May, 1933
I N D U ST R I A L A N D E N G I N E E R I N G C H E M I ST R Y
could place this subject before the people and they would recognize that many of the high-sounding words and formulas that chemists use are really nothing but bread and butter and bacon and eggs; if they were translated into that form, chemists would be less wonderful in the sight of these people, and perhaps more human. A complicated industry like chemistry carries with it a nomenclature which is known only to the select few, and many of the popular articles in the newspapers are not, always true to fact, not because chemists will them to be that, but because the reporter who writes them cannot understand what the chemist says, and he writes the article in accordance with his understanding of what is said; the result is usually garbled and misstated. We need more of the practical and commonplace in chemical education today so that the average person can understand and so that it will a t least remove from him his gullibility as to what he may read in special books on diet and special cures for falling hair. I n the primary form of education this wonderful story of materials should be introduced, because that is all your chemistry is; it is everywhere, it is everything. The consciousness that everything is chemical, that a piece of metal is chemical, and that the rust on an iron bridge is just as much iron oxide as if it were in a bottle, should be a part of common knowledge. If I were designing an engineering course in a university I would require four gears of chemistry and four years of physics; and if they had room for anything else, that would be all right. Not that I want all engineers to be laboratory chemists, but it is possible to have four wonderful years in chemistry and never go into a chemical laboratory. It is possible to show the relationships of the molecular structures one to another and what they can do under various conditions, without manipulating them a t all. It is not necessary for a man to know how to analyze materials if he understands the relationships enough to choose the properly trained expert when the occasion arises. Our particular automotive industry is really a chemical industry because everything we use is chemical. One of our main problems is concerned with the instantaneous chemical reaction produced by hydrocarbons of the structure called paraffin, which means L‘slow-acting.” But we do not find them to be that a t all. They are, in fact, too fast in action sometimes. We do not know the simplest elementary things about gasoline-why it burns in air or how. Just the other day I read a learned paper by two physicists on the effect of spark in a gasoline engine. One said the spark did one thing and the other man said it did another, and this is typical of technical discussions. There is, therefore, a real need for the AMERICAS CHEMICAL SOCIETY to lay a broader foundation of understanding relative to the particular things we are doing and why we are doing them. It is perfectly evident that, when you talk to the layman on the street, a chemical compound is to him far apart from anything he is interested in, and the same holds true in regard to our industrial operations. We regard chemistry as a science, and my definition of a science is something you do not know much about, because as soon as you understand a thing it is no longer scientific. Consequently, the more scientific it is; the less you are supposed to know about it. We want to get to the people a knowledge of chemistry so that they will have an appreciation of what it is. YOUhear today over the radio the discussion as to whether your system should be acid or alkaline. The average person says, “I am suffering from an acid system.” If you ask him what he means, he does not know, but he heard it over the radio. People are today glibly talking about vitamins, enzymes, and proteins; they should find out what those things are because they may see that they know all about them under
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another name. They may find on deeper analysis that there are two names for the same thing which will give them carte blanche for saying that they understand it. To illustrate, I was once discussing radiation with some learned physicists. They said: “Why are you worrying about that? It is down in the books with all the mathematical formulas for it. Just give us, for illustration, one of the problems that is worrying you.” I said: ‘‘Why can I see through a pane of glass? I do not know whether the light comes through the glass or whether it is regenerated on the other side.” The reply was: “That is quite simple. You can see through a pane of glass because it is transparent.’’ I turned to the dictionary and found that transparent means something you can see through; consequently, if you know these things by the two names you seem to have a perfect understanding of them. Because of the extreme divisibility and specialty of the things with which we work, we lose our contact with the basic fundamentals. We need to go back and seek the essentials of this molecule building. Why do molecules have certain physical properties, why do they behave in certain ways? For instance, we might inquire into what we mean by specific heats and why we are interested in them. I read a book not long ago on specific heats in which the first ten pages were supposed to give the fundamentals. The next eighty pages were a discussion of the mathematical features of the pyrometrical furnace. After I finished this book, I went to the plant and said, “From now on we will measure all our specific heats because we cannot take a chance on guessing a t them.” Maybe there are some technicalities in measuring specific heat, but I think the molecule understands why it has specific heat and what it is used for, so, if we can imagine ourselves being molecules for a while, maybe we can work it out that way.
