Tercentenary

No one stepped forward with the Discovery of the Century, yet last week's meeting of the American Chemical Society in Manhattan was far from the usual, humdrum semi-annual convention. The Society's historians, led by Dr. Charles Albert Browne of the U. S. Bureau of Chemistry & Soils, had agreed that chemical industry in the New World got its start in 1635. This meeting, therefore, was to be a 300th anniversary jubilee. Current researches would be reported as always--for example, a symposium on brewing methods and a conducted tour of Jacob Ruppert's brewery--but the dim past and the vague future were more important. The meeting was called "the greatest scientific conclave ever held." Ten thousand delegates were expected to attend, and 5,000 actually did.

Anniversary. It was in 1635 that John Winthrop the Younger, son of Massachusetts' second Governor, returned from a visit to England as the first Governor of Connecticut, with a commission from Lords Saye and Brook empowering him to develop the production of salt, iron, glass, potash, tar, black lead, saltpetre, medicines, copper, alum.

John Winthrop was an alchemist but an enterprising, open-minded one. Born in 1606 at Groton, England, he had attended Dublin's Trinity College, later dabbled in the law, spent five years junketing about Europe, encountered many a scholarly personage with whom he kept in touch by correspondence in Latin. When, at 24, he followed his father to the New World, he was undismayed by the fact that the colonies had no college, no scientific society, laboratory or library. He imported the first library and the first apparatus. His was the idea for the first chemical stock company. He established the first salt works in New London. He and his uncle were the first colonials to experiment with indigo manufacture. He started the American munitions industry in 1642 when he got an act through the General Court of Massachusetts ordering the production of such materials "as will perfect the making of gunpowder, the instrumental means that all nations lay hould on for their preservation. . . . Every plantation within the colony shall erect a house in length about 20 or 30 foote, and 20 foote wide within one half year next coming ... to make saltpetre from urine of men, beastes, goates, hennes, hogs and horses' dung."

John Winthrop's paper, "Of the Manner of Making Tar and Pitch in New England," prepared for Britain's Royal Society, was the first report from America to any scientific body. For his British colleagues he drew a diagram of a tin lamp which he had invented, handed around some bottles of a "pale, well-tasted, middle beer" which he found could be brewed from maize. From cornstalks he made a syrup "as sweet as sugar." John Winthrop died April 6, 1676. On April 6, 1876, the American Chemical Society was founded. After erudite and vigorous Pioneer Winthrop, industrial chemistry received no major stimulus until 1793 when Philadelphia's John Harrison started manufacturing sulphuric acid, so important a chemical that the quantity used has frequently been taken as an index of industrial progress. There was another upsurge after the Civil War, and the greatest of all occurred during and after the World War. False is the widespread notion, however, that on the eve of War the U. S. industry was an inconsequential midget in the shadow of Germany's giant. In 1913-14 the U. S.. produced 34% of the world's chemical output. Last year, led by 26 companies each with assets over $1.000,000 more than 4,000 companies great & small produced about $1,500,000.000 worth of chemicals -- excluding soap, paper, petroleum refinements, paint, varnish, superphosphate fertilizer.

Nieuwland. Dean Frank Clifford Whitmore of Pennsylvania State College lately wrote a letter to Senator Walsh bewailing the fact that the U.S. has no sensible system for government subsidy of science. Dean Whitmore's case in point was an unassuming Catholic priest, a professor of organic chemistry at Notre Dame, who -- despite inadequate materials, apparatus, assistants and reference facilities -- made the pioneer researches on acetylene to which Duprene and lewisite owe their existence. Dean Whitmore argued that if this "God-given genius" had been subsidized his contributions would have been much greater.

Rev. Julius Arthur Nieuwland, father of Duprene and lewisite, was the most eulogized scientist at last week's A. C. S. gathering. A special dinner was arranged, to award him the William H. Nichols medal. The task of recounting his life & work was delegated not to one colleague but to three.

