BOOKS
Overcoming World War IPs Rubber Shortage Reviewed by Maurice Morton
On that fateful day of Aug. 6, 1945, when the atomic age burst forth with such cataclysmic results in Hiroshima, I had mixed feelings of excitement and disappointment. Excitement, as a young scientist, at the news that the energy of the atom had actually been unleashed (we had heard rumors about such research but doubted its practical outcome so soon). Disappointment, because I felt t h a t " w e ' v e b e e n scooped!" By "we" I meant the large group of us who had been working for the past three years on another war-related research effort—synthetic rubber. I had then just completed my doctoral dissertation at McGill University in Montreal on a study of molecular-weight control in butadienestyrene emulsion copolymerization (the wartime GR-S system) and was well aware of the unique and largescale effort made by the U.S. to establish a synthetic rubber industry. This effort was, of course, classified as "confidential" during the war, and we had eagerly awaited war's end to tell our exciting story. Alas, we were suddenly overshadowed by the dawn of the atomic age. Briefly, the American synthetic rubber story of World War II went s o m e t h i n g like this. The main source of the 600,000 tons of rubber consumed annually in the U.S. (more than half the world's supply) were the plantations of the Far East. The U.S. had wisely stockpiled about 1 million tons before that source was suddenly cut off by Japan's action in December 1941. Over the next three years, the U.S. government invested some $700 million (worth at least $5 billion today) in building 51 plants for the production of monomers and polymers for synthetic rubber. Result: Production rose from 3700 tons in 1942 to 670,000 tons in 1944 (and 720,000 tons in 1945). To my knowledge, this was the 64
May 7, 1990 C&EN
Wartime rubber program helped set up a giant industry and was a model for future government funding of research "The American Synthetic Rubber Research Program" by Peter J. T. Morris, University of Pennsylvania Press, 418 Service Dr., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, 1989, 191 pages, $34.95
only case in which a giant chemical industry was set up virtually overnight. (Such a capital outlay was needed not only to produce sufficient rubber but to do so at competitive prices, something no individual company could do.) At the same time, a government-funded research and development program was set up, involving the cooperation of scientists and engineers from some 20 leading academic, industrial, and government organizations and lasting for 15 years, until the synthesis of natural rubber was finally accomplished. This was indeed heady stuff, especially to a young graduate student.
' T h e American Synthetic Rubber Research Program" by Peter J. T. Morris has a title that is somewhat misleading because the book obviously covers the whole program, both production and research aspects. (The title also should, in fact, read "U.S. Government" instead of "American.") The book is not the first on the subject, two other substantial w o r k s b e i n g Frank A. Howard's "Buna Rubber: The Birth of an Industry" (Van Nostrand, 1947) and Vernon Herbert and Attilio Bisio's "Synthetic Rubber: A Project That Had to S u c c e e d " (Greenwood Press, 1985). Unlike these other authors, Morris, a young science historian from the Open University at Milton Keynes in England, had no connection with the wartime program. He was on the staff at the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry in Philadelphia while he worked on his book as part of the center's Polymer Project. The book itself is rather short, consisting of five chapters, a brief summary, and an appendix. It is obvious that Morris has researched his subject in great depth, both by his coverage of the literature as well as by his extensive interviews with many of the principals of the government program over a period of more than two years. In other words, starting as an outsider, he has had to familiarize himself not only with the development of the government program but also with the basic principles of polymer chemistry and rubber technology. An ambitious undertaking and one, judging from his writing, accomplished with a remarkable degree of success. As might be expected in such a case, there are a number of errors in the book, although it is not possible within the confines of this brief review to discuss them individually. But, in the main, most of the facts are correctly stated. The main shortcoming of "The American Synthetic Rubber Research Program," however, is that it
actually attempts to make a judg ment on the success or failure of the research program and comes down somewhat on the side of failure. Considering the background of the author (to whom polymer chemistry was so novel that he felt importuned to "teach" it to the reader in an ap pendix called "Introduction to Poly mer Chemistry")/ as well as the com plexity of the research program un der discussion, such a conclusion borders on the arrogant. It certainly was not, and is not now, shared by the overwhelming majority of par ticipants in the wartime program. I have already noted the remark able success of the synthetic rubber production program, which obvi ously then must have had some as sistance from the research program. Furthermore, as most of us in the program agree, it was the rapid progress in the basic research that fi nally led to the solution of the ulti mate riddle—the stereospecific syn thesis of ris-polyisoprene (natural rubber) and thus to the conclusion of this mission-oriented program in 1956. Morris' pessimistic conclusions are most probably a result of his lack of understanding of the true nature of basic research and its relation, if any, to technological innovation. Ba sic, or fundamental, research cannot really be "directed" to any goal oth er than the expansion of knowledge in a given area (and even then, what is discovered in one area may, in many cases, be more relevant to an entirely different area). Hence "in novation" generally depends on the gradual accumulation of knowledge and experience, which can suddenly burst forth into a creative result. Even Morris agrees that "most, if not all, radical innovations are the unforeseen results of many years of fundamental research/' In this re spect, the synthetic rubber program followed a similar route, and was, in fact, a great spur and model for fu ture government funding of basic research at universities. I do not wish to leave the impres sion that the book pursues a consis t e n t l y pessimistic view of t h e program. In fact, Morris seems to contradict himself many times in this respect. Thus, on one page he states: " T h e academic research
groups did not extend the bound aries of p o l y m e r science v e r y much." But later on he concludes, "Once World War II was over, the researchers published 700 papers and thereby made significant contri butions to the development of poly mer science in the later 1940s and 1950s, the 'golden age of polymer chemistry,' as Cheves Walling re cently remarked." Morris also seems confused about the role of academic research in gen eral, since he also states: ' T h e uni versities also found it difficult to bridge the gap between basic re search and practical application." Were they supposed to? It is my understanding that the original purpose of this study was to record the history of the wartimeinitiated U.S. government synthetic rubber program. It might have been better if Morris had followed that objective, with due rigor and with out attempting to judge the pro gram's success or to theorize on the
relations between basic and applied research, government and industrial support, and the roots of innovation. Maurice Morton, Regents Professor Emeritus of polymer chemistry at the University of Akron, has been on the university's rubber research and chemis try department staff since 1948 and founded the Institute of Polymer Science there. D Psychoactive Drugs: Tolerance and Sensitization. A. J. Goudie, M. W. Emmett-Oglesby, editors, xv + 600 pages. Humana Press, Crescent Manor, P.O. Box 2148, Clifton, N.J. 07015. 1989. $79.50. Reality's Mirror: Exploring the Mathe matics of Symmetry. Bryan Bunch, ix + 286 pages. John Wiley & Sons, 605 Third Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. 1989. $19.95. Rubber Technology Handbook. Werner Hofmann. xxv + 611 pages. Oxford University Press, 200 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. 1989. $85. Ο
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