SULFUR IS A BASIC MATERIALIOF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY ... along with salt, limestone, and coal. Here are uncounted tons of it, better than 99 per cent pure. It has been mined from beneath more than 500 feet of quicksand and rock on the Louisiana coast-which sounds difficult but has been extremely easy ever since Chemist Herman Frasch thought of the perfect way to do it forty-six years ago. Three concentric pipes pierce the quicksands to the underlying sulfur. One pipe carries hot water, which melts it; another carries compressed air to blow it out; the third carries the sulfur to the surface. Here you see it, as painted for FoRTUNE by Eminent American Artist Charles Burch­ field, standing in the great, glistening, yellow monuments that are left after the sulfur has cooled and hardened, and the wooden bins have been knocked away. The sulfur has been molded in these setback steps so that great man-crushing chunks will be less likely to break off. FoRTUNE calls sulfur sulfur because the American Chemical Society has ruled that sulphur is an archaic spelling.

• 82. Chemical Industry: I

It is perhaps the most progressive industry alive. It lowers prices, but has few market wars. Bankers never heard of it until the World War, when it was a hundred and twenty-three years old. Three companies account for about two-thirds of its assets, although hundreds of companies make it up. It sells acids, alkalies, ammonia, and diphenylparaphenyl­ enediamine-and if you don't see what you want, ask for it.

ROM his laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, ble elements-and it suddenly dawned upon FThomas Midgley Jr. one morning The small size of chemical in­ him that all the refrigerants known so far a few years ago telephoned to Detroit dustry conceals its vast importance, were made from 2.mong those elements. to talk to his intimate scientific and per­ whether in peace or in war. For its But there was one element, and only one, sonal friend, Charles Franklin Kettering. importance, definition, and charac­ that had never been so used. It was fluorine. They chatted for a moment about minor teristics see: He ran his finger up a column of elements, matters and then, according to the recol­ and noted that in general toxicity decreased lection that Mr. Midgley later had good CHEMICAL INDUSTRY: I ...... this page from bottom to top. Then he ran his finger reason to write down, Mr. Kettering said: For the chemistry behind the industly from left to right across a row, and observed "Midge, I was talking to Lester Keilholtz turn to: that inflammability decreased. And where last night and we came to the conclusion CHEMICAL INDUSTRY: II ... . page 162 his lines met, there, once again, stood the that the refrigeration industry needs a new Sulfuric acid ...... page 166 element fluorine. refrigerant if it ever expects to get any­ Chlorine page 168 "It was" said Midgley himself, "an ex­ where. So I told Lester that I would call Ammonia and nitrogen . page 170 citing deduction. Seemingly, no one had you and have you see him to talk it over. Hydrogen page 170 considered it possible that fluorine might He is leaving for Dayton tonight." For chemical and financial summaries be nontoxic in some of its compounds ... Duly the next day Mr. Keilholtz arrived of companies, see as follows: If the problem before us were solvable by at Dayton, and he and Mr. Midgley sat Du Pont . . page 85 the use of a single compound, then that down together. Mr. Keilholtz was then Allied Chemical & Dye . page 87 compound would certainly contain fluo­ chief engineer of Frigidaire; Mr. Midgley Union Carbide page 8g rine." Still working in the library, the was the brilliant chemist chiefly respon­ American Cyanamid page go Midgley team decided to synthesize a prod­ sible for discovering why automobile en­ Dow Chemical page 164 uct containing fluorine, which was said to gines knocked, and then developing a Monsanto Chemical page 166 boil at -20° Centigrade, but whose other substance-tetraethyl lead-that would stop properties were entirely unknown. Its them from doing it. Now Mr. Keilholtz name was dichlorodifluoromethane. wanted Mr. Midgley to try his hand at the International Critical Tables-tabula­ Starting with antimony trifluoride, it creating another new substance: a liquid tions of melting and boiling points and wasn't hard to make. But the antimony whose boiling point would be well below other properties-that they could hope to trifluoride, being a specialty chemical in the freezing point of water-and which synthesize without too much trouble? no demand whatever, was hard to come by. would therefore be a refrigerant-but which The most helpful thing that Midgley and Midgley corralled five one-ounce bottles of would be nontoxic and noninflammable. his associates found in the International it; so far as he knows, that was all the an­ Awkwardly enough, the refrigeration in­ Critical Tables was a mistake. The tables timony trifluoride in the whole U.S. From dustry possessed no such thing. Its two best listed carbon tetrafluoride as boiling at one bottle they made a few grams of dichlo­ bets for use in its domestic refrigerators -15° Centigrade, and there were good rea­ rodifluoromethane-a water-clear liquid. were sulfur dioxide and methyl chloride. sons for thinking that this was wrong, as They put a teaspoonful, furiously boiling Both substances were toxic; one was in­ it later proved to be. But that started Midg­ at room temperature, under a bell jar with flammable. Particularly with air condition­ ley thinking about the organic compounds a guinea pig, while a physician watched ing just around the corner, the refrigera­ of fluorine, despite the fact that fluorine is earnestly for symptoms of the guinea pig's tion industry stood in urgent need of a a gas belonging in the same family with collapse. There were none. The guinea technological improvement. chlorine, and even more toxic than chlo­ pig breathed dichlorodifluoromethane with Mr. Midgley listened and was dubious. rine. Discarding the Critical Tables as too equanimity and unconcern, and the pre­ He doubted that any one substance could incomplete for his purposes, Midgley turned dictions of the Midgley team were tri­ be found that would be nontoxic and non­ now to a table of elements arranged ac­ umphantly fulfilled. The job had taken inflammable, and still be obliging enough cording to Nobel Prizeman Irving Lang­ three days! to boil between 0° and -40° Centigrade­ muir's theories of atomic structure. Could Big, bespectacled, jovial Chemist Midg­ the essential range. Nevertheless, he left volatility be related to this table in some ley got the Perkin Medal this year-next Mr. Keilholtz and went to lunch with two way? It could indeed; the elements on the to a Nobel prize, the most resounding ac­ laboratory associates. They discussed the right-hand side of the table were the only claim a U.S. chemist can receive. Chemil>t possibilities, and after lunch the three of ones known to make sufficiently volatile Midgley has a sound instinct for the dra­ them went to work-not in the laboratory, compounds. Of these dozen or more Midg­ matic; and in the course of making his as you might expect, but in the library. ley now ruled out every element that the acceptance address he de-monstrated the What volatile but stable (nondecomposing) Critical Tables told him made unstable qualities of his new substance by personal organic compounds might they discover in compounds. He was left with eight possi- experiment. He drew in a lungful of the FROM COAL: COKE, GAS, AMMONIA, FERTILIZERS, ALCOHOLS, DYES, MEDICINES BY THE UNCOUNTABLE THOUSANDS

