Creative Chemistry: Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries

by Edwin E. Slosson

The United States, like England, had become dependent upon Germany for its dyestuffs. We imported nine-tenths of what we used and most of those that were produced here were made from imported intermediates. When the war broke out there were only seven firms and 528 persons employed in the manufacture of dyes in the United States. One of these, the Schoelkopf Aniline and Chemical Works, of Buffalo, deserves mention, for it had stuck it out ever since 1879, and in 1914 was making 106 dyes. In June, 1917, this firm, with the encouragement of the Government Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, joined with some of the other American producers to form a trade combination, the National Aniline and Chemical Company. The Du Pont Company also entered the field on an extensive scale and soon there were 118 concerns engaged in it with great profit. During the war $200,000,000 was invested in the domestic dyestuff industry. To protect this industry Congress put on a specific duty of five cents a pound and an ad valorem duty of 30 per cent. on imported dyestuffs; but if, after five years, American manufacturers are not producing 60 per cent. in value of the domestic consumption, the protection is to be removed. For some reason, not clearly understood and therefore hotly discussed, Congress at the last moment struck off the specific duty from two of the most important of the dyestuffs, indigo and alizarin, as well as from all medicinals and flavors.

The manufacture of dyes is not a big business, but it is a strategic business. Heligoland is not a big island, but England would have been glad to buy it back during the war at a high price per square yard. American industries employing over two million men and women and producing over three billion dollars' worth of products a year are dependent upon dyes. Chief of these is of course textiles, using more than half the dyes; next come leather, paper, paint and ink. We have been importing more than $12,000,000 worth of coal-tar products a year, but the cottonseed oil we exported in 1912 would alone suffice to pay that bill twice over. But although the manufacture of dyes cannot be called a big business, in comparison with some others, it is a paying business when well managed. The German concerns paid on an average 22 per cent. dividends on their capital and sometimes as high as 50 per cent. Most of the standard dyes have been so long in use that the patents are off and the processes are well enough known. We have the coal tar and we have the chemists, so there seems no good reason why we should not make our own dyes, at least enough of them so we will not be caught napping as we were in 1914. It was decidedly humiliating for our Government to have to beg Germany to sell us enough colors to print our stamps and greenbacks and then have to beg Great Britain for permission to bring them over by Dutch ships.

The raw material for the production of coal-tar products we have in abundance if we will only take the trouble to save it. In 1914 the crude light oil collected from the coke-ovens would have produced only about 4,500,000 gallons of benzol and 1,500,000 gallons of toluol, but in 1917 this output was raised to 40,200,000 gallons of benzol and 10,200,000 of toluol. The toluol was used mostly in the manufacture of trinitrotoluol for use in Europe. When the war broke out in 1914 it shut off our supply of phenol (carbolic acid) for which we were dependent upon foreign sources. This threatened not only to afflict us with headaches by depriving us of aspirin but also to removed the consolation of music, for phenol is used in making phonographic records. Mr. Edison with his accustomed energy put up a factory within a few weeks for the manufacture of synthetic phenol. When we entered the war the need for phenol became yet more imperative, for it was needed to make picric acid for filling bombs. This demand was met, and in 1917 there were fifteen new plants turning out 64,146,499 pounds of phenol valued at $23,719,805.

Some of the coal-tar products, as we see, serve many purposes. For instance, picric acid appears in three places in this book. It is a high explosive. It is a powerful and permanent yellow dye as any one who has touched it knows. Thirdly it is used as an antiseptic to cover burned skin. Other coal-tar dyes are used for the same purpose, "malachite green," "brilliant green," "crystal violet," "ethyl violet" and "Victoria blue," so a patient in a military hospital is decorated like an Easter egg. During the last five years surgeons have unfortunately had unprecedented opportunities for the study of wounds and fortunately they have been unprecedentedly successful in finding improved methods of treating them. In former wars a serious wound meant usually death or amputation. Now nearly ninety per cent. of the wounded are able to continue in the service. The reason for this improvement is that medicines are now being made to order instead of being gathered "from China to Peru." The old herb doctor picked up any strange plant that he could find and tried it on any sick man that would let him. This empirical method, though hard on the patients, resulted in the course of five thousand years in the discovery of a number of useful remedies. But the modern medicine man when he knows the cause of the disease is usually able to devise ways of counteracting it directly. For instance, he knows, thanks to Pasteur and Metchnikoff, that the cause of wound infection is the bacterial enemies of man which swarm by the million into any breach in his protective armor, the skin. Now when a breach is made in a line of intrenchments the defenders rush troops to the threatened spot for two purposes, constructive and destructive, engineers and warriors, the former to build up the rampart with sandbags, the latter to kill the enemy. So when the human body is invaded the blood brings to the breach two kinds of defenders. One is the serum which neutralizes the bacterial poison and by coagulating forms a new skin or scab over the exposed flesh. The other is the phagocytes or white corpuscles, the free lances of our corporeal militia, which attack and kill the invading bacteria. The aim of the physician then is to aid these defenders as much as possible without interfering with them. Therefore the antiseptic he is seeking is one that will assist the serum in protecting and repairing the broken tissues and will kill the hostile bacteria without killing the friendly phagocytes. Carbolic acid, the most familiar of the coal-tar antiseptics, will destroy the bacteria when it is diluted with 250 parts of water, but unfortunately it puts a stop to the fighting activities of the phagocytes when it is only half that strength, or one to 500, so it cannot destroy the infection without hindering the healing.

