America's Munitions 1917-1918

by Benedict Crowell; United States. War Department

CARBON PLANT NO. 2 AT ASTORIA, L. I., SHOWING ALSO OFFICE AND LABORATORY.

In building up our supply of coconut shells we naturally turned first to the resources in the United States. America normally consumes fresh coconuts at a rate sufficient to supply about 50 tons of shells daily. The war restrictions on the use of sugar had the effect of cutting down the consumption of coconuts, used largely in candy and cakes, and consequently one of our efforts was to increase by widespread propaganda the use of coconut. The "Eat-More-Coconut" campaign more than doubled the American consumption of coconut in a brief space of time; and the 50 tons of shells daily, which had been the original supply, grew in volume until in October, 1918, with the help of importations of shell, we averaged about 150 tons per day exclusive of the Orient.

The first heating of coconut shells to make charcoal reduces their weight 75 per cent. Therefore it was evident that we could most economically ship our oriental supply in the form of charcoal produced on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. For this purpose, in August, we established under the direction of an officer of the Chemical Warfare Service a charcoal plant in the Philippine Islands. From this plant agents were sent to Ceylon, India, Siam, and other oriental countries to purchase enormous supplies of nutshells. This work was only gaining momentum when the armistice was declared. As it was, the Philippine charcoal plant actually shipped over 300 tons of coconut shell carbon to the United States and had 1,000 tons on hand ready for shipment on November 11.

The method adopted in the Philippines was to burn the shells in long, shallow trenches. As soon as the smoke had disappeared and the flames came clear and lambent through the incandescent mass, the bed of coals was smothered by means of galvanized-iron lids thrown over the trenches. It is interesting to note that the coolies hired by the Chemical Warfare Service in the Philippines would not work at charcoal burning more than a few hours each day, because they declared that the heat from the pits would give them tuberculosis and other lung troubles.

Meanwhile agents and officers of the Gas Defense Division were searching the tropical regions of Central and South America for other nuts valuable for this purpose. The best of these was found to be the cohune or corozo nut. These nuts are the fruit of the Manaca palm tree. They grow in clusters, like bananas or dates, one to four clusters to a tree, each cluster yielding from 60 to 75 pounds of nuts. Cohune nuts grow principally on the west coast of Central America in low, swampy regions from Mexico to Panama, but are also found along the Caribbean coast. Before the war created a demand for cohune nuts none of them had ever been imported commercially in this country, although it is understood that France had a prewar commercial use for them.

The chief virtue of the cohune nut from our point of view was its extreme thickness of shell, the kernel of this large nut, which is 3 inches or more in length and nearly 2 in diameter, being relatively small. We were importing cohune nuts at the rate of 4,000 tons per month at the time of the armistice. A disadvantage in the use of cohune nuts was that their husks contained a considerable amount of acid which rotted the jute bags and also caused the heaps of nuts to heat in storage. The fire department at the Chemical Warfare Service nut storehouse at Astoria, N. Y., was kept busy putting out spontaneous blazes in the storage piles of cohune nuts. We also sent agents to West Africa and there arranged for the shipment of some hundred tons of palm nuts a month.

A third source of tropical material was in the ivory nuts used in considerable quantities in this country by the makers of buttons. In the button factories in this country there is considerable waste of this nut material, amounting to 400 or 500 tons a month, this waste including the nut dust which was useless to us and had to be screened out. The price of ivory-nut waste was high, because of the use of this material in the manufacture of lactic acid. Nevertheless, we used a considerable quantity of it.

Another great branch of activity in securing carbon supplies was undertaken in this country. In the search for fruit pits and for domestic nuts it was found that the quantity of apricot pits, peach pits, cherry pits (largely from the canning industry), and walnut shells on the Pacific coast amounted to 23,600 tons annually. We arranged for the whole Pacific coast supply of these commodities and converted a part of a San Francisco plant of the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. into a plant for the preliminary carbonization of 100 tons a day of these materials.

The next step was to turn to the consumers of the country and ask them to save their peach and apricot stones, their prune, plum, and olive pits, their date seeds, cherry pits, butternut shells, Brazil nut shells, and their walnut and hickory nut shells. The work of securing these and advertising the Government's need to the public was turned over to the American Red Cross. There was some question at the start as to whether the charter of the Red Cross would permit it to undertake such a war activity; but, since it was determined that this was purely a defensive operation, the legal forces of the Red Cross decided that the organization could go into a campaign of this kind.