NATURAL PRODUCTS

Waikato Times, Volume 122, Issue 20510, 28 May 1938, Page 17 (Supplement)

NATURAL PRODUCTS

Replaced by Chemist’s Inventions (Herbert B. Nichols in Christian Science Monitor.)

CHEMISTRY IS RE-MAKING the world in which we dwell; for nature, a chemist long before modern apprentices came on the scene, left its prize* for men’s “curiosity,” the paramount essential for all researchers, to discover. The rainbow was hidden in a ray of light; and it was not until comparatively recent days that the researcher found its secret. From a lump of coal the chemist accepted not only the blessings of heat, light, and power, but squeezed out perfumes and dyes. From “free air” he also extracted the nitrogen so necessary a component in fertilisers. From the ocean that formerly produced only fish, he wrested bromine for the photographic film and special gasolines. From a pinch of salt comes savour; also chlorine for pulp and paper, and caustic soda for rayon and photographic film, soap, petroleum refining and miscellaneous products. Twenty mule teams made borax a household byword for cleaning. To-day brilliant, white-enamelled sinks and bath tubs, stove surfaces and kitchenware owe their attractiveness to borax and boric acid. In a stand of virgin timber the woodchopper sees firewood worth 10 dollars a cord; the contractor sees lumber worth 40 dollars per thousand feet; and the chemist, woodpulp worth 55 dollars a ton, or rayon for wearing apparel worth 12,600 dollars a ton. To-day chemical products claim almost one-fifth of all the manufacturing enterprise in the United States. That Should Be Answer Enough to anyone who wonders if research in chemistry “pays.” There is hardly a manufactured product in home, office, or factory that does not owe at least a part of its final appearance to the work of a chemist. It 'would be difficult to inspect every laboratory in the nation, but we did achieve a very good cross section by visiting the experimental station of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company in Wilmington, Del. Having statistics relative to 81 du Pont plants and the products they manufacture in 27 States before us, we wanted to know what research activities in recent months had meant the most to du Pont. 1 “As one can readily appreciate,” our guide explained, “invention to-day is vastly different from what it was a few years ago. The time when a genius was closeted in a workshop until he had solved a particular problem, is gone forever. That same problem to-day might be given to 25 men in many bordering fields; and the solution, when it came, would be the result of many men’s experience. Research grows harder day by day. Many of the more obvious things have already been dona.” It developed that after the World War du Pont spent some 40,000,000 dollars over a period of five years in building up an organic chemicals industry, with no important profits realised for a considerable time. To be specific, 12 products developed in the past 10 years, accounted for about 40 per cent of the company’s total sales volume last year. More than 18,000 workers have been given employment as a result.

Then we ventured to ask the du Pont spokesman: “What about munitions? Isn’t that where you get a great deal of profit? ” (That was as outright as any question Charlie McCarthy might ask, and the answer was just as frank.) “ Profit in munitions ? Less than onehalf of 1 per cent of our business is in smokeless powder, the sort used for warfare, and practically all of this is ordered by our own Government. Much of it goes to ‘shoot the admiral over the side.’ Our stake in peace is better than 99 to one. Should war come, we would have to expand •or smokeless powder mills tremendously and construct new plants. That would mean the

Rest of Our Industries Would Suffer. Believe me, we in the du Pont Company pray like everyone else, for international Cace. That’s one thing we have never en able to figure out—why people think we are less humane than other manufacturers.

“Probably dynamite is the product most frequently misunderstood. Magazine articles often refer to it as the very symbol of warfare when essentially it is a peacetime explosive, widely used in mining and construction work. It would be utterly out of the question to manufacture smokeless powder in a dynamite plant.” At the research laboratories on the north bank of the Brandywine, we found war already in progress, war* against ignorance o 4 nature’s ways. Many an African pachy*i derm now roaming the jungle owes his continued existence to the chemist who found in his test tube plastics more useful than ivopr. The tortoise, too, would have been extinct if it had to furnish the raw materials demanded for hair ornaments and toiletware. Ten years ago, no one would think of using tortoise shell to make scuff-

