November i, 1921] 



SCIENCE 



419 



cheaper to simply burn up sawdust waste in- 

 stead of trying to distill it or convert it into 

 paper pulp, and to know when it is cheaper, 

 for this purpose, to buy expensive wood in the 

 shape of clear logs. It requires quite an effort 

 of good judgment to know when it is less ruin- 

 ous to burn waste flax straw from our linseed 

 fields than to try to spin or weave it; to know 

 when it is less injurious to one's bank account 

 to leave natural soda and potash salts in lake 

 water instead of obtaining them by the usual 

 processes. That Boston clergyman of about 

 twenty years ago may have had correct chem- 

 ical information when he started that com- 

 pany for extracting the limitless tons of gold 

 naturally contained in sea water, but if he had 

 been just a little of a chemical engineer, he 

 might readily have concluded that it was 

 cheaper to leave all that gold in the ocean than 

 to try to extract it by methods which cost more 

 than the value of the gold. 



Then again, there are cases where even the 

 best of chemists committed errors of judgment 

 and failed to solve problems because they 

 lacked the daring of the engineer. 



Sir Humphry Davy, one of the greatest 

 chemists of his age, showed his lack of qualifi- 

 cations as a chemical engineer when he re- 

 ported unfavorably on the project to use coal 

 gas for the illumination of the City of London. 

 One of his most emphatic objections was that 

 it would require a gas holder as large as St. 

 Paul's Church dome, and even after this was 

 constructed, it would blow up at the first oppor- 

 tunity. 



As an opposite example, I should cite the 

 great Belgian engineer, Solvay, who revolution- 

 ized the manufacture of soda, one of the chem- 

 icals most indispensable to civilization and 

 used in enormous quantities. His success was 

 mainly due to the fact that he was more of an 

 engineer than a chemist. In developing his 

 process, he was unaware that this reaction was 

 not new; that it was so old and so well known 

 that several patents on this very subject were 

 already on record and that, furthermore, the 

 process had been tried commercially about half 

 a dozen times in several countries, and had 

 invariably been unsuccessful. Fortunately, all 



this discouraging information reached him 

 only after his keen engineering talent had 

 already demonstrated that this elusive chemical 

 process could be controlled in the hands of an 

 engineer and made to operate so successfully as 

 to throw in the scrap heap the older processes 

 used until then. 



The pure chemist, confined by the walls of his 

 classroom, his laboratory, or his library, some- 

 times fails to exercise suiSciently the sense of 

 proportion. 



Nor are the engineers, as a class, free from 

 being carried away by a one-sided point of 

 view, although their way of reasoning and 

 grappling a problem is more along quantitative 

 considerations. 



The ways of thinking and acting of a chemist 

 and that of an engineer are often along de- 

 cidedly different points of view. Yet, if these 

 points of view can be compromised, or harmo- 

 nized, they bring forth good chemical engineer- 

 ing. Nor is this always an easy task. Too often 

 I have seen cases where the engineer, regardless 

 of well-established chemical facts of which he 

 was conveniently ignorant, diligently went on 

 designing the most elaborate and ingenious 

 equipment, giving minute attention to every 

 structural and mechanical detail, and then 

 handed plans and specifications to the chemist 

 to leave the " chemical details " of the prob- 

 lem to the latter. These " details " consisted in 

 specifying a material about as strong as steel, 

 resisting strong acids or other very corrosive 

 agencies, extreme heat, and which should, 

 furthermore, be furnished at a price about that 

 of steel or bronze. When the chemist meekly 

 answered that he knew of no material that 

 would answer the purpose except platinum, 

 iridium, or possibly gold, the information was 

 received with a look of contemptuous disap- 

 pointment on the part of the engineer. 



In another case, a laboratory chemist had 

 been carrying out a chemical process where he 

 heated corrosive liquids under high pressure in 

 sealed hard glass tubes of about half an inch in 

 diameter. In the meantime, he hoped that any 

 engineer forthwith would build him an appa- 

 ratus with which to perform the same operation 

 in ton lots. 



