When the inspector met Kenney later, he said, “I’m sorry I put you to so much trouble for nothing. The whole thing was a waste of time.”
Kenney shook his head in disagreement. “I don’t think it was a waste of time at all,” he said. “We proved the seaman was innocent of smuggling narcotics and we helped him get rid of an unreasonable fear. As I see it, the results were pretty good.”
The case of the diabetic seaman is only one of many strange cases which find their way to the Customs Bureau’s laboratories located in New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Savannah, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Thousands of items, from yak hair to heroin, come to the chemists to be sampled, tested and identified.
In the course of a day, a laboratory may be called on to identify and determine the amount of grease and dirt that is in a shipment of Australian wool; report the percentage of tungsten in a shipment of ore; determine the antiquity of a diamond-studded tiara; test the alcoholic content of Scotch whiskey; examine a rosary case made in Japan, in order to establish its chief component; and analyze a sample of powdered milk from Holland to measure its butter fat.
Or the laboratory may be called on to analyze a shipment of mica to determine whether the mica splittings measure more or less than .0012 inches in thickness. The measurement of the mica has a dollars-and-cents importance to the shipper, the importer and the government because the duty is based on the thickness of the mica splittings, which in turn affects the market value of the import.
No laboratories in all the world have a more varied job to do than those of Customs. Every article that is known to commerce reaches these laboratories at one time or another. The examinations are necessary because only by a precise determination of the contents of many shipments are the appraiser and the collector able to establish value and thus determine the rate of duty which is to be paid into the Treasury of the United States.
The scientists never know when one of their analyses will touch off a court battle which will involve an entire industry and which may mean a difference of millions of dollars to businessmen.
Such a case occurred several years ago when one of the Bureau’s laboratories received for analysis a sample of a product imported from Canada under the trade name “Lioxin.” This product had a great many industrial uses and was competitive with vanillin, which is derived from the vanilla bean and also from coal tar. The imported product was being offered on the market at a price considerably below that of the competing vanillin product—at a price so low, in fact, that it threatened to upset the entire vanillin trade.
The discovery of Lioxin had been one of those accidents of science in which a waste product is found to be extremely valuable. A wood pulp company was dumping waste matter into a nearby stream, and sportsmen complained that it was killing all the fish. The complaints became so numerous that the company called in a scientist to see what could be done about correcting the situation. The scientist found while experimenting with certain chemical compounds that he could convert the waste matter into a substance that was 96 to 97 per cent vanillin. And it could be done much more cheaply than extracting vanillin from the vanilla bean or from coal tar.
When Customs chemists analyzed the product, they found that it contained impurities—but the impurities could be removed quite easily and cheaply. The end product was almost pure vanillin, meeting all the rigid standards set up by the U.S. Pharmacopoeia Act.