Mar., 1921
T H E J O U R N A L OF I N D U S T R I A L A N D E N G I N E E R I N G C H E M I S T R Y SPARE TIME
By H. W.Jordan SYRACUSE, N E W
YORK
Received February 7, 1921
“DO married men live longer, or does it only seem longer?” Charles A. Dana used to ask in the iVew York Sun. A similar query confronts us. Is life easier, or do we only think it easier? Are we growing more versatile, now that power driven machinery does the work we used to do with our muscles? Are we putting more into life than we take out, and building a reserve of interests to draw upon after the age of fifty? Electric power and lighting have added one day a week to our spare time. Are we using those hours to gain superior skill of mind and of senses? The easiest way is not always the best. Some well-meaning but misguided persons feel sorry for animals. They put sweaters on dogs and feed them mushy food instead of cheap, tough meat and bones, and they fix soft pillows for them to sleep on alongside the radiator. It doesn’t help the dog. When he falls afoul of a real dog that has led a dog’s life, the dog with the sweater usually returns home looking like a shredded wheat biscuit, if he returns a t all. Even though he escape that swift fate, we know that he will lose his teeth, grow blind, and die several years earlier than if he were to run a t large on a farm, eat bones, and sleep in the haymow. I once saw the keeper throw a loaf oC hard Vienna bread to a bear that had been raised in the Bronx Park Zoo. He broke it open, scooped out the soft inside, ate it, and threw the rest away. That is what civilization does to bears. I t is becoming a serious question if the same thing is not happening to us, through a law of evolution that has begun destructive action. This law of evolution is, that increasing specialization and peculiar fitness for any special condition of life mean unfitness Cor other and different conditions. When specialization in any one direction goes so far as to unfit us for other and general conditions, then the chances for survival are greatly reduced. Sooner or later the narrow, specialized species becomes extinct or returns to a more generalized type. That is happening in America. Most of the work now done in factories by machinery used to be done by hand a t home. Soap, clothiqg, tablecloths, sheets, and all else were made a t home. Every ounce of food was cooked or preserved there, and cooking was a household art. To-day, if we lost our can openers we would starve. We used to do any job that came our way, do it right the first time, and do it alone. Electricity and the gasoline engine brought widely distributed, finely subdivided light, transportation and power, and highly specialized work. In Chicago, forty-one men join in the job of killing a steer. Forty-one years ago, one man killed a steer. What is more, he raised the steer. In raising him, he gained far more experience in real life than any of the fortyone can possibly accumulate to-day. Raising cattle takes muscle and time, but it builds character, foresight, and self-reliance. I t is generalized work. The specialized work of the forty-one has set our law of evolution in action, namely, that when specialization goes so far that it fits us to do only one thing, we lose our self-reliance and tend to become extinct, or we return to our generalized life. Proof of this is the rapidly increasing demand that the government organize and do everything. We insist that the state legislature pass laws to run the cities, and we implore Congress to regulate the price of wheat and peanuts. The more government does, the more we want it to do. Like the pet dog in the pink sweater, we refuse t o eat, unless it be brought to us and we be coaxed to eat sweetened food that we don’t need to chew. We do not realize how quickly we lose valuable powers of hand, eye, and ear, that have taken ages to acquire. Our New York and New England forefathers got most of their meat by hunting for it in the woods, instead of by telephoning to have it delivered
253:
at the house and charged on the bill. They could track game for miles, as a hound does a fox. The hunter’s sense of trailing is lost to us city dwellers. Many other keen faculties of ear, eye or hand that we were forced to use before we got our easy jobs on automatic machines are fading away. We are so thoroughly contented with our power driven, short hour work that we have not taken the trouble to think up new, personal, improving activities to keep our hands and heads busy through that extra day a week that electricity has given us. We have lazily given up individual pursuits and have fallen victims of commercialized amusement and crowd habits that steadily drag us deeper into passive life. We sit in crowds on bleachers or in dark rooms, to watch small groups of active people, paid to exercise for us, some of whom are only photographic images, that do not require even the exertion of applause. Our second generation of automatic machine people, born the past thirty years, know nothing of the self-reliant life of their American grandparents. They have become far more passive than their parents. They know only one or two kinds of work, and if those stop, many of them think they cannot earn a living a t anything else. The law of evolution begins to act. This rapid, broadspread decline in the personal