Triumphs and Wonders of the 19th Century: The True Mirror of a Phenomenal Era / A volume of original, entertaining and instructive historic and descriptive writings, showing the many and marvellous achievements which distinguish an hundred years of material, intellectual, social and moral progress

by James P. Boyd

V. SYNTHETICAL CHEMISTRY.

This branch of chemical science has for its object the building up of the more complex from the simpler forms of matter. In the early part of the century, Chevreul and Wöhler laid the foundation of the science by the synthesis of fatty-like bodies and urea. Berthellot and Friedel (1832–) in France, and Williamson and Frankland in England, added much to our knowledge. Kolbe, in Germany, made salicylic acid so abundantly as to banish the natural article from the market. The synthesis of coloring matters resembling indigo was also a great blow to that industry. From the products of the distillation of coal, chemists were able to make thousands of valuable bodies of the greatest utility. Many medicinal substances and nearly all the common dyes trace their origin to coal.

Fischer (b. 1852), in Germany, has contributed his remarkable results in the synthesis of sugar to the last years of the century. Lillienfeld, in Austria, has gone still further, and has built up a body which has many of the properties of protein, one of the most highly organized of organic substances.

SIR HENRY BESSEMER.

In the inorganic world synthesis is not so difficult a matter as the vast number of compounds attest. By means of the electric furnace, Moissan, in France, has succeeded in uniting carbon with many of the metallic elements, and thus opened the path for new achievements in passing directly from inorganic to organic compounds.

The progress of chemical synthesis has already blotted out the old distinction between inorganic and organic chemistry, and we can no longer say of organic bodies that they are the products of living cells. Organic bodies are those which contain a carbon or other elementary skeleton, to which are attached the elements or groups of elements forming the complete body.

The claim which has been made that synthetical chemistry would in the near future produce the food of man, and thus relegate agriculture to the domain of the useless or forgotten arts, is, however, wholly without scientific foundation. The function of the farmer will not be usurped by the chemist. The future will see the most important contributions to chemistry coming from the field of organic chemistry, but it will also see the farmer following in the furrow, and man depending for his food on the fields of waving grain.