less heels for women’s shoes, but to-day the same plastic used for combs, jewel cases, and non-shatterable safety glass also fits as a serviceable heel covering. Another Sizeable Skirmish

is directed against the common house fly. Researchers breed flies in the laboratory by the thousands and then test their insecticides on them. Similar experiments were being run in another section of the Pest Control Research Laboratory against the Mexican bean beetle and red spider. In the glass-blowers shop, technicians were at work producing complicated chemical equipment from ordinary tubes, flasks, and piping. Below ground is du Pont’s ultra-centrifuge. This machine, built by Dr. The Svedberg of Upsala University, Sweden, is considerably more complicated than the familiar cream separator used by dairymen, though fundamentally the same. Whirled by oil under pressure, the rotor can achieve centrifugal forced 250,000 times greater than the force of gravity. With help of it, researchers are studying the separation of molecules of many sizes, a process which takes place among chemical compounds at such speeds. Measuring the molecules of silk, wool, rubber, paper and hundreds of new plastics is now possible. Such raw materials furnish the molecular building blocks used by the chemist in re-arranging Nature’s ultramicroscopic patterns to suit the needs of industry. In this group of buildings, neoprene, du Pont’s chloroprene rubber, useful in place of ordinary rubber, was developed. Made from coal, limestone and salt, the initial experiments were brought to fruition, and then, as is customary, the product was turned over to plant chemists for manufacture and further research. To-day neoprene has found a place in many trades; as for example in the petroleum industry, for hose that will resist the attack of oil; in printing, for replacing rubber rollers, owing to greater stability and resistance to ink; in automobiles, for electric cables subject to oily conditions, ignition wires, vibration dampeners, gaskets, cups, and sealing devices, and in refrigeration, for sheet packing and gaskets. At present, European laboratories are producing an artificial rubber-like product of good quality; but whereas their main objective is to secure an independent supply for economic self-sufficiency, the primary object here is to secure a superior product for special uses. It is Not Hard To Visualise a Time when neoprene will be as well-known as iron or aluminium; an established material as familiar to the layman as to the engineer.

In the constant temperature and humidity room, we found half a dozen young researchers at ■work testing the strength of rayon fibres, the viscosity of fluids and the vibration absorption of neoprene, and learned that each year du Pont scouts comb the universities most carefully, scouting for men of ability. But there is no room on Brandywine Creek for a chemist deficient in either originality or the ability to co-operate with others. Elsewhere, three microchemical balances were in operation, key instruments of quantitative microchemistry, capable of weighing only about three-quarters of an ounce at most, but with an accuracy of one to two-millionths of a gram. One laboratory was devoted to the use of X-rays, to make measurements where errors greater than a millionth of an inch are intolerable. Another was devoted to photomicrography, turning out pictures of fibres, fabrics and other common materials, looking fantastically like anything but what they are. We heard for the first time the story of how rayon was brought into existence—one of the most thrilling research adventure yams yet spun, how Count Hilaire de Chardonnet deduced that since silkworms fed on mulberry leaves, “artificial silk” from leaves and twigs of the mulberiy tree could be made in the laboratory. He actually spun fibres that looked like silk by treating his material with nitric acid. Later came the viscose process, in which purified cellulose from cotton linters and spruce wood is treated with caustic soda and carbon bisulphide. This forms the sirupy “viscose” which, after being forced through microscopic holes at the end of a thimble-like cup, or “spinneret,” solidifies to form a continuous yarn of many small filaments. Cotton linters treated with nitric and sulphuric acids, also form nitrocellulose or pyroxylin, the basis of quick-drying lacquers, motion picture film, and safety glass. To mention, for another thing, the new era brought about by Synthetics in Perfumes —only a short time ago nearly a ton of roses was needed to make 10 ounces of the natural oil, 25 tons of violets made but a single ounce of oil of violets, and lilac could not be produced at any price. Today, all are duplicated in the laboratory at a fraction of their original cost, together with scents previously unknown.