warmed gas as casually as he draws in to­ This previously unknown material and its smaller companies listed on the Big Board bacco smoke, held his breath for a mo­ chemical cousins are now tonnage chem­ or the Curb (Dow and Monsanto are typi­ ment, and then blew it softly through a icals. Hundreds of thousands of refriger­ cal among such companies), plus hundreds rubber hose into a beaker in which stood ators were supplied with them this year, of still smaller ones. The total va I ue of a lighted candle. The candle flame wavered and since each refrigerator requires from the products of all is, perhaps, $7oo,ooo,ooo ·and went out. two to four pounds, hundreds of tons have a year. As industries go, it is extremely new. Nontoxic, noninflammable, dichlorodi­ rolled out in tank cars from the plant of It is as broad in its scope as it is difficult fluoromethane is, to all intents and pur­ Kinetic Chemicals, Inc. (a du Pont and to define. For want of a better term, we poses, something new in man's world. It General Motors jointly owned subsidi­ may call it chemical industry. Its activities, existed before l\Iidgley, but only because ary) during 1937. Dichlorodifluoromethane obscure to the layman, can best be ex­ someone, somewhere, had once happened manufacture has called for other chemicals pressed by saying that it is engaged in mak­ to synthesize it. Its use was unknown; its like carbon tetrachloride and has provoked ing something into something else-not by very existence obscure. Its utility to the a new activity in the mining of fluor spar altering shapes and sizes visible to the eye refrigeration industry would never have for its fluorine in Kentucky and Illinois. but by working with the unseen and un­ become known were it not for the fact that, seeable building materials of the chemist: Anno Domini 1937. the chemist is in pos­ E MAY, then, take Mr. Midgley as a atoms and molecules. Working principally session of something that has been tagged Wtoken of the strange industry with with its two great weapons of heat and with the momentous phrase "a technique which this article is concerned. It is a small pressure, it busies itself with making things of discovery." industry, made up of three dominant com­ that are new, things that are cheaper, things But there is another aspect to dichlorodi­ panies (du Pont, Allied Chemical & Dye, to make other things, things that the eye fluoromethane. It represents an industry. Union Carbide & Carbon), plus some fifty of the ultimate consumer seldom if ever falls upon. Chemical industry is not concerned with a great many which was now enabled by cheap alkali to find a wider and wider things that the U.S. public and the U.S. Government think it is: market for something that had been, in Leblanc's day, a product chemical industry does not mean writing ink, fireworks, candles, of luxurious scarcity. The product was soap, out of which was to or mucilage-although all of these things are essentially chemical flower a new society, a new domestic economy, a new conception in products. If we are to define chemical industry, then, we had best medicine-personal hygiene. Further, the large-scale manufacture go back for a moment to the man who in truth began it, although of soda by Leblanc's process gave the rapidly mechanizing textile in­ his aim was notably less. dustry a new and cheaper means of whitening its great new output The man who began it was the Frenchman Nicolas Leblanc­ of cloth without sunshine. It was typical of chemical industry then and the year of his achievement was 1791. Nicolas Leblanc was and now that Leblanc's discovery upset the economics of per­ not trying to make history. He was just trying to make a little fume and incense making, and of any other business that pros­ money. French glass factories, then as now preeminent, had been pered because of the lack of soap. It was even more typical that accustomed to get their essential supplies of alkali from Spain­ Leblanc's revolutionary process was, before long, flung on the rub­ where the Spaniards burned seaweed to get ashes and took barilla bish pile and utterly forgotten; a new and better process for cheap (the alkali, sodium carbonate) from them. But the British armies alkali arose to take its place. Most typical of all, chemical in­ had cut France off from this supply, and it was primarily to aid dustry is today working toward "soapless soaps," which require no the glassmakers that Leblanc began hunting for some means of alkali to make. The segment of chemical industry represented by making a cheap alkali, independent of Spain or the hindrance this cycle of change is small, but it is extremely characteristic. of the British. To this activity he had been spurred by a prize of 12,000 francs HE processes of modern chemical industry are as many and offered by the French Academy for a process by which soda could T varied as the products they produce. About the processes it be made from salt. By what prescience the Academy had decided is important to remember that the method made famous by the that the one might conceivably be made from the other is la~e Thomas Alva Edison-which consisted of trying everything unknown, for the element sodium, common to salt and soda, was yet to be discovered. But if the Academy stabbed in the dark it stabbed in precisely the right place, and Leblanc, starting to work in 1784, had the answer three years later. He treated salt with sul- E. I. DUPONT DE NEMOURS & CO. furic acid, and thus made "salt cake," or sodium sulfate. He roasted the salt cake with charcoal and roo shares Dec. JI, '24 = $r3,925 = g8o shares Dec. ;r, ';6 = $I70,520 = $II5,248 Oct. rg, '37 chalk. Thus he got "black ash," from which he could dissolve out and crystallize sodium carbonate. Once CHEMICALLY Leblanc had done it, it was as simple as that. . .. biggest show in the U.S. Products ranked second and may be first. All this came from in order of importance to du Pont: Fabrics five generations of prolific du Ponts and a OW between what Leblanc did and what other and Finishes-pyroxylin, paints, varnishes, powder plant; shows clearly the conglomera­ men had previously done with chemical ma­ coated fabrics; Synthetic Organic Chemicals tion an imaginative chemist gets into. Re­ N -dyestuffs, tetraethyl lead, ethyl alcohol, etc.; search: preeminent, doubtless tops as to terials, there should be made an immediate and Rayon; Inorganic Heavy Chemicals-acids, dollars spent; considered extravagant by sharp distinction. There were earlier and greater zinc and zinc products, insecticides; Commer­ some. Very wieldy regardless of size. Ex­ chemists than Leblanc. Lavoisier, founder of modern cial Explosives; Cellophane-cellulose film, tremely aggressive. Many du Pont salesmen chemistry, was famous enough in 1794 to be guillo­ caps and bands, sponges; so-called Special are chemists who tackle nearly any problem tined; the great Henry Cavendish and the great Chemicals-electrochemicals, chlorinated sol­ chemically, achieve some striking results, get vents, ceramic colors, specialties; Plastics; and keep some potent accounts. CUSTOM­ Joseph Priestley were roughly Leblanc's contem­ Pigments; Ammonia-products of, plus ERS: like other chemicals, du Pont sells to poraries, and ten times more learned than Nicolas methanol, higher alcohols, urea; Sporting and industries once or more times removed from Leblanc. Moreover, the activities of the common man Military Powders. If you're chemically wise the individual consumer, but unlike them had involved chemical processes like leather tanning, that list is revealing, for du Pont ranks its du Pont gets some public recognition because Ammonia tenth in intracorporate importance of lavish institutional advertising. Munitions dyeing, distilling, glassmaking, for so long that pedants whereas in the industry it is no lower than sales average only 1 per cent of total. can wander in Phoenicia or Egypt or China ("the Chinese invented gunpowder") to their hearts' con­ tent and find the beginnings of this sort of "industrial FINANCIALLY chemistry" wherever it pleases them. . . . stronger than Gibraltar under present-day ing owing to $7,ooo,ooo less from Motors . But what Leblanc did was different from all this. conditions. Du Pont, however, is no mere Management: one of the shrewdest in U.S. For a practical end, with deliberate intention, and chemical even if it is biggest in U.S. ·Nearly industry. Depression depth-1932, earnings by scientific means as he knew them, he set out to half of its earnings since 1925 have come $26,235,ooo, one-third of 1929's $78,ooo,ooo make something into something else, with his eye from a neat General Motors investment made plus. Biggest du Pont year: 1936; net profit: in 1917 from War profits. G. M. holdings now a hair under $9o,ooo,ooo. In July the com­ not only on chemistry but on economics. He was the total 1o,ooo,ooo (about nine-tenths G. M. pany sold soo,ooo shares of $4.50 preferred first person on record to do any such thing. Upon share to one share du Pont common); carried through Morgan, Stanley for $48,75o,ooo to that, as a distinction, rests his unjustly faded and ob­ at $18.45 each-market value October 19, replace cash used in expansion-which never scure historical fame-and upon that, as a definition, 1937, 38~; 1937 high= 70Y2- Which gives a stops. That issue undoubtedly plumped into rough idea of how du Pont values assets, re­ the lock-boxes of the shrewdest investors­ rests the entire structure of modern chemical in­ ports its business. Big and strong, du Pont is with the more than a million $6 debenture dustry. With endless improvements, refinements, on the frank side about finances: gross sales shares that were one of the sweetest income ramifications, and complexities added, the chemical in '936-$26o,3oo,ooo, 18 per cent over 1935, propositions on any list but expensive now. industry continues its deliberate and calculated course 7 per cent above 1929. This year's first nine Statistically du Pont is not exciting, it is of making something into something else. months show sales zooming, but profits crawl- breathtaking-as see below. If Leblanc had not committed suicide because the French Revolution cost him his plant and process, Earned since 1925 ...... $627•'74,000 Net earnings, 1936 . $89,884,ooo he might have seen that course begin. A prime Dividends since 1925 ...... $555,224,000 Earned per share, 1936 . $7-53 Shares of common. 11,065,762 Undistributed-profits tax $2, 148,ooo peculiarity of chemical industry is that you seldom $6 debenture shares. . . 1,092,948 accomplish one thing at a time; your accomplish­ $4.50 preferred shares. . . soo,ooo Return on av. inv. capital ments take place two, five, or seventeen at once. Assets (net) June, 1937 ..... $644,811,ooo '936 16.6% Common dividend, 1936. $6.10 Earned surplus June 30, 1937.$240,927,000 Leblanc produced his cheap alkali primarily for the 1936 sales common, N.Y. S. E. 52o,goo Property account (net) benefit, so he thought, of French glass. But as a result High 1937-18oYs; Low-113!(s (Oct. 19) June 30, 1937. there soon began to grow an entire new industry, For some reason du Pont states intangibles for if the Messrs. du Pont say intangibles are at $29,926,ooo, which, considering the job worth nearly $3o,ooo,ooo-they are worth they have done, can be forgiven, believed, nearly thirty million dollars. BLUE GAS 8c BLOW-RUN GAS ... are the products of these re­ torts that belong to du Pont's big plant at Belle, West Virginia. By treating coke with steam the Belle plant makes these gases, which it can convert by high-pressure synthesis into ammonia or alcohols with equal ease, depending upon markets. conceivable by the imagination-has been supplanted by the and cheaper soap possible. With this criterion of chemical industry approach that we observed in watching Mr. Midgley: mathematical well in mind, we can now proceed to a check list of the industry's and deliberate. Of the product, you should remember that you most outstanding characteristics. seldom perceive it, of and by itself, with any of your senses (unless it is a drug), for it is either deeply concealed in something IRST characteristic of the industry is its extreme youth. familiar, or it has died in giving birth to something else. The FLeblanc's discovery and the beginnings of the Industrial Revo­ chances are against your awareness of diphenylparaphenylene­ lution both occurred during the last half of the eighteenth cen­ diamine. Yet if you knew where, in your everyday life, to look tury. That would seem to make the chemical industry no younger for it, you would there also discover paraisopropoxydiphenylamine than any other sort of industry. But whereas the entrepreneurs and perhaps also tetramethylthiuramdisulfide. All three of them of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries instantly grasped the may be in your automobile tires, as curing or accelerating or anti­ significance of the steam engine and the power loom, they did oxidizing agents. You have already discovered the sizable amount not grasp the significance of chemical industry. Consequently, of dichlorodifluoromethane that may be in your kitchen. If your chemical industry remained in a world apart. It grew, and it wife has a wool garment of a lovely golden orange hue, it may served other industries, without attracting either their notice or have been helped to take its color by 4·4'-dimethylaminobenzo­ the notice of financiers. Calls for more and more of Leblanc's phenonimid. But if you ever feel the need for 3,4-dihydroxyphenyl­ alkali led to calls for more and more sulfuric acid with which methylaminomethylenecarbinol hydrochloride you need only go to make it. Then came an alkali process-the Solvay process­ to your neighborhood druggist and ask him. He would supply better than Leblanc's, but one that called for quantities of am­ you with adrenalin. monia, instead of acid. From that grew the increasing importance But no matter how fantastic the names get-and they are practi­ of the byproduct coke oven that supplied the ammonia. By cal, systematic descriptions, not abracadabra-it is important to such means, chemical industry put on weight and stature through­ remember that practically everything in chemical industry springs out the nineteenth century-but so quietly that the outside world from four utterly simple raw materials: coal, sulfur, limestone, never knew it was there. A seventeen-year-old boy, who was to and salt-plus that relative newcomer, petroleum, and the cele­ become the famous Sir William Perkin, in 1856 made the world's brated "free goods" of the economist, air and water. From these first synthetic dye, using coal tar that was the refuse of gasworks­ raw materials the first products that chemical industry manufac­ and the entrepreneurs of mid-nineteenth-century England passed tures are "heavy" acids (sulfuric, nitric, hydrochloric); alkalies (soda by the significance of what he had done with a total lack of ash, caustic soda); multitudes of products of coal tar; commercial comprehension. (Not so the Germans; Germany saw the vast­ gases (hydrogen, chlorine)-plus such basic materials as ammonia, ness that lay in this new synthetic chemistry, and her early industrial alcohols, and solvents. You could without trouble multiply this list by two or three, but among the so-called heavy chemicals these are the heaviest, the most basic, the most fundamental to the art of living in the world that the chemist has created. ALLIED CHEMICAL & DYE CORP. AND chemical industry can best be defined as the zoo com. shares Dec. p, ·~1 = $8,875 = II0\4 shares Dec. p, '36 = $25,220 = $I7,I11 Oct. I9, '37 1"\. highly imaginative and creative industry that makes these fundamentals, and a relatively few others CHEMICALLr like them, and then combines and recombines them ... basic: largest factor in heavy chemicals. said never to have been used to capacity. into permutations and combinations of substances that Probably produces better than one-third of H ence Hopewell is potentially important-if are new and needed. It is an industry born of chem­ domestic alkali requirements. Leading manu­ it isn't a white elephant. Research: only fair istry and economics. Its head may be in the stars but facturer of acids (especially sulfuric), ammo­ compared to du Pont or Carbide. CUSTOM­ its feet are firmly set upon the practicalities of nia, dyestuffs, and coal-tar distillates. Makes ERS: Other manufacturers, particularly chlorine, and many another important chemi­ chemical processors. Glass, soap, textile, money-making business. To the practitioners of chem­ cal vital to the chemical process industries. leather, fertilizer, and petroleum are heavy ical industry, the world is still an extremely empty Has $5o,ooo,ooo plant at Hopewell, Virginia, buyers; also motorcar, metal, paper and pulp, world. There are old needs, to be better met than by for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. Is agricultural industries. existing materials. There are new needs, which may be yet unsuspected but which will become urgent and vital if a new product comes into being to fulfill FINANCIALLr them. Unlike the economist, the banker, or the poli­ ... Allied was born big in 1920 via mergers. and thread to outsiders. Management: ex­ Stays big. Extremely secretive; President H. F. tremely conservative, sound-stuffy to those tician, the chemist knows where he is going. One of Atherton's 1936 letter to shareholders used who would know all. But Allied earns money his aims is to synthesize better and cheaper products 281 words including salutation, signature, and monotonously-an average of $21,753,000 an­ than the empirical "dump and mix" manufacturing date, which might have seemed verbose to nually since 1925 (high S3o,2oo,ooo in 1929; of the past. But another is to synthesize better and former Chairman (but still guiding light) low 11,400,ooo in 1932)-pays whacking cheaper products than the products of nature her­ Orlando F. Weber. A vigilant defender of the dividends (didn't cut during depression), pros­ American chemical industry, and itself, pers. Last year Allied retired its remaining self. If this is audacious, the chemist is quite able to against foreign invasion. Biggest Allied se­ preferred-about $47•3oo,ooo including the reply that he is already doing just this thing with cret was financial, not chemical-the make-up premium-from its current position without scores and scores of products. of its marketable security account, which batting an eye. Depreciation policy: ruthless. Thus the industry that the synthetic chemist serves averaged (1929-34) 93,075•ooo. Today, ow­ Last year's tonnage: record; dollar volume: ing toN. Y. S. E. and SEC clamorings, Allied under 1929 only; prices to customers on is not just a process industry, and our definition must has revealed holdings of U.S. Steel and Air major products down about 25 per cent since rule such industries out of consideration in this ar­ Reduction stocks at a cost of $22,839,000- 1929. But like most chemicals, Allied does not ticle. They may be small, like candles and fireworks, worth $38·532,000 December 31, 1936, $28,- state its sales or cost of sales. Only a general or they may be huge, like the textile-processing in­ 761,000 October 19, 1937. A "sundry" invest­ depression hurts, and that not cruelly; it cur­ dustry, or the industries of pulp and paper, leather, ment account of 28,8oo,ooo is still needles tails, does not suspend profits. glass, rubber, paint and varnish. But they are all alike in that chemistry and chemicals are to them Dividends since organization . $228,509,000 Dividends, 1936 $1!1>285,000 not an end but only a means. Similarly the metallur­ Earned since 1925 .. . . $261,032,000 Earned per share, 1936. $11.44 gical industries, including iron and steel, fall outside Dividends since 1925 . $182,978,ooo Undistributed-profits tax . $265,800 our definition: like the process industries, they are Shares of common . 2,401,288 Return on av. inv. capital Shares in treasury. 187,189 not followers of Leblanc. For Leblanc was not trying 1936 .. 1 Authorized (all no par) . 3·143·455 3·89% to make glass or soap. But he did make cheaper glass Div. per share 1936 . 6 Equity per share .... 67.68 1936 sales, N.Y.S.E...... 259,500 Surplus, end of 1936. $170,111,000 High 1937-258\lz; Low-150 (Oct. 19) Property account (net) 1920. $86,858,ooo Net earnings, 1936...... $25,324,000 Ditto, 1936 ...... $76,6og,372 SULFUR IS A NUISANCE . as well as an essential to chemical industry. All this equipment is necessary in du Pont's plant at 1'.e\\e to New York Stock Exchange. Previous to industry faces an unexampled obsolescence in plant and equip­ that chemists had not needed bankers. The expansion of chemical ment. It meets this not only with a ruthless accountant's pencil industry was slow enough to be financed out of earnings. And but by a ruthless scrapping of equipment or process as soon as it bankers had barely heard of chemists. Chemically, then, chemical begins to falter. But it is in questions of price policy and structure industry dates from Leblanc and 1791; industrially, chemical in­ that the most interesting examples of economic policy in an indus­ dustry was recognized only after the ·world War. try make themselves felt. Its youth and its upbringing lend to chemical in­ dustry its second characteristic: it is as progressive an industry as it is possible to imagine. It is constantly questioning its own fundamentals. The industry's patriarchal chemical is sulfuric acid, which, one way UNION CARBIDE & CARBON CORP. or another, enters into product after product that the coo com. shares Dec. p, '24 = $6,537 = ;oo shares Dec. 31, ';6 = $;1,125 = $21450 Oct. 19, '37 industry turns out. During the last few years, how­ ever, processes as different as petroleum refining and CHEMICALLY fertilizer production have been finding ways to get ... four general divisions: Electrodes, Car­ it makes wood alcohol (methanol) that never along with less and less sulfuric acid, and the all-time bons, and Batteries; Calcium Carbide and saw wood. Also, Carbide makes commercial peak of its production has thus, perhaps, been passed Gases; Alloys and Metals; Synthetic Organic ethyl alcohol-"grain alcohol"-not from forever. But the industry sheds no tears. After all, it Chemicals. In the 1936 report a list of prod­ products like grain or molasses but by hy­ makes its own acid; if it can do with less it has made ucts jammed fourteen pages of a dry drating ethylene-a product of petroleum dis­ brochure, compared to five pages of an equal­ tillation. And countless other organics which an economy. The industry never holds on to an old ly dry one in 1929. Carbide's greatness is due can well change the natural state of tl1e product or an old process when it can find new ones; primarily to the electric furnace, born of the world as new uses appear. Plastics for Victro­ its orientation, in the nature of things, is entirely carbon arc, with which it has a "partial skill la records, toothbrushes, dentures, or what forward. Fortunately for it, its plants are flexible-an monopoly." From the furnace comes calcium have you to replace? Antifreezes (Prestone, ammonia plant, for example, can be made into an carbide; hence acetylene (Prest-O-Lite), once derived from same foundation as mustard only an illuminant, now, with oxygen, a gas), rust inhibitors, carbon dioxide for Dry alcohol plant almost overnight (page 170). whole system of gas welding. From the fur-· Ice, Pyrofax gas, even gasoline (natural gas or nace developed Alloys and Metals: chromium, casing-head gasoline), sold in bulk to oil com­ ou might say that the industry is bound to be pro­ tungsten, vanadium; also Haynes Stellite, a panies, come from Carbide's Synthetic Divi­ gressive: either it is progressive or it is nonexis­ nonferrous metal alloy with nearly diamond sion. Plants-164; sales offices-g2; warehouse Y hardness at red heat, used in tool steel, oil­ stocks-1,u3; this in the U.S. and Canada; tent. With a similar urgency behind it, the chemical well drills. From carbon come flashlight and more abroad. Research: preeminent. CUS­ industry is efficient. To make a pound of soda, selling radio batteries, millions of motor brushes, car­ TOMERS: steel, petroleum, marine, motor­ for one cent, the Solvay Process Co. must use two bon electrodes, etc. New, with a great specu­ car, aeronautical, railroad, electrical, textile, cents' worth of ammonia. Nevertheless, Solvay sells lative kick, are Synthetic Organics. Carbide & lacquer, pharmaceutical, paper, photo­ Carbon Chemicals, Inc.-subsidiary- is a graphic, explosives, and scores of subdivisions its soda at a good round profit. The answer of course leader in high-pressure synthesis, from which of these and other industries. is that practically every drop of ammonia must be recovered, saved, and recirculated, process without end. Written over the portals of the industry is the FINANCIALLY warning, "Save or diel"-and the chemical industry . . . pure as Ivory Soap. Even 1917 merger fie will bear. Expansion: good times and bad . wastes so little that the packer's utilization of the pig was without stock fees for promotion or serv­ 1925 property account: $158,ooo,ooo; in 1936 is by comparison a prodigal's job. ices, making Carbide lonely in merged com­ $25o,ooo,ooo after 1931's vicious write-down. pany. Carbide is the result of internal grow­ Earnings: two hairs under du Pont without But that is efficiency largely in terms of good engi­ mg pains, acquisition, and merger. And for General Motors. Smart, young mentally, hard neering and good plant practice. The industry is that reason alone it is very unusual. Patents hitting, candid, racing-yet under control. efficient in other ways. It is, for example, entirely and good will: $1. Depreciation: all the traf- Perfect dividend record. No preferred stock. scientific in its approach, whether its approach is to chemistry or to marketing. Again and again, the Dividends since 1917 $281,234,000 Funded debt end of 1936. .. $21 ,125,000 chemical industry develops a new product, whose Earned since 1925 $288,g18,ooo Net earnings, 1936 . $36,852,000 Dividends since 1925 . $1g8,gg6,ooo Dividends, 1936 $23,402,000 name is unknown, whose performance must be taken Shares of common 1936 . g,o00,743 Times fixed charges earned on faith, and must at the same time develop markets Shareholders 1936 . . 55,705 1936 43-4 where none exist. Ethylene glycol was just ethylene 1936 sales, N. Y. S. E.. 8g6,ooo Earned per share 1936 ...... S4.og glycol until Carbide developed it, and a market for it, High 1937-1u; Low-67 (Oct. 19) Return on av. in>. cap. 1936 . 14.1% Cash and equivalent to Funded debt to inv. cap. 1936 7·9% as a radiator antifreeze called Prestone. funded debt 1936 . Equity per share 1936. $27-41 Since 1925 Carbide has paid $go,561,000 to smart little Monsanto, American Cyanamid, surplus from net earnings, more than du or Dow. But enough. Has only funded debt Pont or Allied, the other two of the Big of any size in Big Three-considering earn­ Three chemicals, less, percentagewise, than ings it doesn't amount to much. The chemical indwstry was born reaching out for lower prices: Leblanc was hunting for a cheap alkali. This is more than a symbol of chemical in­ AUTOMATIC CONTROL dustry; it is an unalterable birthmark. The people of Leblanc's day needed . is the sine qua non of modern more soda; they didn't know it, but they did. Therefore make it cheaper, chemical industry. Pressures, tempera­ and you could sell more of it-lots more of it. Looked at in this sense, every tures, concentrations, rates of flow-all success of industrial chemistry is a success of economics as much as a success these are recorded on dials or traced on paper while junior engineers stand of test-tube science. Just as the man in the street did not know in 1784 that watch and scribble in their logbooks. he needed soda, so the man in the street today is unaware of his need for iso-octane. Yet he may come to need it very badly, for it is already an internal­ combustion engine fuel of a greater efficiency than the highest-grade gaso­ lines-and is consequently a vivid new possibility facing aviation engineers. Moreover, chemical industry is itching to get prices down enough so that some day iso-octane can enter the automobile market. The very necessity that the chemical industry is under of developing new products and new markets at the same time is at once its greatest challenge and greatest asset. The laboratory has always known how to make a new product months or years before the plant could make it; but before the plant could match the laboratory and create effective demand, it had to hammer its costs down to a point where the price made sense in a practical world. Aluminum's advantages of lightness, luster, electrical con­ ductivity, and resistance to corrosion had been known for years before there came along a young man named Charles Martin Hall. But aluminum's attrac­ tions, before Hall devised an electrolytic process to win it from its ore, were only tantalizing-for aluminum cost $12 a pound. It now averages twenty­ one and a half cents. [Continued on page r57]

