Wonder materials and troublesome pollution
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Major Developments in the Chemical Industry
• The Chemical Industry arose mid- way through the Industrial Revolution. • It provided previously unheard of products that increased productivity, led to revolutionary new products, and transformed the economies of some nations.
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Gas
• Johann Baptista van Helmont, Dutch scientist • 1577-1644 • Engaged in the study of “airs.” • Coined new word “gas” from Greek χαος, same root as the English word “chaos.” • Van Helmont identified gases by their sources, rather than by their composition (which was unknown). • E.g., “wild gas,” “windy gas,” “fat gas,” “dry gas,” “smoky gas,” etc.
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1 Coal Gas
• One gas obtained was an inflammable “air” obtained from coal that burned like the flames of coal itself. • In 1760 was the first attempt to light a room by the gas from coal. • It was not very successful, and was dropped.
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Gas Lighting
• Around 1800, Phillipe Lebon, a French engineer, produced a gas from heating wood. • It produced a soft light, which he contained in a glass globe. • He conceived of a distribution system involving concealed pipes running throughout a house. • But Lebon was attacked and killed by muggers in 1804, putting an end to his plans.
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James Watt and Matthew Boulton
• Firm of Boulton & Watt get interested in gas. • James Watt’s sun, Gregory Watt, went to Paris to investigate and learned of Lebon’s work. • Meanwhile William Murdoch, Bolton and Watt’s chief engineer in Cornwall, sought to find a way to make a tar from coal for coating ships’ bottoms. • Accidentally he produced a gas from coal that could be used for lighting. • Because of Gregory Watt’s visit to Paris, Watt & Boulton realized the significance of Murdoch’s discovery and recalled him to their Birmingham factory.
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2 Coal Gas Lighting • The Boulton-Watt steam engine foundry in Birmingham’s Soho district became the first factory illuminated 24 hours a day by coal gas. • Watt & Boulton went into gas lighting as a side business. • They outfitted many British factories, e.g., the Salford cotton mill, with 900 gas lights in 1806-1807.
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Soho Stinks
• Coal gas was not purified or washed and it burned imperfectly. • The result was a foul odor. • The Soho Foundry became nicknamed the “Soho Stinks.” • Boulton and Watt decided there were too many problems with gas lighting and they abandoned the business in 1814.
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The Gas Age
• The Gas Light and Coke Company was set up in 1812 in London. • By F. A. Winzer (later Winsor) from Germany. • By 1816, there were 26 miles of gas mains in London.
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3 The Gas Age, 2
• By 1823, there were three rival companies in London north of the Thames. • Their goal was to replace the other night lighting, which was burning oils from animal fats. • Gas lighting cost only about 1/3 to ¼ as much as, say, whale oil.
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Pollution
• Pollution was the major problem since the gas was not purified. • One suggestion (in 1833) for providing illumination indoors without bringing in the foul air was to place the light outside a window and let it shine through the glass to light the room.
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Pollution defeated • Solutions: • In 1840 the atmospheric burner was introduced. It mixed gas and air together before combustion. • In 1895, the gas mantle was introduced. • A glass sheath enclosed the burning flame, dissipated the glow, providing a safer and more usable light.
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4 Social Consequences of Gas Lighting • British philosopher Andrew Ure: • Saw gas lighting as a great liberator. • For example it meant that children could safely work 12 hour shifts in factories!
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Social Consequences of Gas Lighting, 2 • Streets became safer at night because they were better lit. • The level of literacy and education in general went up because people could more easily read at night.
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Night Schools for workers
• In Britain night schools were set up all over the country where factory workers could go after work and hear a lecture or study some subject.
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5 Night Schools for workers, 2
• The British Mechanics’ Institutes, founded in the 19th century, became the model for community colleges and trade schools catering to the adult student.
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Cooking with Gas
• Gas was used primarily for lighting, only occasionally for warmth, and even less often for cooking. • It was only with the introduction of the gas ring in the 1860s that temperatures could be controlled enough to make gas practical for cooking on a modest scale.
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The End of Gas Lighting
• With the innovations of the atmospheric burner and the gas mantle, most of the difficulties of gas lighting had been overcome and the process was practical for general usage. • However, just at that time, electric lighting began to be introduced and the age of gas lighting came to an end.
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• Petroleum seepages have been known for millennia. • In the Middle East for example there are at least 30 places where petroleum seeps up to the surface of the earth naturally. • References to petroleum in various forms occur in the earliest written records. • In the 9th Century BCE, Assyrians marked sites of escaping gases as “where the voice of the gods issued forth from the rocks.” • Ancient Babylonians named the inflammable oil “naphtha” – i.e., “the thing that blazes.”
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Early Uses of Petroleum
• Naphtha was later used in the Byzantine Empire in the making of a weapon, “Greek Fire.” • Greek Fire was a mixture of crude oil and other chemicals that ignited when mixed with water.
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Asphalt and Tar
• About the only natural form of petroleum that was originally considered useful was solid rock (asphalt) or thicker seepages that could be used to make bitumen (tar) for caulking ships’ bottoms and waterproofing. • The modern petroleum industry arose as a means to satisfy the existing demand for lighting that had been created by gas lighting.
