products were sold that contained bacteriostatic additives. The U. S. Process Corp. and the Permachem Corp. are probably the best known suppliers of bacteriostats. Others in the field include American Cyanamid, Caroline Aniline and Extract, and Scientific Oil Compounding. Bex Industries, with its Corobex series of compounds, claims to be the only specialist—Bex makes nothing outside of the bacteriostat field. Various quaternary ammonium compounds make u p a major part of bacteriostat sales although mercurial compounds and familiar names like hexachlorophene are also involved. Biggest Outlet
Manufacturers a r e a d d i n g bacteriostats t o more than $ 1 billion o f consumer products. Applications, as these ads f o r C o r o b e x t r e a t e d products (Bex Industries) show, run the gamut from toys t o b e d pans
Germs Beware Bacteriostats fight bacteria in textiles, hospital equipment, and a growing list of consumer products A ENERGETIC YOUNG man from New York, Bruce Stewart, has been known to go a week without changing his underwear. All the while he is doing such things as playing handball, attending Broadway shows, and holding down the presidency of Bex Industries. With Mr. Stewart it is not a case of "even your best friends won't tell you." Rather, he is just doing a bit of application research for his company. Bex Industries is one of several firms striving to make life more germfree and, in the process, more odorfree through the use of bacteriostats—• compounds which inhibit the growth of bacteria. Although the principle
of bacteriostasis is an old one (the U. S. Process Corp.'s Santized process for textiles has been around for 20 years), only recently have bacteriostats really begun to clean up. Last year more than $1 billion of
Textile products are the biggest outlet for bacteriostats. Treated items on the market include socks, underwear, tee shirts, sport shirts, dresses, yard goods, bath sets, sheets, and mattresses. In most textile uses the main function of bacteriostats is to prevent body odor from developing on fabrics. Perspiration, the kind that cools the body, comes from the eccrine glands and is an odorless body secre-
The a g a r p l a t e test is used t o measure the activity o f bacteriostats against g r a m - n e g a t i v e a n d gram-positive b a c t e r i a . A sample o f t r e a t e d product is p l a c e d on an a g a r p l a t e that has been inoculated with b a c t e r i a l culture. The size o f the zone o f inhibition ( d a r k a r e a in the p h o t o g r a p h ) is a n indication o f the bacteriostats' effectiveness. This test shows zone o f inhibition around C o r o b e x (Bex Industries) processed painted w o o d chip (right) a n d g r o w t h in contact a r e a o f unprocessed p a i n t e d w o o d chip (left) VOL. 52, NO. 3 ·
MARCH 1960
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REPORTS AND
tion that is usually not a factor in social acceptance. The big offender is the slight organic secretion that comes from the apocrine glands. However, even this is odorless and inoffensive until acted upon by bac teria. The job of the bacteriostat, then, is to inhibit bacterial growth on fabrics and thus control odor de velopment. And the compounds do work, al though with varying degrees of effectiveness and durability. Cyanamid, for instance, claims excellent control of odor on cotton, rayon, and blends washed up to 50 times. But durability is less on synthetics, and the use of a chlorine bleach during washing is not recommended. Bacteriostats based on quaternary ammonium salts run into trouble from anionic detergents; a neutrali zation reaction can take place be tween the anionic syndet and the cationic quaternary. Bex suggests quats for items that do not need washing and mercurial compounds otherwise. Most pro ducers offer a number of formula tions, each tailored to the needs of particular applications. Bacterio-
INTERPRETS
stats are applied during one of the regular textile finishing steps, and have little effect on the feel or the appearance of the fabric. Cost varies from l/t cent per pound of fabric to 2 or 3 cents. Usually the cost is not passed on to the consumer. Bacteriostats have gained a good toehold in textiles, but still have tapped only a fraction of the po tential market. And while pro ducers seek additional textile busi ness, they can also think about other items where bacteriostats could be useful. Bex Industries, for one, al ready has its compounds in a long list of items ; plastic swimming pool liners, rug cleaners, housewares, baby products, children's toys, and hospital utensils to mention a few. Hospital Tests
One company is even putting a bacteriostat into plastic playing cards and chips. Whether bacteriostats are really needed in applications like this is a point open to debate. One spot, however, where there would seem to be a clear need for bacterio stats is in hospitals. This is espe cially true, say the producers, be-
cause of the relatively recent problem of bacterial strains that are resistant to many antibiotics. Compounds supplied by Bex have been tested in the Good Samaritan Hospital (Suffern, Ν. Υ.) by Wells Laboratories of Jersey City, N. J. Normal clean-up procedures were followed using soaps, detergents, cleaners, laundry rinse, and floor wax that contained bacteriostats. Bacterial counts made in various areas 17 days after the start of the test showed 80 to 9 5 % reduction. Possible applications for bacterio stats are just about endless. Use of the compounds by makers of con sumer goods is attractive because at relatively low cost manufacturers can make germ-proofed claims about their products. However, bacterio stat producers are moving slowly, and in some cases are ready to turn away new business if the application is not logical and one that the prod uct can handle. This way the companies hope to eventually build a much larger market than if bac teriostats were immediately added at random to everything in sight. L.J.W.
A Grape by Any Other Name . . . Paper chromatography may aid wine makers in easy identification of grape varieties Γ APER CHROMATOGRAPHY may soon come to the aid of the wine maker. In California Pinot Noir grapes pro duce very fine, soft, flavorful wines just as they do in France, where they are the grapes used in making the famous Burgundies. But many of the red wine grape varieties are very similar in appearance so it is not always easy to distinguish the Pinot Noir grapes. There are, in fact, some vineyards in California where the correct name of the grapes is uncertain. Recent work by Richard E. Kepner and A. Dinsmoor Webb of the University of California in co operation with Bryce C. Rankine of the Australian Wine Research Insti tute, has led to a rather simple tech32 A
Although some detail in the chromatograms is lost in these reproductions, the wide variety of pigment patterns produced by different varieties of grapes is evident. The two Pinot Noir grapes from different locations and the Meunier and Gamay Beaujolais grapes all give identical chromatograms
nique for identifying Pinot Noir grapes. Dr. Webb and his coworkers have been investigating the anthocyan pigments in grape skins—the pig ments that are responsible for the visual appeal of many red wines. In this work they extracted the pig ments with methanolic hydrochloric acid and then separated them by paper chromatography. They found that each of the various grape varieties gave distinctive chroma tographic patterns. Furthermore, the Pinot Noir grapes and those of
INDUSTRIAL AND ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
two other varieties of the Pinot type gave simple and easily distinguished patterns. Aside from the Emperor and Tokay varieties which give two pig ment bands, most of the others have eight distinguishable pigments. But the Pinot Noir from two different locations in California and the Meunier and Gamay Beaujolais, both of which are of the Pinot type, have only four pigments. (These are not readily apparent in the black and (Continued on page 34 A)