AMERICAN CYANAMID CO. roo shares Dec. p, '24 = $ro,250 =roo shares A, 400 B Dec. p, ';6 = $8o,r5o = $I2,074 Oct. I9, '37

CHEMICALLY . . . fourth largest; not a very good fourth, about 15 per cent. Cyanamid has developed but heading the so-called little fellows. In quite a stable: it makes beetleware and other 1909 Cyanamid was hot stuff with the only plastics, dyestuffs, pharmaceuticals, explo­ nitrogen-fixation process worth much. But it sives, gypsum, insecticides, rubber chemicals, remained a simple fertilizer and mining alkalis, heavy acids. It owns big bauxite de­ chemical company. Principal product: cal­ posits from which comes sulfate of aluminum, cium cyanamide, made by blowing nitrogen no metal. Cyanamid even goes in for bio­ through white-hot calcium carbide. Crushed, logical products. The company is more ex­ it was fertilizer (75 per cent of Cyanamid's citing chemically today than it has been for business); and the cyanamide could readily years-it has an up-boys-and-at-'em attitude become cyanide (the rest of the business) (required in this industry) and a very keen used in modern metal refining processes. interest in resins from phthalic anhydride The Haber process of nitrogen fixation left that are currently bedeviling the older lac­ Cyanamid on its heels, where it stayed until quers like Duco-which puts Cyanamid on 1927. Then, by acquisition and merger, Cyan­ the other side of the fence after all those amid really got into chemicals. Fertilizer is years (1909-27) of tagging along. Cyanamid is now a slim 10 per cent, but important be­ unique not only in having made a chemical cause of concentrated plant foods (ammoni­ comeback, it is unique because its President, um potassium phosphate); mining chemicals William B. Bell, is a lawyer.

FINANCIALLY ... after being for long like a gentleman S39,ooo,ooo in common stock to finance addi­ who has honorably paid all his debts only to tions; waterlogged in 1931, the shareholders find himself seedy, American Cyanamid now were asked to cut the par value of their shares has a new overcoat, hat, shoes; smokes fifty­ in half; they did, wiped off virtually all of cent cigars. Reason: the miscellany that came the new money. Management, therefore: in with fertilizer starting with 1927 and then realists. Shareholders: lambs. Then Cyana­ claimed it was a merged chemical when Wall mid dug in, showed no red figures (minuscule Street specialized in fancy mergers or inverted black ones), whanged away at research, took pyramids, now seems to be running as a the normal, violent depreciation charges, cohesive whole-to the surprise of the Street, paid no dividends (1931-33), emerged in 1933 American Cyanamid's shareholders. Those with a $2,50o,ooo profit for a change. In 1934 shareholders know what a beating is, also it paid a token dividend of twenty-five cents, some of the hazards of chemical investments. got back to $1 in 1936, currently paid 1 (And there are hazards. Do not be fooled by extra. Today this stalwart old-new chemical those miracles the Big Three have wrought!) is pretty pleased with itself and chemistry. In the flush days Cyanamid sold some Small funded debt.

Dividends since 1926 . .$u,865,ooo Earned per share '36 A and B . $1.77 Earned since 1926 . .$25,783,000 Return on av. inv. cap.-1936 . 9·45 % A voting shares, 1936 . 65,943 Equity per share (A and B) . $15.66 B shares, 1936 . 2,454,425 Div. per share, 1936 . $1 Earned surplus, 1936.. 12,497,ooo 1936 sales, N.Y. C. E.. 628,750 Property account (net) 1925. S4,609,ooo High (B) 1937-37; low-17Ys (Oct. 19) Ditto, 1930 ...... $42,535,ooo Net earnings, 1936...... $4,455,000 Ditto, 1936 .$24,101,000

