Creative Chemistry | Page 7

is only by overcoming nature that man can rise. The sole salvation for the human race lies in the removal of the primal curse, the sentence of hard labor for life that was imposed on man as he left Paradise. Some folks are trying to elevate the laboring classes; some are trying to keep them down. The scientist has a more radical remedy; he wants to annihilate the laboring classes by abolishing labor. There is no longer any need for human labor in the sense of personal toil, for the physical energy necessary to accomplish all kinds of work may be obtained from external sources and it can be directed and controlled without extreme exertion. Man's first effort in this direction was to throw part of his burden upon the horse and ox or upon other men. But within the last century it has been discovered that neither human nor animal servitude is necessary to give man leisure for the higher life, for by means of the machine he can do the work of giants without exhaustion. But the introduction of machines, like every other step of human progress, met with the most violent opposition from those it was to benefit. "Smash 'em!" cried the workingman. "Smash 'em!" cried the poet. "Smash 'em!" cried the artist. "Smash 'em!" cried the theologian. "Smash 'em!" cried the magistrate. This opposition yet lingers and every new invention, especially in chemistry, is greeted with general distrust and often with legislative prohibition.
Man is the tool-using animal, and the machine, that is, the power-driven tool, is his peculiar achievement. It is purely a creation of the human mind. The wheel, its essential feature, does not exist in nature. The lever, with its to-and-fro motion, we find in the limbs of all animals, but the continuous and revolving lever, the wheel, cannot be formed of bone and flesh. Man as a motive power is a poor thing. He can only convert three or four thousand calories of energy a day and he does that very inefficiently. But he can make an engine that will handle a hundred thousand times that, twice as efficiently and three times as long. In this way only can he get rid of pain and toil and gain the wealth he wants.
Gradually then he will substitute for the natural world an artificial world, molded nearer to his heart's desire. Man the Artifex will ultimately master Nature and reign supreme over his own creation until chaos shall come again. In the ancient drama it was deus ex machina that came in at the end to solve the problems of the play. It is to the same supernatural agency, the divinity in machinery, that we must look for the salvation of society. It is by means of applied science that the earth can be made habitable and a decent human life made possible. Creative evolution is at last becoming conscious.

II
NITROGEN
PRESERVER AND DESTROYER OF LIFE
In the eyes of the chemist the Great War was essentially a series of explosive reactions resulting in the liberation of nitrogen. Nothing like it has been seen in any previous wars. The first battles were fought with cellulose, mostly in the form of clubs. The next were fought with silica, mostly in the form of flint arrowheads and spear-points. Then came the metals, bronze to begin with and later iron. The nitrogenous era in warfare began when Friar Roger Bacon or Friar Schwartz--whichever it was--ground together in his mortar saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur. The Chinese, to be sure, had invented gunpowder long before, but they--poor innocents--did not know of anything worse to do with it than to make it into fire-crackers. With the introduction of "villainous saltpeter" war ceased to be the vocation of the nobleman and since the nobleman had no other vocation he began to become extinct. A bullet fired from a mile away is no respecter of persons. It is just as likely to kill a knight as a peasant, and a brave man as a coward. You cannot fence with a cannon ball nor overawe it with a plumed hat. The only thing you can do is to hide and shoot back. Now you cannot hide if you send up a column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night--the most conspicuous of signals--every time you shoot. So the next step was the invention of a smokeless powder. In this the oxygen necessary for the combustion is already in such close combination with its fuel, the carbon and hydrogen, that no black particles of carbon can get away unburnt. In the old-fashioned gunpowder the oxygen necessary for the combustion of the carbon and sulfur was in a separate package, in the molecule of potassium nitrate, and however finely the mixture was ground, some of