resourcefulness of our people, their tendency to lean on crowds and the government, is a serious social condition. If we allow it to grow, the end is the inevitable one of evolution. Either we shall become a weak, inferior nation with a declining birthrate ending in extinction, or we shall be conquered by a more virile and versatile people of generalized type, who will come in, round us up, and put us on reservations. Our best national defense is that we each be versatile in many lines outside the day’s work. If we bowl, play in the band or take part in a minstrel show, let us put our every ounce of energy and brain into it. If it be checkers, or whist, get the best books on the subject, study the play, and learn it to its depths. When that is conquered, take up other subjects and become master of each, in its turn. “Hit the line hard,” said Roosevelt, who made himself an expert in everything he undertook. The highly specialized life that we limit to the day’s work and to passive spare time makes us narrow, selfish, and intolerant. It benumbs our intellectual and social senses. “Specialists are more or less indifferent to intellectual acquirements and gifts that lie outside their specialty. When they air their ideas upon social or philosophic topics, they utterly astound one by their primitive and rustic conceptions.” When we consider that several great civilizations have become completely extinct in Asia, the Greek Islands, Egypt, Yucatan, and Peru, we must not be too sure of the endurance of American civilization, if we disregard evolution by wasting our spare time. City life does not permit strenuous, outdoor, muscular action, but it offers a wide range of keenly entertaining, personal interests that compel skilful use of the hands, and force us to see straight, hear straight, and think straight. We need, each, to be an amateur expert in many interesting, personal things, that we do for the love-the amour-of the working. A splendid feature of the war was the prolonged session of knitting that brought back the nimbleness of fingers and attention to color and design that our grandmothers had in patchwork quilt days. Until we try it, we cannot realize the joy, health and friendship that spring from amateur music, amateur drama or gardening, and from social subjects studied alone or in classes to stimulate discussion and public speaking. All these keep our bodies young and our minds clear, so that we put more into life than we take out of it. One ol the youngest citizens of Syracuse is a clergyman of some seventy years, whose ardent love of roses keeps him in such splendid condition that he swims a mile or more a t a time in summer, for the love of the swimming. Life, like a business enterprise, fails and dies if it does not grow. In the easy satisfaction that arose from the flood of talk-
254
T H E JOURNAL OF I N D U S T R I A L A N D ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
ing machines and other semi-automatic pleasure-giving devices that burst upon us about 1890, we have been like a child in the week after Christmas. But the New Year is at hand. Some of our toys are getting worn and commonplace. Even moving pictures cannot be endured yesterday, to-day, and forever. So we must find substantial, individual spare-time interests that build personal character, and a strong nation. If we don’t, somebody will be accepting a mandate over us.
PRESIDENT SMITH ADDRESSES THE NEW YORK CHEMICAL SOCIETIES A t the joint meeting of the New York chemical societies held under the auspices of the New York Section of the American Electrochemical Society in Rumford Hall, Chemists’ Club, on Friday evening, February 11, 1921, Dr. Charles A. Doremus introduced President Edgar Fahs Smith of the American Chemical Society as the speaker of the evening. In the course of his remarks, Dr. Doremus presented to the Chemists’ Club a picture of Robert Hare, together with pictures of apparatus which he used in his experiments. I n replying to Dr. Doremus’ remarks, Dr. Smith paid tribute to Robert Hare, James Woodhouse, and those other early American chemists who established chemistry in America on a firm basis. I n the course of reminiscences over the twenty-five years since his former presidency, Dr. Smith referred especially to the remarkable development of the Society’s journals from the struggling early days of the Journal of the American Chemical Society until, as he said, they have arrived “at such a stage that the world respects them, the world looks to them, the world says America is doing something that is worth while in the various fields of chemistry.” Referring to his years of executive and administrative work, Dr. Smith said, “I have often wondered why these institutions of learning have dropped down upon quite a number of chemists and made them their executive officers. And you know I have reached the conclusion that chemists are a pretty patient sort of people. Perhaps the experimental work makes them patient. When we want to hurry things, and when we do, we spoil them. But I fancy that it is not only patience we acquire, a good deal of patience, but we respect details, and if you quizzed all men who have been chemists in their day and have been college presidents, you .would find that the people about them would say, ‘We put him there because he is a good detail man.’ ” Dr. Smith also warned the young man, “NO matter how alluring the invitation may be to assume the president’s chair, tell them there is something in the laboratory that you love better.” Coming to the subject of research, Dr. Smith said: RESEARCH