matters, which are necessary subjects of discus­ Perkin Medalist in 1935, Vice President of a big sion and cooperative action. For one example, Chemical Industry: I Union Carbide subsidiary and largely respon­ safety measures. The safety record of the in­ sible for its profitable excursion into organic dustry is good, and doubly so since its every­ [Continued from page I57] chemistry. There is Dr. Robert Erastus Wilson, clay life consists of making and handling cor­ now President of Pan American Petroleum rosive, toxic, or explosive materials. Last year & Transport Co., but fifteen years ago the it was eleventh on the lists of the National change a thousandfold and more you find the Director of Massachusetts Tech's Research Safety Council; a little less safe than glass true basis upon which chemical industry goes Laboratory of Applied Chemistry, and still an manufacturing, a little more safe than build­ forward. active contributor to chemical journals. There ing automobiles. For another example, the In the chemical firmament thus displayed, is du Pont's Dr. Charles M. A. Stine, Vice association discusses container and shipping there are always a dozen or more men who President in charge of research, who conceals a problems. An ammonia manufacturer will be shine the brightest. One such is Thomas brilliant chemical mind behind the fac;:ade of not only willing but anxious to discuss tank­ Midgley Jr., whom we met at the beginning of a suave Rotarian. There is his associate, Dr. car design with a chlorine producer to the end this article. He is a Vice President ot the Ethyl Elmer Keiser Bolton, du Pont Chemical Di­ that a tank-car builder may build them cars Gasoline Corp., but the chemists know him rector, who was the mainspring in the develop­ so lined and valved and protected that both better as this year's Perkin Medalist and as the ment of the chloroprene polymers that have can use them. eminent Chairman of the Board of the Ameri­ become synthetic rubber under the names of Despite its cooperativeness the industry does can Chemical Society. He is a particularly Duprene and neoprene. There is that bub­ not importantly play the lawyer's game of glaring exception to the rule of the Ph.D. in bling geyser of industrial research, Dr. Edward patent pooling-prime means by which the chemical industry-for although he is Doctor Ray vVeidlein-Director of the Mellon Insti­ radio business, for example, has gTown. The Midgley by virtue of an honorary degree from tute and this year's President of the Society. Chemical Foundation was in its early days a ·wooster College, he had no formal training in There is gruff, shaggy Dr. Milton C. vVhit­ patent pool, but it is now largely a pool chemistry, graduated instead as a mechanical aker, Vice President of American Cyanamid; through which Francis P. Garvan supplied engineer from Cornell. But, say his friends, small, Swiss-born Gaston Dubois, no Ph.D. money for such research purposes as he liked "1\Iidge would still be a chemist if he'd been but able Vice President in charge of research to encourage. The petroleum refiners have a taught horseshoeing." Brilliant and dramatic, of Monsanto. But any Chemical Society meet­ sizable pool of chemical patents, but except for he is one speaker who talks always to full ing will probably find that excellent chemist, this the chemical industry disports itself much audiences. Despite his intimate connection Dr. Charles G. Tufts, conspicuously absent­ more in a pool of professional information with the internal-combustion engine, the per­ for he is a Vice President of Allied Chemical than in any other way. For any chemist of any formance o( which he helped to revolutionize, & Dye, which maintains about itself a chemical pretensions whatever is a member or the larg­ he refuses to ride in an airplane. secrecy as great as its corporate secrecy. est learned society in the world devoted to a To these men, add four more. Add Dr. single science-the body of scientists, 2o,ooo ITH none of Midgley's drama or clash, Arthur B. Lamb, editor of the erudite .Journal strong, who make up the membership of the W Chemist Irving Langmuir, General Elec­ of the AmeTican Chemical Society; bearded, Am erican Chemical Society. tric's No. 1 research man, is an equal drawing handshaking Dr. Harrison Estell Howe, who card as a speaker. But whereas a Midgley audi­ edits the Society's more practically minded \VlCE a year, once in spring, once in fall, ence listens with fascination, a Langmuir audi­ Industrial and EngineeTing Chemistry; pre­ T the American Chemical Society holds ana­ ence listens with awe. The most honored and cise, methodical Dr. Evan J. Crane, editor of tional convention. A quarter of the society's en­ the most illustrious of all U.S. chemists, Irving its Chemical Austmcts; didactic, seventy-year­ tire membership has been known to show up Langmuir is quiet, precise, learned, intellec­ old Dr. Charles Lathrop Parsons, the Societx's for these learned picnics, but a typical turnout tual. He is another winner of the Perkin \'eteran secretary business manager. is between 3,000 and 3._500 members-which is Medal; in fact, he has won practically every small only if you think in terms of the Ameri­ medal, every prize, every honor that U.S. sci­ ALL these names together will give you a can Legion; ~,ooo chemists are an awful lot of ence has to bestow. Five years ago he topped rt good if incomplete Who's Who of the chemists. them all off by winning the Nobel prize for his scientific brains that mold and motivate chem­ For its fall meeting this year the society researches in physical chemistry. The papers ical industry. Search any other industry you went to Rochester, New York. And on the he presents are hard to grasp; they are remote, like; you will not find in it any such aggre­ evening of the first day, at cocktail hour, the mathematical, abstruse. But Dr. Langmuir's gation of trained minds as these gentlemen per­ bar of the Hotel Seneca fill ed up with chemists abstruse speculations have led to a dozen sonify or represent. For the chemical industry bound on. conviviality and the gay life. Every­ practical improvements in everyday products. is one in which scientists and engineers are body ordered a drink, ancl the bartenders Tungsten lamps used to blacken, because the not just tolerated and not just employed; they glowed ·with that sort of anticipation which tungsten would boil away from the filament, are in the saddle; their ideas are the controlli tw only a com·ention can create. But then, as they then condense on the inside of the glass. The ideas. They may not be the actual enu·t looked on in shocked and almost tearful sur­ Langmuir remedy, now universally applied: preneurs, but an entrepreneur in the industry prise, the Manhattans grew warm and sirupy. bulbs filled with inert gas under pressure in­ who could not speak the language would be and the highballs turned pale as the ice melted, stead of vacuum-exhausted bulbs. helpless. Mr. Stuart Chase has for years been and the chemists sat on and on, talking end­ Still another Perkin Medalist (1936) and hunting an industry in which the engineer lessly about their business. By the end of the close to industry though not o( it, is snorting. class was the dominating class. He could find evening the glasses were still half full on the cheek-puffing \Varren Kendall Lewis, professor no such situation in the public utilities, nor in tables, and hardly anyone had thought of call­ at Massachusetts Tech, who is everywhere textiles, nor in the construction industry. Had ing for a second round. lt is not that chemists acclaimed among the country's leading chemi­ he looked at the basic chemical industry, he take vows of abstinence-it is just that a chem­ cal engineers. lt was he who really codified would have found it there. ist would rather talk chemistry with another chemical engineering; with the late ·william chemist than do anything else he can think of. H. \Valkcr he stated its basic principles in HE necessity for high scientific training is, These semi-annual meetings usually last a terms of the "unit operations" of evaporating, T then, one of the most important charac­ week, and in the course of their morning, of drying, of distilling, and worked out mathe­ teristics of chemical industry. But although it afternoon, and evening sessions, the chemists matical approaches to them all. His retainers must ha\'C brains, plus a considerable plant will read one another anything from 400 to as consultant to companies in chemical indus­ (on the average an investment of $ 11 ,250 is 6oo scientific papers. (There may be as many try probably far outrun his salary from Massa­ necessary per factory wage earner), plus gen­ as eighteen different subject divisions, all meet­ chusetts Tech. Next year's President of the erous supplies of fuel and power, the industry ing separately.) But despite the learned atmos­ Society is Lewis's good friend, Professor Frank needs a minimum of labor. In 1935 it em­ phere of the convention, the authors of these Clifford \1\Thitmore, dean of chemistry and ployed only 66,ooo wage earners. Labor costs papers are likely to address scanty audiences­ physics at Penn State, ·who is a top-flight or­ amounted to little more than 12 per cent of for chemists go to conventions more for inti­ ganic chemist and, like Lewis, as good a busi­ the value of its products. mate interchanges of information with their nessman as a scientist. The reason is simple: most chemical prod­ friends in corridors, bedrooms, and bars than Any roster of the great in U.S. chemical in­ ucts are made by a continuous process (as to listen to formal presentations. Two or three dustry would have to include half a dozen opposed to a batch process). Consequently, men with problems in common may sit up Ph.D.'s-in-industry, all of whom arc ce nters they can be brou~ht under automatic control­ swapping information utili! four in the morn­ of interest and attention at chemists' conven­ and the part of labor is therefore more to keep ing-and when you multiply this sort of inter- tions. There is Dr. George 0. Curme Jr., [Continuf'rl on page I6o] liberal arts. McKeon came out ftrSt as a visiting The root of the difficulty that many have en­ professor in history; later he was made a pro­ University of Chicago countered in analyzing Hutchins's position is fessor of Greek and Dean of the Division of the his rhetorical tendency to blur the lines be­ Humanities. A soft-spoken, genial person, he [Continued from page I54] tween science and ethics. For example, he has eventually got himself "home" as a m ember of cri ticizecl modern political scientists for pre­ the philosophy d epartment by convincing occupying themselves with a study of the phe­ them that he knew a lot and had no desire nomena of political power to the exclusion of to force his opinions down their throats. method; Darwin, for instance, had a hunch a study of the proper ends of the state. But Buchanan has recently departed for St. John's that his evolutionary theory was correct be­ a study of the ends of the state is not science, College in Annapolis, where, with Stringfel­ fore he had piled up the facts to prove it is ethics, morality, and philosophy. Hutch­ low Barr, another Hutchins man, he hopes to it. What Hutchins's critics fear is that, ins by no means denies this; his argument is apply the educational program outlined in when he speaks of the "truth," he is re­ simply that philosophical assumptions are at The H igher L earning in America to a small ferring not to the fruitful hunch that leads to the basis of all science. In the interests of com­ liberal-arts institution. scientific advance but to the "truths" of arbi­ mon sense, he is merely asking that this be trary philosophies or revealed religion. The reckoned with. He is not doing this because ALL this would be relatively unimportant if nco-scholastic, so they tell us, is not interested he is a moralist; he is doing it because he is .L\.. it were merely a matter of personalities. in truth as a matter of verified hypothesis, but convinced that the moral and intellectual na­ But the fight over Adler, McKeon, and in truth as a matter of prior metaphysical as­ tures of man are inseparable and should be so Buchanan is not a personal fight ; it goes, in sumption. To elate, however, Hutchins has not studied in college. Otherwise, students will fact, straight to the heart of the curriculum. proclaimed himself a nco-scholastic. As a mat­ continue to be graduated knowing a lot about On President Hutchins's office wall there is the ter of fact, he behaves very much like a liberal the how and the when of things, but nothing original of a Thurber cartoon that pictures pragmatist. His appointments at Chicago have about the why or the ought. Or, if you insist, two women pointing derisively to a glum included representatives of all schools of about the conflicting oughts. young man at a party. One of the women is thought; his defense of academic freedom has In any case, the older men in the science saying: "He doesn't know anything except maintained freedom at Chicago for those who departments at Chicago aren't worried that facts ." The cartoon is symbolic: President disagree with him. His enemy, Harry Hutchins will try to sneak over any authori­ Hutchins is pointing to U.S. education as a Gicleonse, has written a book called The tarian system of study on them. As one of them whole and saying: "It doesn't know anything Higher Learning in a Democracy that is a says, "Not that fellow; his metabolism couldn't except facts." ringing reply to Hutchins's own Higher Learn­ stand it." If, as has commonly been said, meta­ It is significant, however, that Hutchins has ing in America) and Gicleonse has had the un­ physics is battling against metabolism to make shifted his plan of battle since the early col­ molested support of many like-minded mem­ Hutchins aspire to the throne of educational lisions over personalities. Realizing that a bers of the faculty, not to mention a lot o"f dictator, it is a certain bet that metabolism President's power is limited to persuasion in the students. will win. the academic democracy of Chicago, he has shown no disposition to force the hands of faculty or university Senate. His missionary work has been limited to private conversation I and to books, articles, and speeches about the Chemical Industry: I deplorable content of U.S. education. The stu­ [Continued from page 90] dents themselves, or those among them who are vocal, have been titillated by the philosoph­ ical squabbles at Chicago over Aristotle and Aquinas. But a sample test of student opinion To these generalities there are, of course, ex­ dustry lacks the full cooperation of its sec­ at Yale, Columbia, Minnesota, and Chicago ceptions. That same Prestone which is Car­ ond largest unit-Allied Chemical & Dye. This shows that undergraduates everywhere are bide's pride and achievement costs $2.95 a tight-lipped, secretive, and suspicious company still inclined to worship the factual approach gallon largely because Carbide holds patents gives nothing to the industry and asks nothing to a subject. There are proportionately more on its production. Someday that price will from it. It need ask nothing, for it is completely students at Chicago who think Plato's R e­ have to drop sharply-and it will drop when self contained-more so even than du Pont, jmblic a better introduction to political science competition begins. When it ceases to be a which has no alkali subsidiary. Its technical than the daily newspaper. President Hutchins protected price it will not, however, become men seldom go to the meetings of the Ameri­ has thus had his effect. But the differences here a price-war price, if the past performance of can Chemical Society. It calls its own tunes. between Chicago and Yale, Columbia, and chemical industry may be taken for a guide to Yet it has never for long call ed tunes too fast Minnesota do not constitute a sweeping vic­ its future. for the rest of the industry to dance to. The tory for Hutchins's insistence that ideas are rest of the industry waltzes decorously, its more important than facts. Moreover, the OR the next characteristic to be noted is Grand Marshal, du Pont, viewing it with a Daily Maroon opened its editorial year on Oc­ F that the chemical industry, despite its slow­ happy and beneficent eye. Its gentlemanly in­ tober 1 with a demand for a "chastened presi­ ly lowering curve of real prices, is an "orderly" stincts are all against pushing and crowding. dent." The Maroon editor, for the first time in industry. It was practicing "cooperation" long If, for example, you were to present du Pont some years, seems to be unimpressed by the before General Johnson invented it in 1933. with an idea that du Pont thought fitted bet­ claims that wisdom resides with the ancients and It has seldom been bedeviled by overproduc­ ter into the economic structure of Union Car­ medievals from Aristotle and Plato to Aquinas. tion, has had no private depressions of its own, bide, du Pont might well tell you, with grace and has not often involved itself in long or but insistence, to take your idea to its com­ HAT does the great battle at Chicago bloody price wars. The alcohol sector of the petitor. The industry that believes in lower­ Wportend? Has Hutchins a legitimate case industry has frequently been guilty of dis­ ing prices does not believe in market wars. to make out against U.S. education? The orderly conduct, and alkali made by the The industry that is in the public mind per­ answer is a qualified yes. Many educators are Solvay process has got into some nasty brawls sonified by the clu Ponts is, in other and ex­ coming to think him at least partially right. with electrolytic alkali. But by and large the tremely non-Liberty League words, the prac­ They are willing to admit that universities and chemical industry has regulated itself in a titioner of one defmite sort of planned schools, in their haste to teach the facts that m~nn er that would please even a Soviet Com­ economy. lie behind the headlines in the daily papers, missar. have dropped most of the good books of the This characteristic is all the more surpris­ ASIC reason for this state of affairs is that Western heritage from the curriculum. But ing when you consider some of the situations B to most of its important people, the in­ many of Hutchins's critics think he has been that the industry faces. In the first place, tech­ dustry is not just an industry: it is also a pro­ staging a sham battle in his onslaught on the nological competition operates at constant high fession. The Manufacturing Chemists Associa­ "fact gatherers." They point out that only the pressure, and new processes displace old ones tion, to which most "proprietors" in the in­ worst sociologists, for example, believe in with some violent dislocations-like the dislo­ dustry belong, is a quiet but active lobby, yet amassing facts without some special purpose to cation that took place when synthetic methanol it is other things as well. It denies that it ever guide them. They argue that all good scientists all but destroyed the manufacturers of methanol talks about prices-who can say that it does not arc agreed that theory, deduction, the formu­ (which is wood alcohol) made from the dis­ discuss costs? But on its agenda it has other lation of hypotheses, are part of scientific tillation of wood. In the second place, the in- [Continued on page I58]

