ETHYL ALCOHOL FROM WOOD WASTE. 7 
Willstatter and Feichmeister 7 with fuming hydrochloric acid on 
cotton and wood has confirmed these results; but in all those experi- 
ments the amounts of acid required have been so large that the initial 
and recovery costs for acid have prevented commercial development. 
Whether the source of the fermentable sugars is the cellulose or 
the lignin of the wood has long been a subject for debate and has 
also been the occasion of considerable investigation; but the fact 
remains that a wood cellulose like soda or sulphite pulp has been 
found to produce about twice as much fermentable sugar and alcohol 
as the same amount of the original wood, the yields being in propor- 
tion to the cellulose content. 
HISTORY OF THE PROCESSES. 
The first recorded attempts to produce sugars and alcohol from 
vegetable fiber were those of Braconnot 8 in 1819. From that time 
until the publication of Simonsen's 9 paper in 1898 little work of 
value was done. 10 Simonsen's review of the problem is well worth 
quoting here, because it tersely describes the situation at that time: 
TJie literature of this problem is imperfect and faulty to a high degree. It contains 
many inaccurate and impossible statements and contradictions. There is no record 
of any systematic investigation as to the effect of a variation of the different factors, 
such as amount of water, pressure, amount of acid, and time in high-pressure inver- 
sions. Parallel and comparative experiments on cellulose and wood are also lacking, 
so no information on the relation of the incrusting substances to the inversion processes 
is at hand. That these investigations may have been made and their results kept 
secret is not impossible, since factories have been established. Such researches 
could hardly have dealt with high-pressure inversion, which has only been carried 
out practically on a large scale for the last 20 years. Yet the manufacture of spirit 
from cellulose mateiial by means of inversion under such unfavorable conditions as 
that over 100 per cent of sulphuric acid was required for the dry wood and the corre- 
sponding quantity of calcium carbonate or lime (and taking into account the high 
price of the material at that time and the length of time required for the process) 
seems to point to the fact that the inversion of wood will be the method of the future 
if only a satisfactory process can be found. 
Simonsen carried out a long and painstaking research on the 
subject, in which he investigated both cellulose (sulphite cellulose) 
and sawdust in a systematic way. As an inverting agent he used 
sulphuric acid, and from his results concluded that the best condi- 
tions for the inversion of sawdust were as follows : 
Time of inversion 15 minutes. 
Acidity 0.5 per cent H 2 S0 4 . 
Proportion of wood to liquid 1 to 4. 
Pressure about 9 atmospheres. 
i Berichte, 1913, 2401. 
a Koerner, Zeit. Ang. Chem., 1908, 2353. 
s Gilbert's Annalen der Physik, 1819, 63, 348. 
s Zeit. fur ang. Chemie, 1898, 195, 962, 1007. 
i° The references to the original literature from 1819 to 1898 will be found in the bibliography at the end 
of this bulletin. 
