real world of
edited by
W.
C. FERNELIUS
Kent State University Kent. OH 44242
HARWDWITTCOFF Chem Systems. Inc.. 303 South Broadway Tarrytown. NY 10591
The G. Frederick Smith Chemical Company Loren C. McBride and Kevin L. Adams G. Frederick Smith Chemical Company, Box 23214, Columbus, OH
Editors' Note. Most chemlsby students i w k forward to heir gaduation and finding a job with an industrial, educational, or governmentorganilation. However, therearealwaysafew who by desireor necessity go into business for themselves or with a few close associates. There is no better example of thisspirit of freeenterprisethan the G. Frederick Smith Chemical Company. The editors at this lealure are happy to present an account of the development of this company.
Practically all firms active in the chemical industry today can trace their beginnings to one or two dedicated individuals, working long hours for little compensation and many times wondering if their efforts would be all in vain. This is certainly the case with the founders of the G. Frederick Smith Chemical Company, which today markets its products under the trade name of "GFS Chemicals." In 1922, G. F. Smith received his PhD in analytical chemistry from the University of Michigan where he had studied under Hobart H. Willard. He accepted a position as an instructor at the University of Illinois and began what was a fruitful career as an educator. The year 1923 found young Smith working late in his lahoratory, or his home, trying to make some compounds for research which were not available elsewhere at that time. He had published, with Willard, a paper on the use of magnesium perchlorate, a drying agent which had no equal for efficiency in moisture absorption, and numerous colleagues had written for samples to try or for more information. He felt obliged t o comply with their requests and spent much of his spare time making small amounts of the compound to distribute, in addition to doing further research on the uses of it. His capacity to make enough prodnct to comply with the requests was soon outstripped by the increasing demand, and Smith set about finding someone to make the product. The people he found were his two brothers, A. H. Smith and C. M. Smith, who were printers with a newspaper in Columbus, Ohio. Pooling their resources they started their husiness in a small (14 X 30 ft) hlock building in Columbus in 1928. The depression started shortly thereafter and the assurance of a means of livelihood was added incentive. I t is said that Smith's brothers kept up their dues in the typesetters'union "just in case." While Smith remained in the university and taught, he provided the technical expertise to the husiness, and his brothers showed real aptitudes for making things work in addition to heing good business people. The weekend trips from Urhana to Columbus were a hit more strenuous then than they would he today, but Smith knew many trainmen and got a lot of rides on freight trains. One of the early problems of manufacturing magnesium perchlorate was obtaining a suitable starting material. The best magnesium perchlorate was made from perchloric acid,
hut i t was also unavailable. so the Smiths started nroducine it and G. F. Smith did a g;eat deal of research into ways to utilize i t in analytical chemistry. His almost single-handed promotion of the use of perchloric acid and various perchlorate salts is one of the trnlv fascinatine e~isodesin chemistrv. One can hardly recall another chemiz who, for 50 years, foight a battle against indifference and misunderstanding toward a compound as Smith did for perchloric acid. He developed new methods of analvsis which used i t and made it available commercially. ~ h r o u g hwriting and lecturing he carried on an effective educational campaign on many uses for the acid. Thanks to his zeal and his investigations, perchloric acid is almost universally accepted by practicing analytical chemists. However, even today, many persons in the other fields of chemistry are unaware of the prodnct or uneducated in the safe usage of it. Early in his career he realized that the education of chemists in the use of perchloric acid would he an unhill task since the unione that make it useful are . .nronerties . prwisclv those that ran make it hoznrdous if mishnnclierl. C'ontinucd drmimd for 1)erchloricacid and other nerchlorate salts induced a competitive situation in 1935 when the Oldhurv Electrochemical Co. (later Hooker) started makina perchlorates in Buffalo, New ~ o r kWith . the Smiths' interest heing more in the analytical chemistry area and with other products heing developed, i t was decided not to scale up for the increased demand and face the competition in ~erchloric acid. (There wds no competition for anhvdrous magnwium vrrrhlomre or their attitude may have been different., Their method of production of perchl&c acid required ammonium perchlorate which was obtained from Norway. That source was cut off with events leading up to World War 11, and that influenced the decision. Electrolytic cells were built to make the needed amount of perchlorate. Within a short time their share of the perchloric acid sales had dropped to about 5-10% of the domestic market. However. as vears nassed. the oualitv . . of the Smith product and some prodktion efficiencies brought customers hack. The ready availability of ammonium perchlorate followed the development of the solid propellant rocket motor in the early sixties and put the Smiths back in gwd position to make perchloric acid. Finally in 1976, Hooker abandoned the husiness, and GFS Chemicals was once again the only maker of perchloric acid in America. The chemistry of the production of perchloric acid is based on the reaction NH&IOd
+ HNO? + HCI + Hz0
-
HClO4.2H20
+ N20
+ NO + NO2 + C12
Note that all but one of the reaction products are volatile gases. The equation has been left unbalanced because no solution that has ever been produced satisfies the observed results. It is quite an exercise to balance it at all. Volume 61
Number 7 July 1984
625
Smith had an interesting attitude toward competition. T o keep his standing as an rdwator it was highly ad\,isnhle to maintain a reseanh and vuhliciitinn record. This he did and augmented it by promotion material about the company products. When others cautioned that he was telling his competitors all his secrets, Smith's reply was that a n y t h e a competitor wanted to take over a portion of his business, he was~welcometo do so. "I can find some other things to
...-..
mak.2"."
