Chemistry Magic 167 



for soldiers' rations; longer- wearing, waterproof clothing 

 for our fighting men; and literally thousands of other 

 items. 



Melamine resins, among the newest plastic material, are 

 approved for buttons on military uniforms, and also are the 

 basis for a new paper treatment that gives tremendous strength 

 to paper so that it can be used for sandbags, tents, food pack- 

 aging, and even clothing. 



Small wonder that plastics have in short order attained the 

 dignity of strategic or essential materials widely used in Army 

 and Navy ordnance and aircraft; in articles for the Quarter- 

 master, Chemical Warfare, Signal, Engineering, and Medical 

 Corps; in Maritime Commission and Office of Civilian Defense 

 articles, as well as in many industrial processes. 



Winning Chemical Leadership from Germany 



We can be thankful that our chemical industry of 1941 was 

 much better prepared for war than it was when the first 

 World War came along. When that conflict started in 1914 

 only five hundred and twenty-eight workers were employed 

 in the production of coal-tar chemicals, dyes, drugs, etc. We 

 were importing more than 90 per cent of our dyes from 

 abroad, mainly from Germany. Nor did we have a single 

 plant for extracting nitrogen from the air and transforming 

 it into the chemicals so vital in war (every shot from a sixteen- 

 inch gun requires more than one hundred pounds of this gas), 

 to agriculture, and to industry in general. We depended on 

 Chile for natural nitrates used in fertilizers and explosives. 

 In most scientific fields we looked to Europe for materials and 

 leadership. 



Our chemical industry struggled successfully to gain inde- 

 pendence from foreign products during the first World War, 

 and during the intervening years of peace it grew powerful. 



