June 15, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



601 



chemistry is also the easy victim of another 

 evil which is necessarily costly to industrial 

 chemistry and is a heavy blow to the whole 

 science. This evil is the ignorant or un- 

 scrupulous chemist. The great difference 

 between industrial chemical research and 

 other chemical research is that the former 

 must produce results on the question in 

 hand while the latter may ramble if neces- 

 sary into less difficult fields. When inex- 

 perienced capital is seeking chemical assist- 

 ance, the first individual it meets who 

 claims to be a chemist is assumed to be 

 competent to handle any problem without 

 inquiry into his past experience. This 

 same capital would scarcely employ a 

 bridge engineer to design a dynamo, yet 

 plant after plant for chemical manufac- 

 ture has been constructed in the last two 

 years in this country with no more intelli- 

 gence than this. As a result literally mil- 

 lions have been squandered and lost in 

 these unsuccessful plants. But unfortu- 

 nately, 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 de- 

 struction, or in abandonment where they 

 proved unprofitable. I have heard of 

 plants erected for the concentration of 

 sulphuric acid in which a battery of stills 

 for this purpose costing in the neighbor- 

 hood 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 de- 



scribed 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 con- 

 ditions they made for themselves the reac- 

 tion 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 well 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 environ- 

 ment profoundly affects chemical reaction, 

 no adequate confirmatory studies were 

 made before capital to the extent of hun- 

 dreds of thousands of dollars has been in- 

 duced to invest in such guesses, with disas- 

 trous 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 failure by undue publicity 

 giving premature capitalistic confidence in 

 them and it is with profound regret that 

 we see the passing for the time at least of 

 such things as toluol from petroleum, which 

 more attention to study may still make 

 useful in war emergency at least. 



These are outlines of some of the evil in- 

 fluences due to or accentuated by war. 

 They are in part of such a technical or pro- 

 fessional nature that they should not have 

 been imposed upon your attention unless it 

 were to protect you against misunderstand- 

 ing the just criticism of the results of these 

 evils and to emphasize that we do not con- 

 sider war an unmitigated blessing if we 