0 1 57 0 [Continued from fJage I 58] to about 56 cents an hour and $23 a week Little, one of the country's greatest chemical the plant clean, to turn a few valves, to weigh in all factories-and most chemical employees engineers, "as though a cotton mill, to make final products and dump them in sacks than \\"Ork fifty-two weeks a year. The industry is at thirty-five yards of cloth, was forced also to to perform the feats of strength and skill and peace, has always been, and always expects to wrn out forty shoes ... courage needed in a steel mill. A sulfuric-acid be. Settled usually in rural surroundings, it Thus the chemical industry is engaged in a plant may be turning out dozens of tons of thinks it offers to J ohn L. Lewis a minimum perpetual economic and scientific juggling act. acid a day, ye t the "crew" is apt to consist of reason or opportunity for organization. It no longer likes to use the word "byproduct" one man, sitting in a glass cage and writing up (although it still has to, occasionally), for the a log of the day from the readings of auto­ UT the prime characteri sti c of chemical word is steadil y losing its meaning. Suppose matic gauges. But because things can always Bindustry is the extraordinary proliferation you are in the business of electrolyzing a salt go badly wrong in a chemical plant, the in­ of its products. Like so many of its charac­ solution to get caustic soda, as a "product." dustry prefers intelligent labor, and its wages teristics, this one is largely inherent; it plus hydrogen and chlorine as "byproducts." are relatively high. Last year they stood at is all but im possible for one process to make Then the demand for ca ustic soda slacks off 65.28 cents an hour and 26 a week compared onl y one thing. "It is," sa id the late Arthur D. (as it has done) and the demand for ch lorine LAYMAN'S GUID~ TO Jlere are the Primary Materials on COAL SALT L·IMESTONE . AMMoN lA 1 COAL TAR I-IYO~OOEN T Cl-llo~IN& ==-=c= COK.& CAUSTIC SODA QUICKLIME CA~BON DIOXIDE And from the Secondary Products above, here are a fe

CI-ILO~INE COK.E SUL~UR QUICK.· NITnOG&N ~YD~OG&N COAL LIM& TAn

Slaked Lime

Viscose Sodium J..lypoch!orite Urea Carbon Tetrachloride CellophaneI Rayon Ant;,.L. Cleansing Fluids Bleaching Powder (Chloride of Lime) NoninflammableI Lye Cleaning ~luid Petroleum Refining Fire Extinguishers Paper Solvents Soap 1-lardening Fats Welding Solvents Plaster Water­ Softeners ~ertilizers The products shown here are only a Dyes Plastics small fraction of the products that E-xplosives Medicines Medicines chemical industry can produce by its Medicines Fertilizers Insecticides atomic and molecular permutations Perfumes and combinations. The chemist has so Water Purification Plasticizers many tricks that any attempt to relate Bleaching Plastics Plastics one substance on this page to almost Refrigerants Glues Solvents every other substance, as the chemist Plastics Textiles Petroleum Refining does, would produce a crisscross of rela­ Petroleum Refining Explosives Dyes tionships which would be bewildering. Insecticides Artificial leather Ferti I izers Thus, this diagram deals with the sim­ Solvents l=ilm (Motion Picture) Refrigerants plest straight-line relationships only. Dyes Dyes Medicines Medicines Antifreeze Rubber Accelerators and Antioxidants goes sharply up (as it is now doing). What is with the U.S. they set up here a company from time Charles Franklin Kettering, whom we your "byproduct" now? For such reasons the which present Commercial Solvents Corp. grew. have met before at the beginni ng of this industry now defines a byprodu ct only as As it made more and more acetone, more and article, demanded on behalf of the automobile something for which a full use has not been more butyl alcohol piled up in its plants as industry a better, faster-drying fin ish for car developed. In the industry's world, such prod­ a useless, noxious byproduct. The company bodies than anything existing. The chemical ucts are few, and becoming fewer. could not even dump it in the Wabash River; industry found it for him-found it in treat­ A perfect example of the industry's juggling health authorities forbade. So it dug an ex­ ing nitrocellulose with solvents made from act lies in the relationship between two heavy pensive hole, and lined it with expensive con­ butyl alcohol, which turned out to be a perfect organic chemical products, acetone and butyl crete, and clumped the butyl alcohol in that­ basis for the whole new lacquer industry alcohol. The best means of producing one also wondering how much it would have to pay which then and there began to arise. Today produces the other. During the War, acetone someday to get rid of it, and how. butyl alcohol is developing wider and wider was a vital necessity for the high explosive, Instead, the War came to an end and every­ uses as a solvent-and its makers now and cordite. The British bought acetone in this where vast stocks of nitrocellulose were left in again wonder vaguely what they are going to country by the ton to treat their nitrocellulose; various stages of treatment. And about that [Continued on page I62] INDUSTRIAL CI-II;MISTRY which Chemical Industry oepends. SULF=UR WATE-R AID AIR:] ___:=r==__ SULS:UR DIOXIDE OXYGEN NITROGEN of the Chemists' Combinations and the results of them.

COKE LIMESTONE SULJ:UR DIOXIDE-

Calcium Carbide Sulfur Tr/oxtde Water WaV llydrogen Acetylene Sulfuric Actd

Methanol and other Alcohols Oxyacetylene flame

Acetic Acid Refrigerant Fumigation Bleach ing Agent Petroleum Refining

Used in every Chemical Industry Gold Mining Clean in9 Metals Textiles Dyes Non inflammable Texti les Plast ics Solvents Film (Motion Picture)' Glass Plastics Solvents Tanning Leather Plasticizers Water-Softeners Antifreeze Soap Welding Metals Cutting Metals

