RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AND CHANGES IN PRACTICE
The whole matter of fixation must be regarded as in process of development. True, it was instituted some fifteen or twenty years ago and has grown to represent the largest producing source of chemical nitrogen, with operations in practically all the important industrial countries in the world and with responsible financial backing. But no one can examine the charts in [Figure 16] without recognizing the premature, mushroom quality of the upgrowth, induced primarily in response to the political conditions leading to and through the war. This is especially true for the American situation. When the war broke out, fixation here was confessedly still in the dependent stage of its development, unable in every effort it had made to stand alone industrially. In the main, the developments that have transpired subsequently have followed along pre-existing lines. In so far as they have done so, little actual economic significance is to be attached to them. For the rest, the new developments, all that can be said at this juncture is that they are disappointingly meager.
Just one wartime achievement, the oxidation of ammonia, stands out as affording a worth that is unmistakably clear. The nitrogen situation, it will be recalled, has two aspects, the military and the agricultural. The military focus is on nitric acid, and the readiest means of insuring a supply; the agricultural focus is on ammonium compounds or their equivalent in neutral nitrogen salts and the most economical means of supply. Here, then, is a parting of the ways to expediency, and it is at this juncture that with military influences to the fore the nitrogen developments of the past few years were led off on an uneconomical tangent of military control. The Bureau of Mines, however, taking up the work of others, has perfected a simple, effective means for oxidizing ammonia to nitric acid. This, beyond question, is the most important contribution of the day. Its significance may perhaps best be brought out graphically in the accompanying sketch.
Ammonia oxidation, it will be observed from the foregoing sketch, gives a means of supplying the military requirement from the direct line of agricultural efficiency. From the strictly military viewpoint, it has the objection of being a roundabout procedure. The dotted line of direct military procedure, however, has no peace-time function, and consequently cannot be maintained in time of peace in trim for war, but must instead be built up expressly to meet wartime exigencies. We have had an illustration of what this means in the way of time and money, and this one ought to suffice. The agricultural channel, once built up on a basis of economic efficiency, is open at all times. At the most, all that is required is to keep an eye to the emergency needs in the way of oxidation equipment, a relatively simple matter. Thus, instead of the precarious procedure of trusting to luck which characterized our pre-war attitude toward nitrogen on the one hand, or of attempting the impossible in the way of maintaining a military program of industrial procedure in time of peace on the other, all that is needed is a constructive program devoted expressly to the interests of economic efficiency.