DENATURED ALCOHOL 253 



duced by a brief action of sulphurous acid on cellulose, have been de- 

 stroyed again by the prolongation of the action. 



But, in the manufacture of the pulp, the wood chips are often given 

 a preliminary treatment to soften and partially disintegrate them. 

 It seems perfectly possible that a liquor might be obtained at this 

 stage of the manufacture which could be worked up into alcohol. 



Denaturants 



The properties which an ideal denaturant should have may be 

 summed up under five heads and they are as follows: 



1. It must render the alcohol undrinkable. 



2. It must be cheap, otherwise the advantages of ' free ' alcohol are 

 lost. 



3. It must be 'separable from the alcohol only with difficulty and 

 at considerable cost. 



It seems to the writer that government officials show a tendency 

 to be more cautious than necessary regarding this feature of denaturing 

 agents. Such a thing as a denaturant which a chemist could not re- 

 move probably does not exist, and so it is wholly a question of the 

 degree of difficulty, and the cost, of the purification. If this difficulty 

 and cost be never so little more than those involved in the manu- 

 facture of new alcohol from raw materials, it should be considered 

 as fulfilling the requirements. Dishonest individuals, bent on swin- 

 dling the government out of its revenues, would set up illicit stills 

 rather than attempt to ' renature ' denatured alcohol. But the gov- 

 ernment demands are much in excess of this standard. 



4. It must be readily detected, in order that revenue officers may 

 determine with ease whether a given liquid contains denatured alcohol 

 or not. 



5. It must not interfere with the use of the alcohol for those 

 purposes permitted by law. 



It is by no means easy to find substances fulfilling all these re- 

 quirements; in fact, although the list of possibilities has been gone 

 over and over again by the ablest living chemists for a matter of 

 twenty years or more, the subject is by no means closed. All the 

 denaturants tried and proposed are unsatisfactory in one way or 

 another, and the governments of Bussia, France and Germany offer 

 prizes ranging from $4,000 to $20,000 for any denaturant which can 

 be proved to be a distinct improvement over those in use. 



Wood spirit, by which is meant, as has already been said, a crude 

 methyl alcohol containing many impurities, notably in the neighbor- 

 hood of 25 per cent, of acetone, obtained as one of the products of 

 the dry distillation of wood, is one of the most satisfactory denaturing 

 agents. It is difficult to remove from ethyl alcohol, it is readily de- 