ROLEOF CHEhlISTS IN THE DEPRESSION The possibilities of progress in chemistry are simply enormous. It concerns everything there is, even our thoughts. That is why I cannot become upset about our present situation, for I have such intense confidence in the common sense of the American people and the American technical organizations that nobody can disturb me, regardless of how we got into it, regardless of whose fault it is. It is by such an organization as the AMERICAN C m n i I c A L SOCIETY, with its sincerity, its knowledge, and its ability to think clearly on complicated subjects that a solution may be found. Chemists may have to forget specific chemistry and see if they can do something to affect to a greater degree our mental state, because that is really all it is. As me think, so we are; and, if we can modify that thinking by chemical processes, let us get a t it tomorrow. We have in America resources such as few countries possess, We have almost every one of the fundamentals-commodities for food and clothing, factories, skilled workmen, people who would like to buy. We are ready to go, but there is something which keeps things from moving. Nevertheless, there is a slight movement of circulation, there are a few people who want things badly enough to part with their money, and a great many people would like to buy and would like to spend their money if they did not feel they would be criticized for doing it. If we can help break down that idea, the movement will be started. I want to tell you a little story about gold because it is so important in connection with the so-called gold standard. As a chemical it is an important element but without much use. They got together all the gold in the world, put it on board a battleship, and deposited it on an island that was accessible only through great engineering feats and ingenuity. Great
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vaults were built, and above eacli door was the name of every nation in the world. The gold was left with a group of experts, who also had a radio receiver, and the battleships returned home. Each year they went hack and took supplies, and each day the great financiers of the world radioed this island to transfer a certain number of dollars from this country’s vault to that country’s vault; the men on the island moved the gold around from place to place and the trade balance was thereby kept correct. One year the battleship found that the island was gone; it bad sunk into the sea. However, the officersreported a t home that it was still there. the financiers continued to radio just the same, and business went on just as well as ever. So, after all, gold today is exactly the same as our standard meter. That is a meter bar, and we do not need ten thousand accurate meter ham, but we have the situation in the case of gold largely because of the fact that gold was a material for ornamentation greatly adored by savage women. The gold standard was determined by how many gold ornaments a chief was willing to get for his ladylove. Because of that it still holds its value to the human race. Let us think of it in this way: In the infancy of the science years ago, chemists were concerned with the transmutation of materials largely into gold. What would happen if someone were to say, “We now know how to produce gold for one dollar a pound?” Would it affect us in any way? It would not change us biologically, or the kind of food we eat, or the clothes we wear, or the houses we live in, or anything we need, and we would go on just exactly the same. So, nobody can today disturb me, regardless of the difficulties we are in, while we have organizations such as this S O C I ~ Y ,having within them the intellectual and potential ability to workout asolution to thesedifhlties. We have been educating thousands of people, and people are thinking much better today than ever before. We have thousands of magazines and out of this reading there are some fundamcntal things which belong to you and to me as individuals, and to our welfare and the welfare of the future. So, during this time of depression we must think and think hard about how we should attack our problems, not from the standpoint of what we have done, but by throwing these precedents away and supposing that we are meeting them today for the first time. We are so often affected by things we have done as they relate to us today. We say, “We have done this a certain way,” and we continue to do i t in the same old way. We may have to reorganize; maybe we are undergoing a metamorphic change in which we are throwing off some of the old things and must pick up new ones just BS a crawlish sheds its shell and grows a new one. We may have grown to a point where many of the older limitations have outgrown their usefulness and have to be thrown away. So,
DonR
CLASSIFIEBS OPERATEIN
Vol. 25. No. 5
I believe that a clear-thinking, intelligent AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCISTY could take this problem as a new one, analyze it, and arrive a t definite conclusions. In my particular industry one of the things we deal with, and it is true in all industries because i t is 3 psychological problem, is the tremendous reversion to type. We want to keep making what we have been making even though it does not meet the circumstances. Another thing is that the generation just passing lias had in mind that it is the smartest, brightest, and best-thinking generation that is going to be born on the face of the earth, and i t has tried to plan for a long time ahead. It has tried to set up the world by a system that will run perfectly for 50 or 100 years. It will not run two days on a system because a system has intelligence only the minute it is created, and it loses intelligence the instant one of the base lines is changed in any way whatever. We have to be working all the time to readjust that situation from day to day. We are going to be just as smart tomorrow as we are today and, I hope, a lit,tlesmarter, because we ought to have learned something today and therefore we ought to be able to meet tomorrow’s problem with better and clearer minds. The next generation, if our system is correct, will be even smarter and clearer-thinking. So, instead of trying to outline the future and systematize the world for the next 50 or 100 years, let us see if we cannot clean up the mess we are in now and give things a chance to work. Again, I want to express my implicit faith in the wonderful CHEMICAL SOCIETY and every other work that the AMERICAN technical organization can do and also to say that I have never lost my confidence in American integrity, American industry, and the American form of government. We have only to believe that we are right, we have only to feel that we can do things, and that very feelimg will automatically adjust us to the ability to do it. There is one thing I am against, and that is a crystallization of the idea that the u-orld is finished, because it is not finished. We have too many people today who say, “I do not see anything ahead.’’ We ought to readjust what we have done, and it is just like trying to put together oneof these jigsaw puzzles when we have only half of the parts and some of them do not fit. If this SOCIETYand others like it will apply the same degree of mental intensity that has been exerted upon many of the technical subjects and will analyze the situation and try to formulate where we arc, how we got here, and where we would like to go, I am sure we will go forward. R X C ~ I Y EMarch D 28. 1933. Presented beiore the general meeting at tho 85th Meeting of the American Chemioel Society. Wdiingtoo, D. C..Mnroh 27 to 31. 1933.
CWSED CInCUlT IN TlrIS WET PnOCESS CEMENT MILLOF PITTSBURGH PLATEGLASSCo., ZANESVILLE, OHIO