The Organic ~eavy Acid [Continued from jJage I6I] founded by the people ol the U.S. In 1918-20 a benign Dr. Jekyll to a hideous l\Ir. Hyde-is do with all the byproduct acetone that they the people's government set the industry up widely misunderstood. Those who think o[ find on their hands. in business, as it practices business today. It U.S. chemical industry as a threat to peace arc As a final example of chemical industry at was the government that wrote the tariffs that reasoning with a sublime childishness. Pure work, glance at the Dow Chemical Co., in Mid­ protected this truly "infant industry" in the self-interest, unmixed with an ounce of hu­ land, Michigan. The Dow company has its twenties. And it has been the U.S. conception manitarianism, alone would make chemical being in Midland because it stands over a of education that has profited chemical indus­ industry quake in its boots at the thought o( center o( the great Michigan brine wells-wells try most of all-for it is from the hundred­ another war. For with another war, the debt inexhaustibly full o( water from some sub­ million-dollar scientific laboratories or the of chemical industry to the people would be terranean ocean. In this water there is common universities t.hat the industry has drawn its instantly payable, and at a fixed price. The salt-sodium chloride-plus sodium bromide, priceless asset of trained men. next war won't mean just the government calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. That the industry has paid back part of its operation or the railroads: the next war will And by the electroly,is of this brine and sub­ debt in the form of endowments to the uni­ mean the nationalization of all essential sen·­ sequent chemical treatments, Dow was able versities is unquestionable. That it has paid ices of supply. Chemical industry would be last year to manu[acture 304 different prod­ back part o( its debt to the people in the form No. 1 on the list of governmental confiscations ucts. It needs large amounts of electric power, of lower prices and better sen·ices is also un­ - and whether it would ever again be able to and it must purchase benzene in big quantities questionable. The question is, simply: what emerge into the domain o[ private profits is a from outside producers. But that is almost portion has it paid? question that probably costs its present leaders all-and its brine is free for the pumping. And That question must be left open for the some long, long thoughts. The next war, for the products range from aspirin (of which Dow present time. It will not become pressing until chemical industry as perhaps [or all of indus­ is the largest producer in the U.S., selling to a much greater question arises: the question trial democracy, would be one war too many. virtually every pharmaceutical house) to of U.S. involvement in war. l[ war should Meanwhile, chemical industry pursues phenol for plastics, aniline as the base of the come to the U.S. tomorrow, chemical industry peaceful ways. Last month the Atlas Powder dye industry, and metallic magnesium, which would be ready. It has techniques that could Co.-o( all concerns-opened a big new plant in some alloy form may someday give alumi­ be swung instantly into the production of designed to convert dextrose electrolytically num a run for its money as a lightweight explosives, poison gases, and dmens of other into new so[tcning agents, such as can be used structural metal. implements of international anarchy. There for printers' rollers, etc. Hooker Electrochemi­ would be no waiting o( the troops for their cal announced that it was building new ca­ TOOKED at from any vantage point, chemi­ supplies; the waiting would be all the other pacity on the \Vest Coast to hydrogenate fats. L cal industry presents a snug picture. The way. This aspect of d1emical industry-its Membership in the Chemical Society increased Big Three-du Pont. Carbide, and Allied­ ability at a word of command to turn from by 500. Prices were firm and demand was brisk. control some two-thirds of the business. To­ day the whole chemical picture has an air of financial stability that is unusual in so new an industry. There is no evidence o[ fighting Chemical Industry: II among its companies for position: price struc­ tures are steady, affected more by chemical ex­ cellence than by old-fashioned price competi­ tion. This is the unique industry that knows its Sulfuric acid on the wane, and chlorine's star nsmg. High­ costs and re[uses to sacrifice profits for the sake of volume. Competition is che111iml-there you pressure synthesis; methanol (wood alcohol), ammonia, and nitrogen; will find all the fighting you want-but the surface, the financial surface, is serene. And the future of hydrogen_ it will probably continue to be: new develop­ ments seek outlets through established chemi­ cal industrial channels, for there lie the talent and the money for development, one as vital as OMEDAY a historian will pay to the nine­ o( dyers, the i\le>srs. Pullar, of Perth, admired the other (or any new process. Steenth century the honor it deserves. In the the color. They acknowledged the importance And the chemical industry is a rich indus­ midst o[ its mutton-chopped prigs and swoon­ of having made a dye from such a source as try. From 1925 through 1936 the six com­ ing ladies it produced almost every basic dis­ coal tar. but they were afraid that its use would panics li,ted in the boxes that accompany this covery upon which the twentieth century make dyed goods so expensive that they could article• had a net income o( around St.240,­ stands. lf we are to sec some of the more im­ not be sold. What Perkin's dye really did, o( ooo,ooo, paid $96s,ooo,ouu in dividends. Only portant chemical operations of the present course, was by its new chea pness to make one o[ those companies missed a dividend day in their proper balances and relationships, nawral dye an obsolete product. Mean­ during the depression and none showed a loss. we must first spend five minutes with the nine­ while, young Perkin went on to the synthesis Their net income last year was St6.~.450 , ouo; teenth cenwry and in rapid succession view of other dyes-and the great Hofmann, re­ they paid S1 18,236.ooo to shareholders. its most important chemical landmarks. turning to Germany, there sowed the seed for As with these companies, so with the do1ens 1. The first synthetic dye is discovered. By the the huge and hugely important chemistry o( of others that FoRTUNE has not mentioned. By age of seventeen, young \Villiam Henry Perkin coal tar-from which dyes and medicinal prod­ and large, their managements ha,·e been both was good enough to be an assistant to the great ucts were shortly to come in what seemed like shrewd and enlightened. their contributions o[ chemist A. \V. von Hofmann, whom Victoria's an unending profusion. new goods to society both sound and spectac­ Prince Consort had brought from Germany to 2. The Solvay fHocess for a/lwli supersedes ular, their return to stockholders extremely teach at the Royal College oE Chemistry in Leblanc's. In 1863 the Belgian Ernest Solvay satis[actory. That would seem to be enough London. Working in 1856 with coal tar from all but blew Leblanc's alkali process off the to demand of any industry. gas retorts, (or which no earthly use was earth by a newer and still cheaper method of The chemical industry, on the other hand, known, Perkin produced aniline. That was producing soda. \Vhcreas Leblanc had treated has its critics, just like any other. And these no great trick; Perkin merely wanted the ani­ salt with suHuric acid, charcoal, and chalk, critics have a point to make which, in passing, line because he had a theory that from it he Solvay dissolved salt in water, saturated it with it is interesting to note. It may be said in a could synthesize quinine, and thus break the ammonia, and let it trickle down a tower full broad sense that all industry owes a huge Dutch monopoly. To his bitter disappoint­ oE perforated partitions. Jnto the bottom though intangible debt to the people-a debt ment he could achieve nothing even resem­ of the tower he blew carbon dioxide, product that cannot be paid directly in dollars, but bling the handsome white crystals o( quinine; of heating limestone to quicklime, and got only indirectly, in lower prices, better quali­ he found himself with only a tarry black sodium bicarbonate, which, heated Hrongly, ties, moderate profits, and various forms o( solution. Into it he dropped a piece of silk. left sodium carbonate or soda behind. Today, service. But U.S. chemical industry owes a \Vhy he did that, he was never in years after­ in the U.S., Allied Chemical &: Dye, through peculiar debt in this respect: that it was ward able to explain-but when he drew out its subsidiary, Solvay Process Co., is the most •on /Jages 85 , 87, 89, 90, I6.f, and I66. The first four his silk it was stained a deep purple, and the important practitioner of this process. Solvay comJHtnies were chosen because they are the fou1" purple would not wash out. lt was, in other soda, cheaper than the Leblanc soda before it, largest in the inrlust1y; the last two-Dow and Mon­ words, a dye: the first dye ever made from any spread out into still wider uses: for more soap. sanlo-fo,· thei1· typicality of smaller comf>twies. source except a root, a bark, or a berry. A firm [Continued on fJage I6.,t] for the manufacture of glass, and for the that the byproduct oven supplanted the bee­ production of caustic soda, or sodium hy­ Chemical Industry hive and became, for a while, the most impor­ droxide, which, in its turn, was to become tant source from which commercial ammonia an essential in the textile industries, in the [Continued from page r62] could be produced. Thereafter the hitherto oncoming pulp and paper industries, and in wasted products of coal distillation were saved petroleum refining. Most of these industries as carefully as the coke itself. Perkin's discovery were nascent or r udimentary in 1863: the rea­ no way related to it. This was the byproduct of a synthetic d ye to be made from the coal-tar son being that [or their development they coke oven. The iron and steel industries, to refuse of the coke oven was slow in making its needed the cheap alkali with which the Solvay which coke was a basic need, clung to the so­ significance felt-but when it did, the process process was only then prepared to supply called beehive oven, which produced a hard o[ coke production lent it an all but inex­ them. I£ there had been such a thing as the coke that resisted crushing [rom the load it haustible source of raw material. rayon industry, it, too, would have needed bore in blast furnaces. But the beehive oven 3· Petroleum is distilled. In 1850 lamps were great quantities o[ caustic soda. wasted all the other products produced by still lighted by whale oil, supplied to the U.S. The Solvay process, in reaching out to find coking coal. One of these products was am­ by ew England's whaling fleets. It was get­ the ammonia it needed, set in motion still an­ monia-and because of the need of the Solvay ting steadily more expensive, and it stank. other new chemical engine, at first glance in process for ammonia it gradually came about Five years and more before the great Drake well came in at Titusville, Pennsylvania (that was in 1859), people had been skimming a few barrels a day from surface oozings of petroleum near Titusville and Tarentum, be­ THE DOW CHEMICAL CO. cause it had been discovered that petroleum, IOO shares Dec. ;r, '24 = $6,200 = 9070! shares Dec. p, '36 = $124,327 = $86,893 Oct . 19, '37 like whale oil, was a "'burning oil." But it was Professor Benjamin Silliman the younger who gave this piddling business a new reason CHEMICALLY for b eing when from crude petroleum he made ... all products come from three kinds of salicylate, which is synthetic oil of winter­ the first careful and studied fractional distilla­ brine: brine fi elds in Michigan, which can green used in chewing gum. Magnesium also tions. Something called coal oil came from and do make any of the 304 Dow products; supplies the sparkle in sparklers on July distilling p etroleum-and it burned better brine from oil wells, from whid1 Dow makes Fourth and the metal foil for photographic than any oil h ad ever burned before. It was nearly all of the U.S. supply of iodine; brine flash bulbs. All this and more Dow makes that which started the hunt for petroleum on from the sea, for bromine to turn into by passing an electric current through its ethylene dibromide. Practically, insofar as inexhaustible supply of brine, then combin­ the grand scale-for a source that would yield the layman is concerned, Dow makes ing and recombining the elements and the not just a few barrels a week, but hundreds Medicinals, Jndustn'a l Chemicals, Dyes, scores of compounds. One of the company's upon hundreds. of barrels a day. When the Flavors. Those are the big divisions. Then most important developments is the great Drake well came in, Silliman's process of there is ferric ch loride for photoengravers, plant at \Vilmington, North Carolina, com­ fractional distillation was ready for it- but phenol for resins like Bakelite, sodium sul­ pleted in 1933 to get bromine [rom sea water the whole point of the process was to produce phide for tanning, common epsom salts, for the manufacture of ethylene dibromide, coal oil. There were lower a nd higher boil­ which Dow is more pleased to sel l by the ton the scavenger that gets rid of lead on the cyl­ ing fractions too, but they were nuisances. The than by the sack, aspirin (Dow is largest U.S. inders of an engine, put there by antiknock higher boiling fractions were useless (the dis­ producer), and insecticides. One of the most gasoline containing tetraethyllead. Dow buys important Dow products is Dowmetal-mag­ some raw materials-benzene, basic to many covery o[ their usefulness as lubricants was still nesium alloys. All products are sold to manu· of its syntheses, alcohol, and a very few a decade away) and a lower boiling fraction, facturers, not to individuals. If you have an others. RESEARCH: it would be difficult to called gasoline, was worse than useless: it was a oil well that is no longer producing hand­ find more intelligent; but it's all down one menace. It tended to make coal-oil lamps somely, Dow has chemicals that will acidify alley-what comes out of brine. The list explode-one of the greatest household haz­ it, make it nearly as good as new. Dow grows and grows and grows: for instance­ arcls of grandfather's clay. And the greatest makes carbon tetrachloride [or dry clea ners, Dowtherms, mixtures of synthetics that smell problem o[ the first distillers of oil was to caustic soda for soapmakers, chlorine for like geraniums but have important and grow­ throw away that gasoline without getting bleaching and deodorants, sa licylic acid for ing uses in the new so-called hi-fluid boilers pinched b y health or other civic authorities corn cures, bromide sedatives, even methyl (sec page 170). for maintaining a nuisance. For more than thirty years thereafter, the industrial chemist FINA.NCIALL r waited to find an outlet for this byproduct o[ time has been kind to Dow, exceedingly cals failed) fires the imagination. One the commercial production of coal oi l. so to those few shareholders who bought in square mile o[ sea water seventy-six feet deep 4· Electrolysis gains importance. In 18oo 191 5, never sold. Dow has a sol id record of contains chemicals and metals worth about A lessandro Volta made his momentous dis­ dividends; has paid as much as 7.50 regular, S7 1,ooo,ooo-w hich isn't all idle dreaming as covery of the electric battery, and in the same 75 extra, and 6o per cent in preferred in one Dow now takes the bromine. The 'Wilming­ decade it was discovered that an electric cur­ year ('9'5)· 10 per cent stock bonuses were ton plant, however, is jointly owned by Dow rent h ad a chemical effect. Connect electrodes paid in 1925 and 1928; 400 per cent in 1929, and Ethyl Gasoline Corp., in turn controlled to a bauery, put the electrodes in water to another 50 per cent in '934· 1oo shares in by Standard of New Jersey and General Mo­ which you have added a little acid, and under '9'5· plus exercise of rights when offered, tors-the motorcar builder that at last has would have cost 7o,ooo, would have been found a way to profit from building cars and the influence of the current the water decom­ worth 931 ,000 in May, 1936, would have running them. Dowell, Inc., is a Dow sub­ poses into its component h ydrogen and oxygen. paid dividends during the period of I27 ·5 '4· sidiary, whid1 acidifies oil wells on a royalty The principle established here was the princi­ Best word for Dow: unique. Dow, to an even basis; is a mushroom. Big-little Dow must be ple o f electrolysis. But it was a long while be­ greater degree than other chemicals, is im­ appraised today on what it can do with what fore that princi pie found any commercial uses. portant finan cially because it is so damned it has done, what it can do with what is left By 188o cl1emists were pretty sure that elec­ smart chemically; has in brine a better than in its brine wells, in sea water. Almost alone trolysis was going to be an exceedingly valuable "partial skill monopoly," a phrase loosely in its field, protected by a blanket of patents, used in chemistry. Dow's North Carolina Dow has been Jess concerned with that weapon, but they weren't sure for what. Then sea-water bromine plant (and only Dow gobbler of profits-obsolescence-than other Charles Martin Hall used an electrolytic proc­ succeeded in this process after bigger chemi- chemicals. ess to produce cheap aluminum, and its uses began to dawn. By 18go there was a small elec­ Preferred shares 29,692 Div. 1937 (calendar year)­ trolytic plant at Niagara Falls for electrolyz ing Common shares 945,000 through Aug. 16 . 2.60 salt. Today electrolysis goes on wherever power Common shareholders, May '37 3,063 Net earnings, year ending May is cheap-and electrolysis produces great quan­ Common trading. N.Y.C.E., 31• 1937 4,089,000 tities of those two vitally important chemicals, '36 ( 1ow on N.Y.S.E.) .. 79·930 Earned per share l\Iay, 1937. 4· 17 caustic soda and chlorine (page 168)-plus h y­ High '937 (com.)-159'12: Low-94 drogen. which is of a commercial importance (Oct. 19) Funded debt 5·720,000 Div. on common-1936 (calen­ Equity per share of common . S23 .62 now swiftly rising (page 170). dar year) Total assets May 3 1, 1937. 