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7 “Coal Oil”
• James Young, assistant to British scientist Michael Faraday, in 1848 developed a lubricant from a petroleum product – a form of naphtha. • When refined further, it made excellent lighting. • He set up a company to manufacture and sell this product in Europe and America to compete with gas lighting and animal oils. • The name “coal oil” is still used in some places, but he called it paraffin illuminating oil. In America it became known as kerosene.
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Drilling for Oil • Impediments: • Lack of hard drills • Lack of mechanical power • Uncertain success • Early 19th century drillings sought water or salt, not oil. • Developments: • In 1830 the derrick was introduced. • In 1850 the steam engine was adapted to power drills. • Between 1840 and 1860 more than 15 borings that were looking for salt hit petroleum accidentally.
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Looking for Oil • G. H. Bissell, an American industrialist, considered deliberately searching for oil. • He sent a sample of oil from a Pennsylvania seepage to Yale chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr. • Silliman reported back that he thought that several new products could be obtained from the crude oil. • Bissell also got some advice on likely places to drill for oil.
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8 Drake’s Well • Bissell funded exploration led by his contractor Edwin L. Drake. • On August 27, 1859, after drilling 69 ½ feet through bedrock, Drake struck oil. • The Pennsylvania Oil Field began.
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The turning point in the history of petroleum
• Within 15 years, the annual output of oil in the U.S. (mostly all in Pennsylvania) reached 10 million barrels of 360 lbs each.
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The Oil Well Industry
• The first big product of the petroleum industry was kerosene. • The U.S. exported it in tins worldwide to satisfy a demand for lighting. • Gasoline was the first distillate obtained in refining, but it was regarded as both useless and dangerous, so it tended to be just burnt off. • In Europe, the petroleum industry developed mostly in Russia. • By 1901 Russia was the largest oil producer in the world.
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9 Monopolies • In the U.S., the Standard Oil Company was founded in the 1870s by John D. Rockefeller. • Standard Oil owned not just the oil drilling rights and the oil wells but also the pipelines between the wells and the ports, and even the ships. • Ultimately Standard Oil’s monopoly was deemed unfair to the spirit of competition and the company was broken up into smaller companies by the U. S. Congress. • This was the first major Anti-Trust suit, solved by breaking apart the dominating company.
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Rubber • Rubber: a tropical crop. • Characteristic properties: • recovering shape after being deformed, • impermeability to water. • Early uses: • As early as the 13th century, natives of Central and South America collected latex and coagulated it over a fire to make rubber balls. • By 1615 Spanish explorers used rubber to weatherproof the cloaks of soldiers.
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Rubber gets its name
• In 1751 a French scientist, Charles de la Condamine, brought a sample of rubber back to France from an expedition to Peru. • In 1770, the British amateur scientist Joseph Priestley (discoverer of oxygen) gave rubber its English name when he noted that rubbing with it was a good way to erase pencil marks. Joseph Priestley
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10 Beginning of Modern Uses
• When rubber began to be imported into Europe, it came in already coagulated form in “bottles” or in balls, and then was cut into strips. • It could be dissolved with turpentine and used as a thinned liquid. Unfortunately, using solvents produced a weak solution of rubber that dried unpredictably.
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The problem of pre- formed rubber
• Thomas Hancock began using rubber commercially in Britain by incorporating strips of rubber into garments and bandages etc.
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Hancock’s experiements
• Hancock was dependent on the shape of the bottles in which the rubber was imported. • He experimented putting the rubber “bottles” through a shredding machine which had revolving spikes. • To his surprise instead of getting small bits of rubber, he produced a solid mass. A rubber medallion of Thomas Hancock
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11 Hancock’s Masticator
• He redesigned his shredder as a masticator and made from it large cylinders of rubber which could then be cut into whatever shapes he needed. • He made rubber sheets by shaving slices off his cylindrical blocks. The sheets could be joined end to end while still warm and thereby made into any size desired. SC/NATS 1840, Science and the Environment – XV The Chemical Industry 34
Applying a rubber coat like varnish • Charles Macintosh, a Glasgow chemical manufacturer, used coal tar naphtha as a solvent for rubber. • He dissolved rubber and made a sort of varnish that could be brushed onto cloth, making an impermeable layer.
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Rubberized Clothing
• Macintosh then took two pieces of treated cloth and sewed the rubber treated sides together on the inside, making a surface all around with no “tacky” side to the touch. • With this layered cloth, he could make many waterproof products. • He set up a factory in 1824 for his waterproof clothing. • In Britain, raincoats are still called “macintoshes.”
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12 Waterproof items
An advertisement for Macintosh’s “Travelling Articles” made of rubberized cloth.
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Rubber Tires
• Tires were being made from rubber strips, but rubber loses its elasticity in the cold and becomes soft and tacky in the heat. • This was especially a problem in America with its great extremes of temperatures.
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Goodyear’s accident
• Charles Goodyear, a Philadelphia hardware merchant, by accident overheated a mixture of rubber, sulphur, and white lead. • The result was a substance that remained elastic in all weather and did not become soft and tacky.
