THE RELATION OF CHEMICAL LABOR-

ATORIES TO THE NATIONAL

WELFARE1

For two years and a half the world has
been in a ferment. On the basis of an inci-
dent which now seems trivial, the mutual
jealousies and distrust of the nations of Eu-
rope precipitated a war in which the inter-
ests of all the nations of the world are in-
volved. Those of us who think that our
race is progressing toward better condi-
tions can not but believe that there will
grow out of this war some better method of
settling differences between nations. The
duel as a means of settling private quarrels
has long since disappeared in England and
America. It must surely cease as a means
of settling quarrels between nations. It
seems certain that the time will come when
the world will look back to these years as a
time of madness like the madness that drove
men to the crusades of the middle ages.

With all the loss and waste and dreadful
suffering of these years the nations of the
world are learning some lessons which
would not have been learned in times of
peace. Russia has solved her liquor prob-
lem for the time being. Germany enforces
a democratic equality in the distribution of
food which is beyond the wildest dream of
the socialists. Bread is distributed by
cards and the wealthiest citizen can get no
more than the day laborer. England has
solved the problem of the unemployed-
there is no longer a "submerged tenth" for
whom conditions are utterly hopeless. One
of my friends who has been in London with

1 An address delivered at the dedication of the

chemical laboratory of the University of Oklahoma,

January 26, 1917.

his family reports that his wife was commiserating her charwoman on the suffering of the war, when the latter replied: "It's not so bad-a pun' a week and the man away from home-it's too good to last."

In America, too, we are learning some lessons-among others that our industrial independence, at least in the matter of dyes for our textiles, is of some importance.

It

If we try to find a single word which expresses that for which all of the warring nations are striving it is efficiency. seems very dreadful that the desire to slaughter our fellow men should be the incentive, and if we did not believe that the lessons learned under the stress of war will remain during the long years of peace that are to follow, we might well wish for the good old times before scientific efficiency was thought of. But whether we will or not a new sort of efficiency has come to stay and it is worth our while, here in America, to grasp its meaning and to look for the foundation on which it has been built.

I see with the eyes of a chemist, of course, and shall draw my illustrations from the science which I know best, but much that I have to say applies to other sciences as well.

A little less than one hundred years ago, shortly after Europe had settled down from the tumult of the Napoleonic wars a young German doctor of philosophy, not yet out of his teens, went to Paris to study chemistry and succeeded in gaining admission to the private laboratory of Gay Lussac. Liebig was a born chemist, if ever there was one, and had worked with things chemical from early boyhood. But even Liebig needed the inspiration of contact with one of the master chemists of his time, and this Gay Lussac gave him. After a few months he returned to Giessen and there in a laboratory which was new of its kind in university life he gathered about him an

enthusiastic group of young men who came to him for the study of chemistry. The laboratory was very crude and primitive in comparison with the palaces of science which we build to-day, but out of that laboratory went influences which have spread over the whole world-Liebig's idea of a laboratory was not that it is chiefly a place for teaching what is already known, but rather that it is a workshop where teacher and pupil are striving together to learn something new from the great book of nature. Very soon many similar laboratories sprang up and within a few years Germany became the country to which young men resorted from all over the world for the study of chemistry.

A. W. Hofmann, one of the talented young men of the Giessen group, was called to London by Prince Albert in 1845. There he taught in the college of chemistry. He employed as an honorary assistant, some years later, a young man by the name of William H. Perkin. Young Perkin became so interested in the subject that he was not content merely to work with Hofmann during the day, but he fitted up a private laboratory at home where he could work at night. Here he tried to do some experiments in the hope of obtaining a synthesis of quinine. His first experiments gave an unattractive reddish brown precipitate of the sort that most chemists would pass by as hopeless. He became interested, however, and tried similar experiments with a simpler substance, aniline. The product was at first still more unpromising, but on further examination he found that it contained a beautiful purple coloring-matter which was capable of dyeing silk and other textiles. It was in fact the substance we now know as the "Mauve dye." Perkin, then a lad of only eighteen years, conceived the daring idea that this color might be put to practical use. Fortunately his father had faith enough in his ability to

furnish him with the necessary financial assistance. It was a new thing under the sun and it is fascinating to read of the difficulties met and overcome in developing the industry of the coal-tar dyes. The benzene which is now separated from coal-tar to the amount of thousands of tons annually was not to be had as a definite product and it was necessary to invent the machinery and apparatus for carrying out on a large scale operations which, hitherto, had been tried only in test-tubes. Even when the new dye had been made, the dyers, who were accustomed only to vegetable dyes, could not use the product and Perkin had to go into their dyehouses and teach them how to handle the material. All of these difficulties were finally overcome and a successful foundation was laid for a great industry, which in less than a generation revolutionized the artistic beauty of our wearing apparel.