The Flemish parents to whom Julius Nieuwland was born in 1878 at Hansbeke, Belgium, took him in infancy to the U. S., settled near South Bend. The boy naturally went to Notre Dame. In 1900, studying for his doctorate at Catholic University in Washington, he discovered that acetylene with-chlorides of arsenic and aluminum gave a poisonous black tar. Two depressions came & went; the Titanic sank; Europe went to war. After the U. S. joined, Dr. Windord Lee Lewis of Northwestern University,* stationed at Catholic University, stumbled upon the Nieuwland thesis, decided to investigate the poisonous black tar. He found he could obtain from it a deadly gas, beta-chloro-vinyl arsenic dichloride. This was lewisite, only war gas worse than mustard gas. To foil spies, the work on lewisite was ostentatiously dropped at Catholic University under the pretext that it was ineffective, furtively transferred to Cleveland where it was put in charge of a certain young Major J. B. Conant--now President James Bryant Conant of Harvard.

For 70 years chemists tried to make synthetic rubber by picking latex apart, deciding what it was composed of, reassembling the elements. It might have been better to look for a compound which would serve the purpose of rubber rather than duplicate its composition. The synthetic rubber which grew out of the Nieuwland researches is 40% chlorine, not an ingredient of natural rubber at all. At a chemistry symposium in Rochester, during the winter of 1925, Father Nieuwland read a paper on the formation of divinyl acetylene from acetylene and cuprous ammonium chloride. Du Font's Dr. Elmer K. Bolton was there, suspected that if the monovinyl could be similarly produced, artificial rubber was at hand. Acetylene, from common coke and lime, is cheap.

Father Nieuwland helped the du Pont group under Wallace H. Carothers prepare the monovinyl, suggested catalysts for changing it to chlorobutadiene. Carothers found that after standing ten days in a closed vessel, chlorobutadiene became an elastic mass like rubber. Thus Duprene. Last summer du Pont announced that Duprene automobile tires were satisfactory in every respect (TIME, July 2).

Super Contactor. Dr. Walter Joseph Podbielniak, Chicago consulting chemist, described the "super contactor" developed in his laboratories--a centrifugal machine for fractional distillation. A fractionator of the orthodox gravity type would have to be 700 ft. high, said he, to compete with his trim little machine in efficiency. Heart of the device is a conical coil which is rotated at such speed that the heated contents are squeezed by a force 1,500 times gravity. Outlets at the base of the spinning coil provide very fine separation by density. The super contactor was de-signed to extract from petroleum certain hydrocarbons never before obtained in the pure state, to produce heavy water and other valuable isotopes cheaply, to remove from liquor impurities which not even long years of aging can extinguish.

Pea-Tasting. The grading of canned peas has long been a matter of human taste. Dr. Zoltan Imre Kertesz of the New York State division of food chemistry reported that the proportion of peas soluble in alcohol was a much better index of grade, that many a canner was ready to replace human tasters with alcoholic robots.

Young Grass. Previous tests on the nutriment value of cereal grasses, said Dr. C. F. Schnabel of Kansas City, Kans., were misleading because the grass was too old. Dr. Schnabel took tender, young shoots of wheat, barley, oats, rye, ground them to a meal tasting like malted milk powder, found its food value two to five times greater than spinach, carrots, lettuce or chard, its vitamin content up to 50 times greater. Hens fed on this meal laid twice as many eggs containing fivefold as much Vitamin A.

High-Test. By using phosphoric acid as a catalyst, Dr. Vladimir N. Ipatieff of Chicago obtained from ethylene, propylene and other by-product gases a motor fuel which he said last week increased the speed of an Army airplane by 35 m. p. h. Best available high-test gasolines have an "octane rating" of 76. Dr. Ipatieff believed himself well on the way to a 100-octane motor fuel, great goal of petroleum chemists.

Puffed Bricks. Discoursing on new building materials, Ohio State's Professor James Renwick Withrow said that bricks have been made lighter (volume for volume) without sacrificing strength, by swelling the clay with compressed air.

* Dr. Lewis is now research director of Chicago's Institute of American Meat Packers.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.