35·683,000 5· F1·asch mines sulfur. Before H erman Frasch developed a new mining process, the [Continued on page I 66] [Colllillued from jJage I6.J] ping stones by which industrial chemistry the acid in sturdy lead chambers instead of essential ingredient for the most essential reached the twentieth century. Once arrived fragile glass tubes and bottles. Fumes of chemical in industry came almost entirely from there, the chemical industry began an even burning sulfur supplied sulfur dioxide; when Sicily. Sicilian sulfur was not too pure but swifter acceleration. And in '9'3 it received fumes from niter (mostly oxides of nitrogen) it was the best there was. The sulfur pro­ one of the sharpest reorientations of its exist­ were added, the sulfur dioxide would combine ducers of Sicily did not fail to appreciate their ence, for in that year the Haber process for with air and water to make the oily sulfuric importance; the price of sulfur climbed so the fixation of nitrogen was brought to com­ acid. That was good enough for a business high that acid producers took to using pyrites, mercial usefulness. The story of that revolu­ amounting to ounces or pounds, but the grow­ which is iron sulfide, instead of Sicilian tion is told in its proper place on page 170. ing soda business needed tons and tons of suHur in their burners. All this time, and well From here onward let us select, among the acid. Thus the small lead chambers became known to everyone, there lay in Louisiana im­ countless thousands of chemical industry's bigger, and still bigger, and soon there were mense beds of sulfur. Unhappily they lay useful products, the four that are, today, plants that took in fumes, steam, and air at buried beneath at least 500 feet of quicksand the most commercially important. Let us one end, convened most of the mixture to and rock, which completely balked ordinary remember, once again, that the industry's acid, and left the niter fumes to blow out mining methods. By 18go Frasch had devel­ most basic ingredients are coal, salt, limestone, wasted at the other. oped a process whereby this sulfur could and sulfur-plus air and water, and that rela­ As volume increased and competition with an almost ridiculous simplicity be tive newcomer, petroleum. The sections that pushed prices clown, this niter waste grew melted underground, brought to the surface, follow concern the secondary products that more and more serious; particularly so since and pumped into great bins to cool and chemists produce from these raw materials. niter was needed for wartime and mining ex­ harden. His simple process called for sinking plosives. (That was long before Chile's nitrate three concentric pipes-one to carry hot water beds, later to save the Allies in the World War, down to melt the sulfur, another blowing com­ Sulfuric acid had bee"n exploited.) Happily, the acid maker> pressed air to force the suHu r out, and the soon found at least a partial escape from their third to carry the suHur to the surface. It f LEBLANC'S soda process was the Adam trouble; somebody discovered that the brown worked perfectly-and sulfuric-acid produc­ I of industrial chemistry, sulfuric acid, fume coming out the end of the plant as a tion, freed from the millstone of Sicilian sulfur made of its rib, was its Eve. Sulfuric acid, salt, waste was precisely what was put in at the and pyrites, bounded ahead, carrying all the limestone, and coal were Leblanc's raw ma­ beginning. Well and good, said the acid rest of industrial chemistry with it on its terials and all but the first were ready to makers, we shall catch it and make it work broad and straining shoulders. hand. Sulfuric acid had been known for over again. So by washing the exit fumes with If Leblanc began industrial chemistry's centuries and had first been made in small weak acid, they did catch it and were able to history, these five further discoveries-from lots as a kind of laboratory curiosity. Later, use it over and over again. The need for niter Perkin's dye to Frasch's sulfur-were the step- a few hardy souls built little plants to make dropped to a tiny fraction of what it had been, acid was cheaper to make and actually purer. This cheaper acid was finding wider and wider uses. The chemist Liebig made his great MONSANTO CHEMICAL CO. study of plant-food necessities; he put to­ gether his artificial manures, consisting of 100 com. shares Nov. 21, '27 = $;,875 = 786 shares /Jrc. p, '36 = $76,8}1 = 62,976 Oct. 19, '37 potash, phosphoric acid, and guano, and farmers began to be persuaded to use them. CHEMICALLY That called for sulfuric acid to produce phos­ phoric acid-first out of bones, later out of Mon sa nto. one of the older U.S. chemi­ chcmicab for the rubber indusu·y. 1\Ionsanto waste bone black from sugar refineries, still cals. ~tarted life in 1901 as a maker or sac­ products number well over 300: most im· later out of phosphate rock from South charin. Today, after many a tough year of portant c u~tomer is the foocbtuff indu~try. Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida. The thriving cut-throat German competition, this SL. Louis which took '5 per cent of domestic produc­ new business of petroleum refining began to company is one o[ the best cliver;ificcl o[ all, tion la st yea r. Products are u~ed [or bleaching one of the sm;utct,t chemically. Products di­ flour, flavoring and sweetening for beverages, drink up tons of sulfuric acid to improve its vide roughly into three broad group~: Fine and flavoring [or candy, as an ingTedient in products. Galvanizing and tin-plating of steel and J1ledicinal Chemicals, Heavy Chemicals, setr-ri:.,ing flour, baking powder. and animal needed other tons for cleaning the raw metal lnlrnnediales. The first group is most in1· food;. The butter, milk, cheese. and canning so that the plating would stick. Gasworks were portant; it consists of sacd1arin, vanillin, industries use 1\Ionsanto compounds as ad­ using acid to recover ammonia for the develop­ coumarin-rlaYors-aspirin, caffeine, phenol­ juncts. Pharmaceutical how~es , next itnpor­ ing fertili zer market. Perkin had made his first pluhalein, salicylic acid, beruoates, etc. The tant customers, accounted for more than 11 1 dye, and the Germans were swiftly building a H eavy GroujJ refers, of course, to the acids, per cent of last year's business. o other in· whole new industrial structure upon his dis­ caustic soda , alum. chlorine. lnlennediales, dustry took more than 9 per cent. R£­ those essential in the production of other SEA HCH: constant and excellent-done by a cm•ery-all of which needed sulfuric acid. In organic chemicals, are represented by parani· subsidiary removed entirely from any manu­ Sweden, Nobel had given the explosives busi­ traniline, maleic acid, and scores of others. facturing division. Plants-nine in the U.S., ness a big push with his invention of dynamite: Jn addition, there arc the highl y important t\\'0 in England. smokeless powder was being made of wood pulp or cotton by the action of sulfuric acid and nitric acid (made with sulfuric). But by FINANCIALLr that time Leblanc's cl1eap alkali process, which ... this keen chemical earned S4,468,ooo to ~204 worth of working capital. Today's had started sulfuric acid on its careening last year, a record; paid S3,235,ooo in cash working capital is a whopping $16,ooo,ooo. course, was completely licked by the Solvay dividends, also a record (forced by undis­ A s smart financially as it is chemically, l\Ion­ process-which needed no acid. The prime tributed profits tax). l\Ionsanto made over santo, after a shrewd look at Mr. Roosevelt's mover behind sulfuric's growth disappeared; half a tnillion dollars more in 1933 than it tax on undistributed profits, promptly went and in the curious economics of chemistry that did in rg2g, which was the first million-dollar­ into the money mart, on-creel S4-50 preferred profit year in its history. Its growth through at 101 0; and accruals, gobbled up a cool was all to the good, for an acute shortage of sul­ depression years was phenomenal. But it S4·950,ooo before October 19, '937· Mon­ furic acid might otherwise have developed. wasn't always like that-1\lonsanto, started santo will probably continue to grow as it Other needs sprang up so swiftly that sulfuric­ in 1901 with Ss.ooo capital, was once as has before- by means of carefully made acid production never halted for a day. scrubby a chemical as ever existed. lt lost mergers, clever internal growth, and research. These new consumers needed acid more money the first three years; in 1yo4 got down No funded debt. concentrated than the lead-chamber process could produce. As the discontent with cham­ Di,·idends ~ ince 1925 IO.f90.ooo Earn cd per share, 1936 . ber acid grew, a chemical inquiry began as ;\'et income since 1925 ...... S24,171 ,ooo Paid per share, 1936 . to why it was, year before, that an English Shares S4-50 preferred . 50,000 Equity per com. share Sept. 30. S•7-9' vinegar maker had not been successful with a Shares of common I , 114>409 Net sa les, '935 .S24,705.ooo sulfuric-acid process on which he had a patent, 1936 ;ale;. N.Y.S.E. 168,100 and which had looked wonderful but hadn't Net sales, 1936 ...... S28,848.ooo High '937- 107 0;: Low-79% (Oct. 19) worked. The vinegar maker, one Peregrine 1932 low-common Total assets, 1936. 44·947,000 '3% Phillips, had stumbled on the fact that when [Continued on page I68] • 166 • sulfur dioxide and air were passed over hot along with it came more and cheaper chlorine. platinum, they combined to form sulfur tri­ Chemical Industry We have seen that salt, in an electrolytic oxide, and that this need O!Jly be dissolved cell, produces caustic soda, hydrogen, and in water to make sulfuric acid direct, in any [Continued from f>age I66] chlorine. Chlorine from this process is pure concentration. The platinum was left in the and ready to sell with only the formalities of end just as it was in the beginning, its power compressing and cooling it until it liquefies. to promote the combination of air and sulfur Chlorine Then it can be bottled up in tank cars, which dioxide entirely unimpaired." At least, that can trundle chlorine around the country with was what the patent said. But the process ;\ S LEBLANC'S soda process fostered sul- no excess weight of lime (as in bleaching hadn't worked well for Phillips. His trouble 1""\.. £uric acid manufacture to supply one of powder) to burden the freight bill. turned out to be that impurities in his sulfur its raw materials, so one of its byproducts set Soon chlorine began to come from wherever poisoned the platinum catalyst and made it another chemical wheel spinning by leading power could be cheaply installed and salt was refuse to function. But even when that was to the commercial production of chlorine. To plentiful-which, to Niagara, slowly added the known and this new "contact process" for make soda you treated salt with sulfuric acid Pacific Northwest, the salt belts of Michigan, sulfuric acid was well under control, the to form sodium sulfate, which you wanted, and the Kanawha valley in West Virginia. process still accounted for very little produc­ and hydrogen chloride, which you did not. As The electrolytic process had this further ad­ tion. The reason: sulfur pure enough for the long as soda makers made only a little soda, vantage: if the demand for chlorine dropped, contact process scarcely existed, and purifica­ the winds blew this acrid gas harmlessly away. while the demand for caustic soda held steady, tion was too expensive. But that was before But as soda production grew the air about the unmarketable excess of chlorine could be Herman Frasch brought sulfur, better than 99 soda plants became more and more noxious. combined with the hydrogen directly to make per cent pure, up from under the quicksands ol In England, where Leblanc's process was p~t the highest grade of hydrochloric acid. the Louisiana coast. Once this was accom­ to real work, it was only a little while before vVhat has happened more recently, however, plished, sulfuric acid, still cheaper, still more laws were clam peel clown to force the soda is that chlorine demand has outrun caustic plentiful, emered its modern phase of use. plants to stop this gaseous nuisance. And stop demand. Cheaper and cheaper chlorine began Of all the things made by chemical indus­ it they did by dissolving the offending gas in to interest the solvent makers. You could make try and consumed without going through the water, thus making hydrochloric acid (also the valuable but highly inflammable material formality of a sale, sulfuric acid is probably called muriatic). But that only kept it out of carbon disulfide (essential in viscose rayon the best example. In the peak year 1929 a the air. ·what was to be done with the tons of manufacture) out of coke and sulfur in the quarter of the total production probably ne.ver acid that accumulated when nobody wanted electric furnace, and by treating it with chlo­ saw the market. Each consumer-and every more than ounces or at most pounds of it? rine produce the flame-smothering solvent chemical plant is one-takes a careful look into One early answer was to put it in casks, carry called carbon tetrachloride, familiar to every­ the matter to decide whether he will buy his it out to sea and clump it. one in Pyrene for fire extinguishers, and in acid, or make it. Reasons for this principally But at length it developed that the rapidly Carbona, the dry-cleaning agent. Chlorine involve freight charges. So much air and water growing textile industry needed something to plus acetone produces chloroform-seldom combine with sul(ur to make sulfuric acid that help bleach and whiten its products. Whereas used now as an anesthetic but still a valuable the acid that goes out of the plant weighs some yards of cottage-made linens could be spread solvent for oils and alkaloids. The making of three times as much as the sulfur that comes in the sun to bleach, acres of factory-made the new, noninflammable, nontoxic refriger­ in. And the dangerously corrosive and burn­ goods would need more landscape than Eng­ ants like clichlorodifluoromethane and the new ing acid is tough to handle compared to the land had. And sunlight was practically the flameproof dry cleaners' solvents called for innocuous sulfur from which it is made. only bleaching agent used-although it had chlorine and still more chlorine. Obviously then, there is good reason for build­ been known since 1785 that chlorine, a vile, Therefore, as with sulfuric acid, so with ing sulfuric-acid plants as close as possible yellow-green, choking, poisonous gas that had chlorine: for a time it looked as if chlorine to consuming markets and keeping them scat­ been made in the laboratory, had bleaching demand were going to outrun supply. So, also tered and little, without caring very much how properties. Ah, said the much beset alkali as with sulfuric acid, there were immediate they relate geographically to the sulfur supply. makers, we shall make bleaches from our attempts to produce commercial chlorine in Sulfuric acid has been the pig iron of muriatic acid and solve two problems at once. other ways-ways not depending on electroly­ chemical industry. In 1929 its sales reached And they did. A molecule of hydrochloric sis. Chlorine as a byproduct of caustic soda an all-time peak of s.Soo,ooo tons, worth acid is made up of an atom of hydrogen and an is all right as long as the soda sells; but, rea­ $4s,6oo,ooo-ancl this was only some 70-ocld atom of chlorine and it is easy to split them soned the chemical manufacturers, why could per cent of the total production. It has never apart-oxygen from the air plus a catalyst we not make chlorine a byproduct of sodium returned to that peak (?!though chemical in­ will do it. The bleach makers-they were nitrate-valuable fertilizer for the cotton grow­ dustry in general has) and there are those who not just soda makers now-recombined the ers? The reaction is simple enough: dump think that it never will. Nothing is more chlorine with slaked lime to produce the sub­ nitric acid on salt instead of soda ash, and get characteristic of the chemical industry than stance that still goes by the names of bleacll­ the same old sodium nitrate, but get chlorine the way it outgrows the products and con­ ing powder or chloride of lime. And from that instead of carbon dioxide. Allied Chemical ceptions of its youth-and there are some signs successful attempt to get rid of a noxious started out with that process at Hopewell, Vir­ that the industry is beginning to outgrow its waste product many important consequences ginia, getting its nitric acid by the oxidizing of previous dependence on sulfuric acid. The began to grow. Chlorine is valuable because it synthetic ammonia (page 170). Tight-lipped new petroleum industry can no longer afford is extremely active; a chlorine molecule de­ Allied will not admit it, but the process has to treat its products as roughly as it used to. lights to combine with wide varieties of other been giving it a great deal of practical trouble Therefore in this industry new refining agems molecules-and in the combination it effects -and chlorine has only recently been pro­ -solvents and synthetic compounds-are re­ some radical changes. Also, chlorine is a killer. duced at Hopewell in quantities sufficient to placing sulfuric acid. The fertilizer manu­ A few lungfuls of the pure gas will kill any be felt in the market. facturers are beginning to find new ways to animal. But chlorine is also a germ killer. It Notice now how the rise of chlorine has make plant food from phosphate rock without has helped eliminate the fear of typhoid-fever accompanied, and in some ways caused, the sulfuric acid. Pickling steel for galvanizing epidemics by destroying contamination in decline in sulfuric acid uses. '"'hen you use and tin-plating is being clone without sulfuric water supplies. It is the source of the active chlorine in making organic compounds and acid-hydrochloric acid is taking its place. ingredient in the so-called Carrel-Dakin solu­ solvents, you frequently produce hydrochloric And whereas hydrochloric acid used to be tion for application to wounds, which is made acid at the same time. The increasing use o( made almost entirely from sulfuric acicl"s ac­ as is bleaching powder, but with caustic soda hydrochloric acid is crowding sulfuric out of tion on salt, it is now being made from the replacing lime. But its industrial uses far out­ metal pickling. The chlorine-born synthetics chlorination of hydrocarbons-once wastes of rank its medicinal ones. include the petroleum-refining solvents, which • petroleum distillation. Chlorine, indeed, is Chlorine continues to be the most important have also intruded on sulfuric acid. And taking an industrial importance that increases bleaching agent, not only for cloth but for phenol, for plastic manufacture, and hosts almost daily-and to it we should look next. paper. So long as it remained fairly expensive o[ other intra-industry products were once •That is what chemists know as a catalyst, but an its use was largely limited to this. But when wholly children of sulfuric acid, are now also explanation of how it worhs has filled volume after Niagara Falls began to supply the U.S. with its children of chlorine. There are men in the volume with words that exf>lain really nothing at first really abundant electrical energy a new chemical industry who are willing to say that all of how or why a catalyst works. kind of alkali industry began to thrive, and [Continued on j>age I7o]

