Creative Chemistry: Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries. Edwin E. Slosson
modern chemical activity as well as some of the big problems which must continue to engage the attention of our chemists. Dr. Slosson has indeed the unique quality of combining an exact and intimate knowledge of chemistry with the exquisite clarity and pointedness of expression of a born writer.
We have here an exposition by a master mind, an exposition shorn of the terrifying and obscuring technicalities of the lecture room, that will be as absorbing reading as any thrilling romance. For the story of scientific achievement is the greatest epic the world has ever known, and like the great national epics of bygone ages, should quicken the life of the nation by a realization of its powers and a picture of its possibilities.
CREATIVE CHEMISTRY
La Chimie posséde cette faculté créatrice à un degré plus éminent que les autres sciences, parce qu'elle pénètre plus profondément et atteint jusqu'aux éléments naturels des êtres.
—Berthelot.
I
THREE PERIODS OF PROGRESS
The story of Robinson Crusoe is an allegory of human history. Man is a castaway upon a desert planet, isolated from other inhabited worlds—if there be any such—by millions of miles of untraversable space. He is absolutely dependent upon his own exertions, for this world of his, as Wells says, has no imports except meteorites and no exports of any kind. Man has no wrecked ship from a former civilization to draw upon for tools and weapons, but must utilize as best he may such raw materials as he can find. In this conquest of nature by man there are three stages distinguishable:
1. The Appropriative Period
2. The Adaptive Period
3. The Creative Period
These eras overlap, and the human race, or rather its vanguard, civilized man, may be passing into the third stage in one field of human endeavor while still lingering in the second or first in some other respect. But in any particular line this sequence is followed. The primitive man picks up whatever he can find available for his use. His successor in the next stage of culture shapes and develops this crude instrument until it becomes more suitable for his purpose. But in the course of time man often finds that he can make something new which is better than anything in nature or naturally produced. The savage discovers. The barbarian improves. The civilized man invents. The first finds. The second fashions. The third fabricates.
The primitive man was a troglodyte. He sought shelter in any cave or crevice that he could find. Later he dug it out to make it more roomy and piled up stones at the entrance to keep out the wild beasts. This artificial barricade, this false façade, was gradually extended and solidified until finally man could build a cave for himself anywhere in the open field from stones he quarried out of the hill. But man was not content with such materials and now puts up a building which may be composed of steel, brick, terra cotta, glass, concrete and plaster, none of which materials are to be found in nature.
The untutored savage might cross a stream astride a floating tree trunk. By and by it occurred to him to sit inside the log instead of on it, so he hollowed it out with fire or flint. Later, much later, he constructed an ocean liner.
Cain, or whoever it was first slew his brother man, made use of a stone or stick. Afterward it was found a better weapon could be made by tying the stone to the end of the stick, and as murder developed into a fine art the stick was converted into the bow and this into the catapult and finally into the cannon, while the stone was developed into the high explosive projectile. The first music to soothe the savage breast was the soughing of the wind through the trees. Then strings were stretched across a crevice for the wind to play upon and there was the Æolian harp. The second stage was entered when Hermes strung the tortoise shell and plucked it with his fingers and when Athena, raising the wind from her own lungs, forced it through a hollow reed. From these beginnings we have the organ and the orchestra, producing such sounds as nothing in nature can equal.
The first idol was doubtless a meteorite fallen from heaven or a fulgurite or concretion picked up from the sand, bearing some slight resemblance to a human being. Later man made gods in his own image, and so sculpture and painting grew until now the creations of futuristic art could be worshiped—if one wanted to—without violation of the second commandment, for they are not the likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.
In the textile industry the same development is observable. The primitive man used the skins of animals he had slain to protect his own skin. In the course of time he—or more probably his wife, for it is to the women rather than to the men that we owe the early steps in the arts and sciences—fastened leaves together or pounded out bark to make garments. Later fibers were plucked from the sheepskin, the cocoon and the cotton-ball, twisted together and woven into cloth. Nowadays it is possible to make a complete suit of clothes, from hat to shoes, of any desirable texture, form and color, and not include any substance to be found in nature. The first metals available were those found free in nature such as gold and copper. In a later age it was found possible to extract iron from its ores and today we have artificial alloys made of multifarious combinations of rare metals. The medicine man dosed his patients with decoctions of such roots and herbs as had a bad taste or queer look. The pharmacist discovered how to extract from these their medicinal principle such as morphine, quinine and cocaine, and the creative chemist has discovered how to make innumerable drugs adapted to specific diseases and individual idiosyncrasies.
In the later or creative stages we enter the domain of chemistry, for it is the chemist alone who possesses the power of reducing a substance to its constituent atoms and from them producing substances entirely new. But the chemist has been slow to realize his unique power and the world has been still slower to utilize his invaluable services. Until recently indeed the leaders of chemical science expressly disclaimed what should have been their proudest boast. The French chemist Lavoisier in 1793 defined chemistry as "the science of analysis." The German chemist Gerhardt in 1844 said: "I have demonstrated that the chemist works in opposition to living nature, that he burns, destroys, analyzes, that the vital force alone operates by synthesis, that it reconstructs the edifice torn down by the chemical forces."
It is quite true that chemists up to the middle of the last century were so absorbed in the destructive side of their science that they were blind to the constructive side of it. In this respect they were less prescient than their contemned predecessors, the alchemists, who, foolish and pretentious as they were, aspired at least to the formation of something new.
It was, I think, the French chemist Berthelot who first clearly perceived the double aspect of chemistry, for he defined it as "the science of analysis and synthesis," of taking apart and of putting together. The motto of chemistry, as of all the empirical sciences, is savoir c'est pouvoir, to know in order to do. This is the pragmatic test of all useful knowledge. Berthelot goes on to say:
Chemistry creates its object. This creative faculty, comparable to that of art itself, distinguishes it essentially from the natural and historical sciences. … These sciences do not control their object. Thus they are too often condemned to an eternal impotence in the search for truth of which they must content themselves with possessing some few and often uncertain fragments. On the contrary, the experimental sciences have the power to realize their conjectures. … What they dream of that they can manifest in actuality. …
Chemistry possesses this creative faculty to a more eminent degree than the other sciences because it penetrates more profoundly and attains even to the natural elements of existences.
Since