In the early 1930'8, Smith and a student, Charles Goetz, tried an experiment which involved the storage of cream anaernbically under pressure, ostensibly to reduce spoilage. When samples were removed from the container the cream expanded as though whipped. Immediately recognizing the commercial possibilities for this new discovery, the Smiths started another comoanv. Aeration Processes. and began marketing the world's first aerosol product. They namedihe whipped cream from a can Instantwhip". Today 12 plants in the U S . are still making Instantwhip" and related products. Nationallv. there are 46-related companies marketing Instantwhi@ products and other refrigerated foods to restaurants and to institutional markets. In the 'thirties, while most of the perchloric acid business was going elsewhere, the Smiths were busy developing an entirely new line of analytical reagents. Earlier work by Walden, Hammett, and Chapman had shown that 1,10phenanthroline gives a red-colored compound with iron and that the color would change to blue on oxidation, one of the first redox indicators. As demand for this indicator, ferroin, increased, the company started making and marketing both the parent compound and the iron complex. Thus began another of Smith's loves. When the ferroin indicator became available he beean to investigate the use of cerium(1V) as an oxidant. This in turn led to his desire to expand thk range of oxidation-reduction indicators. Over the next 20 or more years, hundreds of phenanthroline, bipyridine, and triazine derivatives were svnthesized and svstematicallv studied both as redox indicators and colorimetric reagents for iron and copper. Along the way, he enlisted the aid of several prominent professors to assist him in this endeavor. Francis Case of Temple University provided many of the syntheses. Harvey Diehl of Iowa State University and later Alfred Schilt of Northern Illinois University developed many analytical applications. The interest in the cerium(1V) compounds that had been generated snccessfullv has carried throueh manv vears. and ;hey have been important in many fields other th&anal&ical chemistrv. " . including" the manufacture of the microcircuitrv necessary to the modern electronics industry. After G. F. Smith's retirement from the University of Illinois teaching faculty in 1956, he continued his research practically until the time of his death in 1976. He continued to investigate many of the projects he had started earlier in his career, such as primary standard materials, periodic acid and iodic acid and their salts. However, he always continued to try to do new things with perchloric acid. 0;er the years, the ~ o m ~ became a n ~ involved in making many products simply to make things available to chemists even though the products were not commercially successful. Many of these products found their way into research proiects and then the chemical literature. ~ a t e r some , of these bore fruit. One such project developed in the 1960's when some of the people charged~withanalysis of Lunar samples asked if it might be possible for the Smiths to distill specially some perchloric acid for them. A sub-boiling distillation technique was devised and the acid delivered. Pleased with the quality, requests followed for other acids to be purified, and a product line of high purity acids had found its way into the market place through the GFS Chemicals catalog. G. F. Smith, "The Professor" to his brothers and must of the people who worked at the company, always considered 626
Journal of Chemical Education
G Frederick Smith
himself a university man, an educator. He minimized the demands business activities made on his time and played down the publicity his business ventures attracted. With this commitment to research and teaching, most of the nuts and bolts of the business early fell to his brothers. After C. M. Smith's death in 1941, the heart of the growing firm was A. H. "Beano" Smith. I t was his gift for taking an idea or a process from paper through the development and engineering phases, many times "making do" without the proper equipment or tools, which allowed the company to offer quality products at reasonable orices. A irrqumt visitor to t h e e . I.'. Smith plant in itsearly da).s tells 111l~rineimun.sstd bv the inernuinf and resourcefulness of the smith brdthers. ~e;chloricacid required distillation for purification. This was done in specially designed glass stills fabricated by The Ohio State University glass blower after normal working hours. For crystallization dishes, bath tubs (with drain stoppers firmly in place, of course) mounted on wheels served admirably. As a drying agent, magnesium perchlorate must be porous to present amaximum surface area. The crystals bad to be grown to a large size and then dried very carefully to prevent melting as well as fracture of the crystal structure. This was accomplished by spreading the hydrate in thin layers on metal trays placed directly above metal-strip electric heaters. The vacuum furnace for doing this was constructed on the grounds. From the humble beginning, the small company has grown to occupy about 2 blocks on the original site and recently has moved its offices and research lab to a new facility on 73 wooded acres outside the city. The product line includes ahout 1000 different items, most manufactured a t the Columbus plant. The catalog also lists a few pieces of specialty apparatus and complimentary publications. The company has about 25 employees and sales of over $3 million. The founders of the company never sacrificed service or quality for the sake of growth or profits and the organization remains extremely service-oriented. The new officeilaboratory facility is fully computerized. Every effort is made to fill orders and requests for technical and safety information on the day received. GFS Chemicals markets through trade show booths, journal advertising, and direct mail. The company remains pr~vately owned by the Smith family. I t is operated by Darrell Hntchinson, president and CEO since the retirement of G. F. in 1969.