• If)8 • [Continued from jHtge I68] monia and other nitrogen compounds. J n make ammonia or methanol from this com­ the chemical industry is leaving a sulfuric-acid Norway other handsprings were being turned. biRation just as you wish. But by far the most phase and entering a chlorine one. Vast amounts of hydro-electric power were interesting use of commercial hydrogen is for used to make nitric acid by the so-called arc the process known as hydrogenation. process: in the presence of a vast, fan-shaped The hydrogenation of vegetable oils is an Ammonia and nitrogen electric arc small amounts of nitrogen would old story. If you pass hydrogen over vegetable combine with oxygen, both in the air, the end oils like coconut or cottonseed or peanut, in HE layman knows ammonia only as some­ product being nitric acid. Lime treated with the presence of a catalyst (usually finely divided T thing on the kitchen shelf-and this is not this is an excellent fertilizer. nickel), you produce a solid substance useful ammonia at all but a weak solution of am­ Simple as the processes were and plentiful in cookery. Crisco is such a product: a cooking monia in water. \!\Then the chemist speaks of as were the raw materials, the power require­ fat from cottonseed oil, notably cheaper than ammonia he means anh)1drous ammonia (with­ ments of these processes were huge. But the lard. Large quantities of fish and vegetable oils out water), which is a gas and becomes a liquid power requirements of the Haber process are are hydrogenated for the soap industry. only when subjected to sufficient pressure. The much less and it can be used anywhere that But other oils and other substances are also molecule of ammonia consists of one atom of coal and water can be economically brought to­ happily susceptible to hydrogenation. Petro­ nitrogen and three atoms of hydrogen-and the gether. The process begins when coke is leum can be made to yield better products production of ammonia from the nitrogen of burned in air, changing the air's oxygen (lubricants, gasoline) and to yield them more the air is a triumph that some sober historians to carbon dioxide, which is easily removed, abundantly when subjected (as in the plants of chemistry have ranked in importance to leaving more or less pure nitrogen behind. of the Standard of New Jersey and the Standard the race with the discovery of fire. Then more hot coke is treated with steam; the of Louisiana) to hydrogen under great pres­ Inert and useless, 1,650 pounds of nitrogen products are hydrogen and carbon monoxide. sure. Further, the "soapless soaps" in which press down upon every square foot of the When you separate the carbon monoxide from du Pont and Procter & Gamble are interested earth's surface. Sir \Villiam Crookes in 18g8 the hydrogen you now have the two essential are made from the acid parts of fats by another predicted the imminent end of civilization gases ready for their reaction, and need only high-pressure treatment with hydrogen. The upon the presumption that the combined compressors, catalysts, and heat to make am­ result yields a material that acts like soap nitrogen that is an essential ingredient of monia. The ammonia may immediately be in bard or soft water and leaves no dirty scum every form of animal and plant life would used for the production of fertilizers, or it on the hair, the dishes, or the bathtub. These be exhausted. Nitrogen from the air could be may be oxidized to nitric acid for explosives soapless soaps need no alkali for their manu­ "fixcd"-that is to say, could be combined or the production of nitrates for usc as ferti­ facture, unlike the commoner soda soaps, and with other elements into useful and nour­ li7ers. Or it can be turned into urea-for which hence threaten another dislocation in the ishing forms-only by certain peculiar bac­ the principal uses today are in the production chemical· economic balance. teria living on the roots of leguminous plants. of fertilizers and urea-formaldehyde plastics. The bodily wastes of animals are rich in use­ The Haber process was the first example o( UT the most spectacular use for commercial ful nitrogen, and the farmer nourishing his a practical chemistry of a new kind-the Bhydrogen lies in the future. That is the hy­ plants with manure was doing his work .?£ chemistry of high-pressure synthesis. It is a drogenation of coal to produce liquid hydro­ restoring nitrogen to the life cycle. But the technique that can be used for more than one carbons. Because U.S. petroleum resources are enormous dissipation of nitrogen after a single end. For example, remember that incandescent still ample there is yet very little heard here use was helping to throw the entire cycle ofT coke plus steam produce a mixture of hydrogen about the possible hydrogenation of coal; yet its proper balance. Moreover, nitrogen in the and carbon monoxide; upon that combination in Germany, England, and Japan the process form of nitrates was vital to the explosives in­ there hangs another vital industrial develop­ has already begun. dustry-and the principal source of world sup­ ment. I£ a hydrogen and carbon-monoxide Its possibility in this country leads the ply was the great nitrate deposits of Chile. mixture is put into the compressors of the same chemist to think that such engineering con­ The virtual world monopoly of Chile in apparatus that makes ammonia, out comes ceptions as BonneYi lie and Grand Coulee nitrates was a matter of primary world concern methanol-still known as wood alcohol from are already museum pieces. Hydroelectric when a methodical German, Fritz Haber, the days in which it was produced entirely by power h~s an appeal for the mind largely be­ found the essential clue to the whole riddle the distillation of wood. A change of catalyst cause no fuel need be paid for to develop of nitrogen fixation in 1908. * Using extremely is necessary, but otherwise the same plant can power. But the fixed charges saddled upon high pressures and temperatures he was able, be set to work producing an entirely different such a plant are enormous, and the power any with the aiel of a catalyst made mostly from product. Indeed, Commercial Solvents Corp. electrical plant produces can not be efficiently iron, to cause nitrogen from the air to combine a decade ago made this very shift. After transmitted more than a few hundred miles. with hydrogen in the ratio of one to three, building an ammonia plant to consume hydro­ Meanwhile, says the chemist, no one has been producing ammonia. The process, experiment­ gen made as a byproduct of its fermentation noticing the great increases in efficiency of ally successful in 1go8, was working at full processes, Commercial Solvents decided that fuel-burning plants. They come from an in­ plant scale by 1913-and the first wide usc of too many other people were going into am­ creased understanding of the characteristics of this incalculably useful discovery, which solved monia making. Then and there it changed its high-pressure steam-and also from new syn­ the worst problem in the whole agenda of plans and overnight it made a methanol plant thetic organic compounds like diphenyl oxide, modern chemistry, came in the flaming out­ bloom from the seed of synthetic-ammonia ap­ which are in use in so-called hi-fluid boilers­ break of the \t\Torld \Var. \Vithout self-suffi­ paratus. And synthetic methanol has all but boilers in which a fluid of higher boiling point ciency in fixed nitrogen for explosives Germany ruined the business of the wood distillers. than water is first heated and made to do work; could not have waged that war. But if the first then, in cooling, heats water above its boiling result of the Haber process was calamitous, a point, makes it work too. more permanent result lay in the fact that the Hydrogen Therefore the chemist's conception of the air, which had hitherto been useful in the sup­ future of power does not lie in hydroelectricity. port of life only by making the combustion of F THE sulfuric-acid phase of chemical in­ But neither does it lie in plants that are fired the body possible, could now be made not I dustry is an old phase and the chlorine phase by coal that has perhaps jounced 400 miles in merely to support life but to contribute toward a current one, perhaps a future phase is the coal cars across country to be delivered from its nourishment and growth. phase of hydrogen. This lightest of all gases mine to point of consumption. Since the hy­ Before the Haber process, chemists had and simplest of all chemical molecules was the drogenation of coal produces liquid hydro­ turned all sorts of complicated handsprings gas whose explosion destroyed the airship carbons, the chemist wants to know why these to make the nitrogen of the air combine use­ Hindenburg this year. Obviously, hydrogen hydrocarbons should not be processed at the fully with other elements. The cyanamide proc­ will never again be willingly used as a buoyant mine mouth with hydrogen made from coal ess was one of these handsprings. If you fused gas in aeronautics; but hydrogen's commercial and steam and then pumped in pipe lines, lime and coke in the electric furnace, thus uses are growing and growing fast. We have silently and efficiently, for 500 miles or more to using great quantities of electric power, you seen hydrogen as the product of electrolysis, the centers of power consumption, there to be got calcium carbide, which nitrogen would but electrolytic cells are impracticable to sup­ burned as fuel for steam engines or in the cyl­ join to make calcium cyanamide. That could ply large-scale industrial needs. Prime reaction inders of Diesels. And this conception is all the be used as a fertilizer or as a source of am- for the production of commercial hydrogen is more challenging because the lm-l'est grades of *Peace-loving Fritz Haber lived until I9J4· But at the one we looked at just above: the interac­ coal or even lignite-too poor in fuel value to his death he was living in Switzerland as a volun· tion of steam and incandescent coke to yield warrant mining today-are the yery substances tmy exile from Nazi Germany. hydrogen and carbon monoxide. You may that can be best hydrogenated into liquids.