A few years later two German chemists solved the riddle of the structure of alizarin, the coloring matter of madder root, and showed that the dye could be made from the anthracene of coal tar. They did not, however, put the production of the material on a commercial basis and here, again, it was William H. Perkin who worked out the economic details of manufacture in his factory.

With such a beginning it would have seemed that England must be the leader in the manufacture of artificial dyes, but long before the end of the nineteenth century Great Britain had lost all her initial advantage and Germany was preeminent in the production of synthetic colors.

When we look for the reason for this surprising result we find it almost entirely in the laboratories founded on Liebig's ideal -laboratories where students learned the chemistry already known, it is true, but where, much more than that, and as their prime object, teachers and pupils gave their energies intensely and incessantly to

the development of an ever-changing science. Young men trained in such an atmosphere proved to be the very ones who could solve the varied problems of an industry which is so intimately connected with investigations in pure science. In addition to the supply of trained chemists furnished by the universities there grew up a most intimate connection between the university laboratories and the factories where dyes were made. An illustration will help to make this clear. Kekulè, one of the men who worked with Liebig in Giessen, proposed his theory of the structure of benzene in 1865. This has become, perhaps, the most important single thought guiding the work of the color-chemists even to the present day. Baeyer, who had studied with Kekulé, took up, in the same year, some work on isatin, an oxidation product of indigo. He tells us with what pleasure he had spent for a piece of indigo a birthday present of two thalers, given him when he was thirteen, and with what a feeling of reverence he drew in the odor of orthonitrophenol while he was preparing isatin from it by the directions which he found in an organic chemistry.

After working upon isatin and other derivatives of indigo for four years with good success Professor Baeyer dropped the subject for eight years because his former teacher Kekulè published a paper in which he announced that he was attempting a synthesis of isatin. It was evident that Kekulé did not succeed and in 1877 Baeyer felt justified in taking up the subject again. Three years later he discovered a synthesis of indigo which was of sufficient promise for a patent and the Badische Anilin Soda Fabrik began at once an attempt to put the synthesis on a manufacturing basis. But a successful synthesis in the laboratory is very different from successful production in a factory. The chemists of the factory worked over the process from every pos

sible point of view for fifteen years. The various steps in the process were greatly improved and more than a hundred patents were taken out, but it was never possible to convert Baeyer's synthesis into a successful manufacture of indigo on a large scale. The original material required for that synthesis is the toluene of coal tar and the annual production of this substance would be sufficient to produce only about one fourth of the indigo required in the world. As toluene is used in the manufacture of a great variety of other dyes and compounds it is evident that any considerable use for the manufacture of indigo would cause such an increase in price as automatically to stop the manufacture. No manufacture of indigo could succeed unless the dye were made at a price to compete with the agricultural production in India.

The factory found its way out of this culde-sac by means of a discovery made by Professor Heumann in the chemical laboratory of the Polytechnic at Zurich, Switzerland-a laboratory which has given us many brilliant discoveries in chemistry and which is conducted on a high scientific plane, not on the theory that it must devote itself to so-called practical problems. By combining Heumann's discovery with another made by Hoogewerf and van Dorp in a laboratory in Holland it became possible to manufacture indigo with naphthalene of coal tar as the starting-point. Naphthalene, known to us all in the familiar moth balls, is abundant and cheap.