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13 Vulcanization
• This is the vulcanization process, which Goodyear patented in the U.S. in 1841. SC/NATS 1840, Science and the Environment – XV The Chemical Industry 40
Rubber tires
• In 1846 Hancock introduced rubber tires. • They were made of solid rubber, 1 ½ inches wide and 1 ¼ inches thick.
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Pneumatic tires
• In 1888, John Dunlop introduced the pneumatic tire for bicycles. • By the end of the 19th century, tires were the biggest use of rubber. • Next was insulation for electrical wire. John Dunlop
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14 Rubber Plantations
• Rubber was being collected from naturally growing trees in South America, but when demand took off, this supply was inadequate. • The rubber plantation came into existence around 1895. The largest of these were located in Ceylon and Singapore. SC/NATS 1840, Science and the Environment – XV The Chemical Industry 43
Industrial Chemistry
• The Industrial Revolution increased the demand for alkali for: • Textiles • Glass making • Soap manufacture • Originally alkalis were made from natural sources. But with increased demand, synthesis became necessary. • Nicholas Leblanc, a French physician, found a method to make soda from salt in the late 18th century. • This became the first large scale industrial chemical process. It dominated the chemical industry for over a century.
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Enter Canada: Potash
• Potash was obtained by leaching wood ashes. • Producing potash and selling it abroad was a way for Canadian settlers in forested regions to produce ready money. • Canada supplied Britain with ¾ of its potash by 1831. • This required burning 4 million tons of hardwood annually in Canada. – Just for the ashes!
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15 Bleaching, the natural way
• The natural way of bleaching fabric was to lay out strips of fabric in the sun, spread them with buttermilk and let the sun’s rays trigger a chemical process between the fabric and the buttermilk. • It was a slow and unreliable process.
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Chemical bleaching: Hydrochloric acid
• The manufacture of soda produced an unwanted byproduct, hydrochloric acid, which was regarded as a foul pollutant. • Eventually it was found to be useful in making bleach, and became a boon to the textile and paper making industries.
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Synthetic Dyes
• The production of chemical dyes became one of the biggest parts of the chemical industry. • It arose out of organic chemistry in the 19th century. • One of the first instances of scientific research leading directly to an industrial application. • Research at the Royal College of Chemistry in London.
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16 The first synthetic dye: mauve.
• 18-year-old William Perkin, doing experiments at the Royal College of Chemistry, discovered the dye mauve in 1856 – an accident arising from his attempt to make quinine from a derivative of aniline. • Quinine was used as a treatment for malaria, especially in the British colonies. • Perkin failed to derive quinine but he produced some purple crystals which he found would dye silk William Perkin as purple. a young student
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Aniline dye
• Perkin saw the potential of synthetic dyes. With family backing he set up a factory to make aniline dye in Britain. • He made a fortune and retired at age 38 to do research. William Perkin holding a skein dyed mauve.
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Migration of the chemical industry • Synthetic dyes began in Britain but soon the leadership moved. • First to France, to support its fashion industry. • Then to Germany, which came to dominate the industry by the end of the 19th century.
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17 Explosives
• Until the middle of the 19th century, the only important explosive was • gunpowder. • Nitro-celluose (gun cotton) and nitroglycerin were developed in the middle of the century, but there were considered so dangerous that little practical use could be found for them. • What was needed were explosives that only exploded when desired.
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Dynamite
• Alfred Nobel developed a way to make nitroglycerin safe for use by absorbing it into a mixture of clay and causing it to explode with a detonator. This was dynamite. • It revolutionized the mining industry and was used in major construction projects. It became a very important product for the chemical industry and led to the development of other explosives. Alfred Nobel
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Explosives for peace
• Nobel intended that dynamite be used for peaceful purposes, such as mining. • Nevertheless the first public use of dynamite was as a bomb, which killed 7 policemen at a labour rally. • Nobel left 9 million dollars to fund prizes for helping humanity, including the Peace Prize.
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18 Plastics
• The chemical product that has had the greatest impact on modern life. • Plastic industry begin in 19th century, but most development has been in the 20th. • Key product: a resin made from petroleum that can The microstructure of be made into any plastics. desired shape (hence “plastic.”)
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Plastics, 2
• Key plastic products • Vinyl, discovered in 1838, made into a commercial product (polyvinyl chloride, or PVC) nearly a century later. • Acrylic, first marketed as Plexiglas, a non-shatter alternative to glass. • Nylon, developed in 1935, as sheeting and as a fabric. • Others: polyurethane, Teflon, and many primarily industrial products.
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The virtue of plastics
• Plastics are a wonder material: • They are very durable. They don’t rust, rot, or in general biodegrade. • This is their greatest virtue. • This is also their Plastic food containers greatest danger.
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19 The trouble with plastics
• What to do with the tonnes of plastic waste accumulating everyday? • Recycling is possible, but not to the same use. • Another problem is the release of unwanted chemicals (e.g. CFCs) if the plastics are destroyed (by incineration, for example).
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