There isn’t anything particularly new in research that I am capable of elaborating, for i t is a subject which has been widely and intimately discussed many times. This fact, however, that it has been a subject of frequent debate, makes it interesting apart from every other consideration. The mere mention of research puts in motion in every one of us, a vast multitude of thoughts which, if we were to utter, would provoke animated, perhaps acrimonious and endless discussion, at the close of which, very likely, few of us would be in sweet harmony. Yet the frailty of our nature continues t o prompt us to prolong the discussion in spite of the certain disagreements upon which we shall come. Because I’ve been a teacher of our science for forty-four years, I shall make bold to present to you one or two thoughts which ‘I’ve carried about with me for a long time. After a basal training in the old classical curriculum with a great deal of extra time in chemistry and allied subjects, I was plunged, early in the seventies, into a German laboratory atmos-
Vbl. 13, No. 3
phere, where one heard little else than research. It wasn’t strange that in due course I acquired the tendencies and the language of my surroundings, and that I was soon heard chanting eins, zwei, drei-am Hydroxyl forbei, and that my conception of research in large measure consisted of studies of the position of substituents in the benzene nucleus with an accompanying skill in representing, on a flat surface, the most astounding changes in the benzene hexagon-even extending as far as the erection of Luft schloss~rl These fanciful things were most attractive; and delighted, indeed, was I, when I could draw for my own delectation and that of my indulgent friends, the most involved, intricate, and architecturally attractive figures which unconsciously led me to think of the molecules upon which I was engaged as possessing some such alluring internal arrangement. Yes, I soared aloft, elated beyond expression; for I was actually engaged in research. The quantitative determination of .a few elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, the halogens, etc., didn’t signify in the least. All that was easy, despite my blind stumbling along this road. There was one, and only one, respectable field in which a chemist could do research and that was in the organic field (so I thought). All other chemical fields were exhausted, and shou‘d I say it-they were not the fields in which real doctors could afford to waste time and thought. I had become a researcher-an investigator-and my field was the single field deserving consideration. What poor unfortunate simpletons were they who wrestled with problems in inorganic, analytical, agricultural, applied, and physical chemistry! They had my commiseration! And there soon came to my attention that chemists were of two breeds-pure and impure. The pure were those who occupied themselves with the profoundest problems, while the impure were they who spent their days and nights in works, never reading papers or entering into discussions; just hanging around a t chemical society meetings, hoping to pick up the crumbs which fell here and there from the tables of the savants. The Annalen and the Berichte seemed the only worth-while journals. But disillusionment was on its way. Fate placed monazite sands in my hands for careful analytical study. Just one year and a half of time from the precious organic field with daily baffling experiences with monazite! New elements appeared. Never before had I met them outside of textbooks. My introduction to them was jerky and awkward. Mutely, I strove t o understand. Night after night I lay awake cogitating! At last I humbly confessed (to myself) a profound ignorance as t o the nature of my new acquaintances. But I did not turn my back upon them-not at all. I doggedly pushed in upon them and made them tell me their stories, so that eventually I emerged from an eighteen months’ enthrallment quite prepared to acknowledge that there were other elements than carbon and that they-each one of them-had their own migrations and experiences to narrate. All this broadened the horizon and outlook of this particular researcher! It also caused him to extend his acquaintance to other elements until he was a t last able to say that he had been introduced to every element known a t the time of his Wanderjahr. It was a delightful experience in every particular. There were, of course, many anxious periods; but, these passed, the “going was good.” There were naturally discouragements and strong temptations to turn aside and even to go back to those alluring compounds with the sesqui-pedalian names, but something within said, “go on.” This was sternly said, and acted like a spur. Not to weary you, this researcher came out of his journey deeply humbled in spirit, but quite certain that he was now becoming a real chemist. He modestly thought that he had got beyond his a, b, c’s, could actually spell and put words together. Yes, he had acquired a respect for analysis, learned to use the spectroscope with ease and confidence, determined specific heats
