838 



SCIENCE., 



[N. S. Vol XLIII. No. 1120 



volved in this enormous production of gun- 

 cotton in a single plant? — work that is 

 conducted in ten to fifteen parallel proce- 

 dures or "cotton-lines," which with their 

 accompanying accessories, include cleaning 

 and alkali digestion of the cotton; bleach- 

 ing with chloride of lime; manufacture of 

 sulfuric acid for the production of nitric 

 acid and "mixed acid"; nitration of the 

 cotton in thirty-pound batches ; the hazard- 

 ous wringing and hasty submerging of the 

 cotton in water, to avoid the consequences 

 of heating by too slow dilution of the 

 strong acid held spongelike by the cotton; 

 the conveying of this material in the cotton- 

 line to the washers where the remaining 

 acid in the tube-shaped cotton fibers is re- 

 moved; and finally the removal from the 

 water as wet or damp gun-cotton, the com- 

 mercial product of many plants. This end 

 product of course is but the beginning or 

 raw material for the various nitro-cellu- 

 loses, smokeless powders and other high ex- 

 plosives. Yet this scale of operations is 

 not going on in just one plant of this kind 

 or even in this one industry. This is a 

 sample of what is happening every day in 

 the shape of the American chemical engi- 

 neers' answer to the question, how are you 

 meeting the war's problems? 



At some of these things we are permitted 

 to take at least a peep. No one man can 

 know all of even such gross developments, 

 and practically every chemist we meet has 

 his enthusiastic story of the progress in his 

 own and familiar fields. We all do know, 

 however, that if this is the character of the 

 outward developments, there must be 

 legions of quiet research and other experi- 

 mental attacks on the new problems, and 

 literally hundreds of solutions being worked 

 out for minor problems in factory and 

 plant, not to speak of the vast amount of 

 work in other departments of chemistry 

 made necessary by all these things. Then, 



too, there is the ever verdant crop of inter- 

 esting suggestions, revolutionary changes 

 and inventions throughout the list of the 

 chemical industries. In fact they are 

 doubly numerous and aggressive under the 

 stimulation of such a time as this. It ia 

 never wise to predict their success or failure 

 until even years have elapsed in many 

 cases. So that the lecturer who wishes to 

 entertain his hearers with pleasant and 

 surprising intellectual gymnastics in the 

 shape of the newest and most wonderful 

 achievements in industrial chemistry is safe 

 from apparent error for from three months 

 to three years, if he picks his illustrations 

 well. At the end of that time he can dodge 

 criticism for misjudgment by referring the 

 back-fires to poor business management, 

 insufficient capital, tariff, trusts and some- 

 times to poor engineering. It is true that a 

 large number of these new things never 

 make good. It is equally true that some of 

 them will make good and that all of them 

 indicate progress, for they are strivings, 

 and progress comes by striving. 



It is equally true also that many of the 

 chemical expedients which are in success- 

 ful use under war conditions will auto- 

 matically step aside when normal condi- 

 tions resume. It is fundamental industrial 

 chemical intelligence that a procedure 

 which is ridiculous under some conditions 

 may be a God-send under others. We do 

 not expect every change installed to be 

 really normal progress, for it will not be so 

 in the ordinary sense at least. On the other 

 hand, it would be wrong also to say that the 

 mushroom plants producing munitions are 

 not signs of progress. They unquestionably 

 are not such signs in as far as they are 

 temporary. They do not measure true ex- 

 pansion in their respective fields. He would 

 be a novice or singularly blind, however, 

 who did not see that the construction of 

 such plants on the undreamed-of scale I 



