Creative Chemistry: Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries

by Edwin E. Slosson

C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ + 12O₂ → 11H₂O + 12CO₂
cane sugar oxygen water carbon dioxide

When sugar is burned the reaction is just the same.

But when the yeast plant feeds on sugar it carries the process only part way and instead of water the product is alcohol, a very different thing, so they say who have tried both as beverages. The yeast or fermentation reaction is this:

C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ + H₂O → 4C₂H₆O + 4CO₂
cane sugar water alcohol carbon dioxide

Alcohol then is the first product of the decomposition of sugar, a dangerous half-way house. The twin product, carbon dioxide or carbonic acid, is a gas of slightly sour taste which gives an attractive tang and effervescence to the beer, wine, cider or champagne. That is to say, one of these twins is a pestilential fellow and the other is decidedly agreeable. Yet for several thousand years mankind took to the first and let the second for the most part escape into the air. But when the chemist appeared on the scene he discovered a way of separating the two and bottling the harmless one for those who prefer it. An increasing number of people were found to prefer it, so the American soda-water fountain is gradually driving Demon Rum out of the civilized world. The brewer nowadays caters to two classes of customers. He bottles up the beer with the alcohol and a little carbonic acid in it for the saloon and he catches the rest of the carbonic acid that he used to waste and sells it to the drug stores for soda-water or uses it to charge some non-alcoholic beer of his own.

This catering to rival trades is not an uncommon thing with the chemist. As we have seen, the synthetic perfumes are used to improve the natural perfumes. Cottonseed is separated into oil and meal; the oil going to make margarin and the meal going to feed the cows that produce butter. Some people have been drinking coffee, although they do not like the taste of it, because they want the stimulating effect of its alkaloid, caffein. Other people liked the warmth and flavor of coffee but find that caffein does not agree with them. Formerly one had to take the coffee whole or let it alone. Now one can have his choice, for the caffein is extracted for use in certain popular cold drinks and the rest of the bean sold as caffein-free coffee.

Most of the "soft drinks" that are now gradually displacing the hard ones consist of sugar, water and carbonic acid, with various flavors, chiefly the esters of the fatty and aromatic acids, such as I described in a previous chapter. These are still usually made from fruits and spices and in some cases the law or public opinion requires this, but eventually, I presume, the synthetic flavors will displace the natural and then we shall get rid of such extraneous and indigestible matter as seeds, skins and bark. Suppose the world had always been used to synthetic and hence seedless figs, strawberries and blackberries. Suppose then some manufacturer of fig paste or strawberry jam should put in ten per cent. of little round hard wooden nodules, just the sort to get stuck between the teeth or caught in the vermiform appendix. How long would it be before he was sent to jail for adulterating food? But neither jail nor boycott has any reformatory effect on Nature.

Nature is quite human in that respect. But you can reform Nature as you can human beings by looking out for heredity and culture. In this way Mother Nature has been quite cured of her bad habit of putting seeds in bananas and oranges. Figs she still persists in adulterating with particles of cellulose as nutritious as sawdust. But we can circumvent the old lady at this. I got on Christmas a package of figs from California without a seed in them. Somebody had taken out all the seeds—it must have been a big job—and then put the figs together again as natural looking as life and very much better tasting.

Sugar and alcohol are both found in Nature; sugar in the ripe fruit, alcohol when it begins to decay. But it was the chemist who discovered how to extract them. He first worked with alcohol and unfortunately succeeded.

Previous to the invention of the still by the Arabian chemists man could not get drunk as quickly as he wanted to because his liquors were limited to what the yeast plant could stand without intoxication. When the alcoholic content of wine or beer rose to seventeen per cent. at the most the process of fermentation stopped because the yeast plants got drunk and quit "working." That meant that a man confined to ordinary wine or beer had to drink ten or twenty quarts of water to get one quart of the stuff he was after, and he had no liking for water.