August 7, 1914] . 



SCIENCE 



183 



lying principles were well established, long 

 and costly preparatory team-work had to 

 be undertaken; where foremost scientists, 

 as well as engineers of great ability, had to 

 combine their knowledge, their skill, their 

 perseverance, with the support of large 

 chemical companies, who, in their turn, 

 could rely on the financial backing of 

 strong banking concerns, well adyised by 

 tried expert specialists. 



History does not record how many proc- 

 esses thus submitted to careful study were 

 rejected because, on close examination, they 

 were found to possess some hopeless short- 

 comings. In this way, numerous fruitless 

 efforts and financial losses were averted, 

 where less carefully accumulated knowl- 

 edge might have induced less scrupulous 

 promoters to secure money for plausible 

 but ill-advised enterprises. 



In the history of the manufacture of 

 artificial dyes, no chapter gives a more 

 striking instances of long, assiduous and 

 expensive preliminary work of the highest 

 order than the development of the indus- 

 trial synthesis of indigo. Here was a sub- 

 stance of enormous consumption which, 

 until then, had been obtained from the 

 tropics as a natural product of agriculture. 



Professor von Baeyer and his pupils, by 

 long and marvelously clever laboratory 

 work, had succeeded in unraveling the 

 chemical constitution of this indigo dye, 

 and had finally indicated some possible 

 methods of synthesis. Notwithstanding aU 

 this, it took the Badische Aniline & Soda 

 Fabrik about twenty years of patient re- 

 search work, carried out by a group of 

 eminent chemists and engineers, before a 

 satisfactory method was devised by which 

 the artificial product could compete in 

 price and in quality with natural indigo. 



Germany, with her well-administered 

 and easily enforcible patent laws, has 

 added, through this very agency, a most 



vital inducement for pioneer work in chem- 

 ical industries. Who otherwise would dare 

 to take the risk of aU the expenses con- 

 nected with this class of creative work? 

 Moreover, who would be induced to pub- 

 lish the result of his discoveries far and 

 wide throughout the whole world in that 

 steadily flowing stream of patent literature, 

 which, much sooner than any text-books or 

 periodicals, enables one worker to be bene- 

 fited and to be inspired by the publication 

 of the latest work of others? 



The development of some problems of 

 industrial chemistry has enlisted the bril- 

 liant collaboration of men of so many 

 different nationalities that the final success 

 could not, with any measure of justice, be 

 ascribed exclusively to one single race or 

 nation ; this is best illustrated by the inven- 

 tion of the different methods for the fixation 

 of nitrogen from the air. 



This extraordinary achievement, although 

 scarcely a few years old, seems already an 

 ordinary link in the chain of common, cur- 

 rent events of our busy life; and yet, the 

 facts connected with this recent conquest 

 reveal a modern tale of great deeds of the 

 race — an epos of applied science. 



Its story began the day when chemistry 

 taught us how indispensable are the nitrog- 

 eneous substances for the growth of all liv- 

 ing beings. 



Generally speaking, the most expensive 

 food-stuffs are precisely those which con- 

 tain most nitrogen; for the simple reason 

 that there is, and always has been, at some 

 time or another, a shortage of nitrogeneous 

 foods in the world. Agriculture furnishes 

 ITS these proteid- or nitrogen-containing 

 bodies, whether we eat them directly as 

 vegetable products, or indirectly as ani- 

 mals which have assimilated the proteids 

 from plants. It so happens, however, that 

 by our ill-balanced methods of agriculture, 

 we take nitrogen from the soil much faster 



