Creative Chemistry: Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries

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From America's Munitions
THE PRODUCTION OF NEW AND STRONGER FORMS OF STEEL IS ONE OF THE GREATEST TRIUMPHS OF MODERN CHEMISTRY
The photograph shows the manufacture of a 12-inch gun at the plant of the Midvale Steel Company during the late war. The gun tube, 41 feet long, has just been drawn from the furnace where it was tempered at white heat and is now ready for quenching.
This book originated in a series of articles prepared for The Independent in 1917-18 for the purpose of interesting the general reader in the recent achievements of industrial chemistry and providing supplementary reading for students of chemistry in colleges and high schools. I am indebted to Hamilton Holt, editor of The Independent , and to Karl V.S. Howland, its publisher, for stimulus and opportunity to undertake the writing of these pages and for the privilege of reprinting them in this form.
In gathering the material for this volume I have received the kindly aid of so many companies and individuals that it is impossible to thank them all but I must at least mention as those to whom I am especially grateful for information, advice and criticism: Thomas H. Norton of the Department of Commerce; Dr. Bernhard C. Hesse; H.S. Bailey of the Department of Agriculture; Professor Julius Stieglitz of the University of Chicago; L.E. Edgar of the Du Pont de Nemours Company; Milton Whitney of the U.S. Bureau of Soils; Dr. H.N. McCoy; K.F. Kellerman of the Bureau of Plant Industry.
E.E.S.
The recent war as never before in the history of the world brought to the nations of the earth a realization of the vital place which the science of chemistry holds in the development of the resources of a nation. Some of the most picturesque features of this awakening reached the great public through the press. Thus, the adventurous trips of the Deutschland with its cargoes of concentrated aniline dyes, valued at millions of dollars, emphasized as no other incident our former dependence upon Germany for these products of her chemical industries.