Even with the aid of these fundamental discoveries from the university laboratories the chemists of the factory worked incessantly upon the problem for seven years before they felt sufficiently sure of their ground to recommend the building of a plant for the manufacture on a large scale. Two incidents of the development are of sufficient interest to deserve mention. The first step in the process is the oxidation of

naphthalene to phthalic acid. The processes which had been used before that were too tedious and expensive. In the course of a systematic examination of all possible methods for cheapening the process a chemist accidentally broke a thermometer in a mixture of naphthalene and sulfuric acid which he was heating. The mercuric sulfate which was formed proved to be the needed catalyst to hasten the reaction and the details of a successful process for the oxidation were soon developed. But, as is so often the case, the solution of one problem brought out a second difficulty. Strong sulfuric acid is required for the oxidation and this is reduced to sulfur dioxide, which it is necessary to recover and convert back into the strong acid by oxidation with air. This led to the transformation of the old and well-known contact process for the manufacture of sulfuric acid into a new and radically changed form. Incidentally it may be remarked that the new contact process soon found its way to America and has been used to convert to sulfuric acid the sulfur dioxide obtained as the first step in the reduction of zinc ores. The strong sulfuric acid has been used, in turn, in making dynamite.

Finally, in July, 1897, the preliminary work was completed and the Badische Anilin Soda Fabrik was ready to begin the construction of the necessary factories. In October, 1900, Dr. Brunck reported that the firm had spent about eighteen million marks or four and a half million dollars upon their plant and that the production had already attained a proportion which corresponded with the natural production from 100,000 hectares or nearly 250,000 acres of land. In reply to the suggestion that the competition might prove disastrous to the farmers of India he expressed the hope that the land now used for the production of indigo may be released for rais

It has seemed worth while to consider this development of the manufacture of indigo in detail because it points out so clearly the road which we must travel in America if we are to succeed in the color industry. It is a lesson which American manufacturers are learning, too, and this promises well for the future. A manufacturer in Michigan has recently taken a promising research worker in organic chemistry from the University of Michigan to help him develop the manufacture of indigo, and another manufacturer in Buffalo last summer called a man from the University of Illinois at twice the salary he was paid there, to organize a research laboratory for the manufacture of dyes. In each case the man secured his training in the research work of a university laboratory.

At the beginning of the war we were using dyes in the United States to the value of about $15,000,000 a year. Of this amount only about $3,000,000 worth were made in America. Nearly all the rest came from Germany. Textile industries having a product worth hundreds of millions are directly dependent on dyes and there is scarcely a person in this country who has not seen in some form the effect of the shortage. The dye manufacturers have been alive to the situation and in another year they will be able to furnish the quantity of dyes required, though they will not be able to furnish as great a variety as were formerly used.

We have heard a good deal, in recent years, about a scientific tariff commission. The action of Congress last summer illustrates the need of such a commission. The importance of making ourselves independent of other countries had become so evident that a bill was introduced providing for an ad valorem tax on dyes of 30 per cent. and a specific tax of 5 cents per pound.

years. At the end of that time it is to be decreased one cent a year till it disappears. There is also a provision that if the American factories do not produce 60 per cent. of the value of our home consumption at the end of five years the specific duties are to be completely repealed. While the specific duty is only two thirds of the amount which had been recommended by the New York Section of the American Chemical Society, it might, perhaps, have been sufficient if it were not for another provision which was allowed to creep in. Apparently at the instigation of some large user of dyes, indigo, alizarin and their derivatives were excluded from the specific duties. No logical reason, whatever, can be given for this exclusion. It must be due either to stupidity or to an attempt to favor some special interests. As this class of dyes constitutes 29 per cent. of the whole and at least 10 per cent. of the other dyes are covered by foreign patents, it is evident that the hope that our factories will produce 60 per cent. of our dyes in normal conditions of foregin competition is small.

Still other difficulties beset the industry. The manufacturers of dyes in Germany have very definite arrangements by which one dye is made by one firm, another by a second, and still another by a third so that there is no real competition in the manufacture of staple products. Such combinations are fostered rather than hindered by the German government, but similar combinations in this country are forbidden by the Sherman law. The way out of this difficulty seems to be in the first place a census of dyes showing what dyes are used and the quantities of each. Such a census has already been prepared by the expert of the Department of Commerce and Labor. If we can combine with this, in accordance with a suggestion of Dr. Herty, the editor of our Journal of Industrial and Engineer