June 15, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



603 



dividual industries. Time only will eradi- 

 cate the evil. Only a short time ago I was 

 at a banquet of a society of engineers in an 

 eastern city. The professor of chemistry 

 from a near-by university was an invited 

 speaker. He was a revered and respected 

 man among American chemists and a man 

 of affairs, too, but he lived in the dark ages 

 of chemical achievement. He spent half of 

 his time telling how wonderful chemistry 

 was and how great the achievements of for- 

 eign chemistry in particular and not one 

 word of American chemistry. Yet in his 

 own city in the last three years has sprung 

 up a chemical industry that is marvelous, 

 and which he did not know existed. In 

 his own line, organic chemistry, was a plant 

 for making certain organic materials used 

 in war, by a series of steps that has no 

 counterpart in chemical literature for the 

 magnitude and conception of its chemical 

 engineering operations. It is not only the 

 largest scale upon which aU of its many 

 operations have ever been conducted, but 

 its chemistry is a series of highly interest- 

 ing adaptations and developments. When 

 peace comes again, if that plant still pros- 

 pers it will be a useful aid in the solution 

 of one of our most important engineering 

 problems of this generation. Americans 

 are not wizards that they do in two years 

 what it took German chemists decades to 

 work into. Such things are only done 

 where the ability exists and the power born 

 of experience in solving similar chemical 

 problems is possessed. It is not right to 

 our students, you who teach, to praise the 

 competitors of our compatriots and never 

 stir ourselves to be informed on what our 

 own countrymen are doing, even if the for- 

 eign achievements are served up to us, 

 ready to teach, as paid advertisement of 

 German dye-makers. The German general 

 staff has learned, if others have not, that 

 German chemical achievement which is 

 great, indeed, is no sign that equal ability 



does not exist elsewhere. The allies and 

 America improvised a munitions industry 

 in two years to match their machine of 

 forty years ' preparation. Such an achieve- 

 ment is only the natural result of our pres- 

 ent industrial chemical development in 

 America and the allied countries. There 

 is nothing in the rate of American indus- 

 trial chemical development of which any 

 American need be ashamed. 



The progress in industrial chemistry and 

 chemical engineering in the last three years 

 itself, in this country has been wonderful. 

 Let me protest, however, that this is no 

 ground for the philosophy which I under- 

 stand obtains in some quarters, that war is 

 a desirable, natural, logical or sort of evo- 

 lutionary benefit. All this progress is in 

 spite of war. War could force us to do 

 nothing we did not possess capacity for be- 

 fore. Because war changes the normal re- 

 lations between supply and demand, cost 

 and selling price, gives us opportunities to 

 do only what we could do anyway, if the 

 same demand arose from any other cause. 



Industrial chemical tendencies during 

 the war have been governed by unusual 

 demands for chemicals from abroad in ad- 

 dition to war drains, healthy home require- 

 ments, new demands from industries 

 formerly supplied from abroad or forced 

 to use new raw material by scarcity or high 

 prices, together with speculation, raising 

 prices to unusual levels. This resulted in 

 expansion of existing plants, rapid installa- 

 tion of new ones, hasty perfecting of new 

 processes already slowly maturing and the 

 seizing of opportunities to profit by high 

 prices through erection of small plants for 

 the production of special chemical mate- 

 rials and through the development of proc- 

 esses hitherto existing as possibilities, only, 

 in the minds of chemists. This has greatly 

 extended also the supplying of chemical 

 construction materials and machinery and 

 has increased the opportunities for the 



