72 The Ohio Journal of Science [Vol. XVIII, No. 3, 



anomalous condition of bitter complaint of shortage by con- 

 sumers simultaneously with utter inability of some producers 

 to market their product, and still other producers with large 

 contracts for product and inability to produce due to poor 

 deliveries or failure of equipment. These difficulties do much 

 harm, since they tend to discourage capital and it must not be 

 forgotten that industrial chemical development is im.possible 

 without capital. German chemical manufacturers understood 

 this clearly when they organized American branches of their 

 color works, eliminating American employees to conceal the 

 market and its peculiarities, and placing all their business in 

 the hands of "American citizens" of German name. Then 

 when the U. S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce 

 attempted last September to publish the amounts of each 

 dye consumed in this country, they vigorously protested that 

 their rights as American citizens were being infringed by 

 encouraging competition. The uncovering of this octopus to 

 public gaze should be set down to the war's credit. It has 

 long been a familiar animal to many industrial chemists. 



Another evil effect of war, a common one now greatly 

 intensified, is the discouragement of capital by failure of hasty 

 and ill-advised manufacturing projects. Successful specu- 

 lators and others have been influenced by the potential earning 

 capacity of industrial chemistry and have jumped into projects 

 with little study and no experience. Often such capital has 

 not known enough to employ chemical engineers, but has put 

 growing works into the hands of electrical and mechanical 

 engineers whose general engineering sense has not always saved 

 them from physical disasters that chemical experience would 

 have avoided. Such engineers and capital and sad to say, 

 m_any chemists, who either, lacking entirely in manufacturing 

 experience or having had manufacturing experience, though 

 they acquired no sense of responsibility to protect capital 

 against hazard from decisions without basis in experience, 

 have been the easy victims of the machinery and equipment 

 company who needs but to see a plant, or a picture in a book, 

 and they will design you one while you wait. There not being 

 the proper engineering check, such plants fail at times with 

 regretable loss of life as well as capital and confidence in things 

 chemical, or if they succeed (because the process is simple and 

 well known) the plant can be counted upon to cost from 50 

 to 100 or more per cent, higher than it should. 



