/4 The Ohio Journal oj Science [Vol. XVIII, No. 3, 



would scarcely employ a bridge engineer to design a dynamo, 

 yet plant after plant for chemical manufacture has been con- 

 structed in the last two years in this country with no more 

 intelligence than this. As a result literally millions have been 

 squandered and lost in these unsuccessful plants. But unfor- 

 tunately, enough such plants are successful, that their authors 

 escape the penalty of their dishonesty, and therefore, the evil 

 persists and continues. Plants have been constructed for the 

 manufacture of high explosives by engineers who knew nothing 

 of the business, resulting in great loss of property and even life 

 from their final destruction, or in abandonment where they 

 proved unprofitable. I have heard of plants erected for the 

 concentration of sulfuric acid in which a battery of stills for this 

 purpose costing in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million 

 dollars was placed in operation without even a single experiment 

 preliminary to erection, on the type of material to be used, and 

 not even a trial run on one of the stills before all were placed in 

 operation. The first day they operated was the last day, for 

 they all went into solution in the acid. 



Men who were or claimed to be chemists have read how 

 simply some reactions described in the general chemistries 

 work, and designed a plant upon their nerve or — as they 

 thought — common sense, and found to their consternation 

 that under the conditions they made for themselves the reaction 

 did not proceed at all, or they were so inexperienced in large 

 scale operations that they could not recognize what they had 

 when the work was under way. Others have so far lost their 

 heads by publicity" or financial possibilities, even though good 

 chemists, that they have assumed that what could be done 

 with raw material from one source could be equally w^ell done 

 with it when from another source, provided they merely proved 

 its actual presence in the new product. Ignoring the whole 

 history of chemical as well as industrial chemical development 

 that the chemical environment profoundly affects chemical 

 reaction, no adequate confirmatory studies were made before 

 capital to the extent of hundreds of thousands of dollars has 

 been induced to invest in such guesses, with disastrous results 

 to capital and grave loss of confidence in chemical research. 

 These things are in large part due to or at least the losses could 

 only be so heavy under war pressure. Processes which gave 

 every promise of success have been hurried into failure or near 



