Creative Chemistry | Page 2

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The kelp harvester gathering the seaweed from the Pacific Ocean 53
A battery of Koppers by-product coke-ovens at the plant of the
Bethlehem Steel Company, Sparrows Point, Maryland 60
In these mixing vats at the Buffalo Works, aniline dyes are prepared 61
A paper mill in action 120
Cellulose from wood pulp is now made into a large variety of useful
articles of which a few examples are here pictured 121
Plantation rubber 160
Forest rubber 160
In making garden hose the rubber is formed into a tube by the machine
on the right and coiled on the table to the left 161
The rival sugars 176
Interior of a sugar mill showing the machinery for crushing cane to
extract the juice 177
Vacuum pans of the American Sugar Refinery Company 177
Cotton seed oil as it is squeezed from the seed by the presses 200

Cotton seed oil as it comes from the compressors flowing out of the
faucets 201
Splitting coconuts on the island of Tahiti 216
The electric current passing through salt water in these cells
decomposes the salt into caustic soda and chlorine gas 217
Germans starting a gas attack on the Russian lines 224
Filling the cannisters of gas masks with charcoal made from fruit
pits--Long Island City 225
The chlorpicrin plant at the Bdgewood Arsenal 234
Repairing the broken stern post of the _U.S.S. Northern Pacific_, the
biggest marine weld in the world 235
Making aloxite in the electric furnaces by fusing coke and bauxite 240
A block of carborundum crystals 241
Making carborundum in the electric furnace 241
Types of gas mask used by America, the Allies and Germany during
the war 256
Pumping melted white phosphorus into hand grenades filled with
water--Edgewood Arsenal 257
Filling shell with "mustard gas" 257
Photomicrographs showing the structure of steel made by Professor
E.G. Mahin of Purdue University 272
The microscopic structure of metals 273

INTRODUCTION

BY JULIUS STIEGLITZ
Formerly President of the American Chemical Society, Professor of
Chemistry in The University of Chicago
The recent war as never before in the history of the world brought to
the nations of the earth a realization of the vital place which the science
of chemistry holds in the development of the resources of a nation.
Some of the most picturesque features of this awakening reached the
great public through the press. Thus, the adventurous trips of the
Deutschland with its cargoes of concentrated aniline dyes, valued at
millions of dollars, emphasized as no other incident our former
dependence upon Germany for these products of her chemical
industries.
The public read, too, that her chemists saved Germany from an early
disastrous defeat, both in the field of military operations and in the
matter of economic supplies: unquestionably, without the tremendous
expansion of her plants for the production of nitrates and ammonia
from the air by the processes of Haber, Ostwald and others of her great
chemists, the war would have ended in 1915, or early in 1916, from
exhaustion of Germany's supplies of nitrate explosives, if not indeed
from exhaustion of her food supplies as a consequence of the lack of
nitrate and ammonia fertilizer for her fields. Inventions of substitutes
for cotton, copper, rubber, wool and many other basic needs have been
reported.
These feats of chemistry, performed under the stress of dire necessity,
have, no doubt, excited the wonder and interest of our public. It is far
more important at this time, however, when both for war and for peace
needs, the resources of our country are strained to the utmost, that the
public should awaken to a clear realization of what this science of
chemistry really means for mankind, to the realization that its wizardry
permeates the whole life of the nation as a vitalizing, protective and
constructive agent very much in the same way as our blood, coursing
through our veins and arteries, carries the constructive, defensive and
life-bringing materials to every organ in the body.

If the layman will but understand that chemistry is the fundamental
science of the transformation of matter, he will readily accept the
validity of this sweeping assertion: he will realize, for instance, why
exactly the same fundamental laws of the science apply to, and make
possible scientific control of, such widely divergent national industries
as agriculture and steel manufacturing. It governs the transformation of
the salts, minerals and humus of our fields and the components of the
air into corn, wheat, cotton and the innumerable other products of the
soil; it governs no less the transformation of crude ores into steel and
alloys, which, with the cunning born of chemical knowledge, may be
given practically any conceivable quality of hardness, elasticity,
toughness or strength. And exactly the same thing may be said of the
hundreds of national activities that