In this search for substances that would attack a specific disease germ one of the leading investigators was Prof. Paul Ehrlich, a German physician of the Hebrew race. He found that the aniline dyes were useful for staining slides under the microscope, for they would pick out particular cells and leave others uncolored and from this starting point he worked out organic and metallic compounds which would destroy the bacteria and parasites that cause some of the most dreadful of diseases. A year after the war broke out Professor Ehrlich died while working in his laboratory on how to heal with coal-tar compounds the wounds inflicted by explosives from the same source.

One of the most valuable of the aniline antiseptics employed by Ehrlich is flavine or, if the reader prefers to call it by its full name, diaminomethylacridinium chloride. Flavine, as its name implies, is a yellow dye and will kill the germs causing ordinary abscesses when in solution as dilute as one part of the dye to 200,000 parts of water, but it does not interfere with the bactericidal action of the white blood corpuscles unless the solution is 400 times as strong as this, that is one part in 500. Unlike carbolic acid and other antiseptics it is said to stimulate the serum instead of impairing its activity. Another antiseptic of the coal-tar family which has recently been brought into use by Dr. Dakin of the Rockefeller Institute is that called by European physicians chloramine-T and by American physicians chlorazene and by chemists para-toluene-sodium-sulfo-chloramide.

This may serve to illustrate how a chemist is able to make such remedies as the doctor needs, instead of depending upon the accidental by-products of plants. On an earlier page I explained how by starting with the simplest of ring-compounds, the benzene of coal tar, we could get aniline. Suppose we go a step further and boil the aniline oil with acetic acid, which is the acid of vinegar minus its water. This easy process gives us acetanilid, which when introduced into the market some years ago under the name of "antifebrin" made a fortune for its makers.

The making of medicines from coal tar began in 1874 when Kolbe made salicylic acid from carbolic acid. Salicylic acid is a rheumatism remedy and had previously been extracted from willow bark. If now we treat salicylic acid with concentrated acetic acid we get "aspirin." From aniline again are made "phenacetin," "antipyrin" and a lot of other drugs that have become altogether too popular as headache remedies—say rather "headache relievers."

Another class of synthetics equally useful and likewise abused, are the soporifics, such as "sulphonal," "veronal" and "medinal." When it is not desired to put the patient to sleep but merely to render insensible a particular place, as when a tooth is to be pulled, cocain may be used. This, like alcohol and morphine, has proved a curse as well as a blessing and its sale has had to be restricted because of the many victims to the habit of using this drug. Cocain is obtained from the leaves of the South American coca tree, but can be made artificially from coal-tar products. The laboratory is superior to the forest because other forms of local anesthetics, such as eucain and novocain, can be made that are better than the natural alkaloid because more effective and less poisonous.

I must not forget to mention another lot of coal-tar derivatives in which some of my readers will take a personal interest. That is the photographic developers. I am old enough to remember when we used to develop our plates in ferrous sulfate solution and you never saw nicer negatives than we got with it. But when pyrogallic acid came in we switched over to that even though it did stain our fingers and sometimes our plates. Later came a swarm of new organic reducing agents under various fancy names, such as metol, hydro (short for hydro-quinone) and eikongen ("the image-maker"). Every fellow fixed up his own formula and called his fellow-members of the camera club fools for not adopting it though he secretly hoped they would not.