Industrial Chemistry - It Meets Demands of War
March 23, 1942 Life Article

March 23, 1942 Life [Table of Contents] Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early technology. See articles from Life magazine, published 1883-1972. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.

In 1942 and throughout the War Years, Life magazine (and many others) ran many articles promoting industries, services, organizations, and individuals who contributed toward our ultimate victory. Of course no one knew for certain that we would prevail in the end, but if it hadn't turned out that way, it wouldn't have been for lack of effort and sacrifice. Part of the objective was to inform the populace about how the country was pooling its resources - physical, labor, and mental - to defeat the Axis Powers that sought to takeover the world. This particular issue of Life focused on the chemical industry, with the raw materials and processes used to produce needed products both for fuel and for the base components of other finished goods. Sulphur, potassium, and coal mining and processing, along with petroleum, common table salt, and air and water were some of the most fundamental ingredients of every other item needed to aid the effort. Ever hear of Ameriopl rubber?

Industrial Chemistry - It Meets Demands of War

To keep the U. S. forces fighting, industrial chemistry must for the duration produce 5 lb. of explosives for every soldier every day. The filling of this order has brought none of the agony of retooling and conversion that has beset other items of war production. To fractionate toluol from coal for TNT requires only an adjustment of pressure and temperature controls on the towers that distill the raw materials for dyes, drugs and plastics. The nitric acid that turns cotton into smokeless powder is the same nitric acid that turns cotton into plastics and paint.

But the biggest job of industrial chemistry is now, as always, to supply other industries with the materials it has taught them to use. Without sulphuric acid, compounded from gleaming plateaus of brimstone pumped up from beneath Gulf Coast swamplands (see opposite), ten major U. S. industries would find their operations in confusion. If to sulphuric acid are added the acids, bases, salts and solvents that chemistry assembles out of water, air, salt, limestone, potash, coal and petroleum, there is involved the whole fabric of technology by which modern civilization lives at peace and fights its wars.

By the tragic irony that links the release of man's creative energies to his impulse for destruction, the history of chemistry is the history of war. Modern industrial chemistry dates from the British blockade of Napoleon's Europe in the first years of the 19th Century. To supply gunpowder for the Grand Army, French chemists treated salt with sulphuric acid, and therewith launched three fundamental chemical commodities, chlorine for bleaching, soda ash for the manufacture of soap and glass, and sulphuric acid for all its infinity of uses. To World War I must be credited the next great advance in industrial chemistry. It is a fact that Germany went to war as soon as its supply of nitrogen for explosives was assured by German chemistry's invention of a process for artificial fixation of nitrogen from the air. That process, now again diverted to war production, stands between man and starvation. Via synthetic fertilizers it restores nitrogen to the soil whence it goes into proteins, the stuff of life.

To the U. S. in the third year of World War I, Germany twice sent a submarine loaded with the most precious cargo it could carry - drugs and dyes distilled from coal tar. These had simply disappeared from consumption in the U. S., where coal coked for the steel industry spewed its riches through the roof ports of beehive coke ovens. The same crisis held throughout the U. S. chemical economy, which produced no potash and only part of our needs of such vital elements as chlorine and nitrogen. Fortunately the U. S. lacked neither chemical brains nor resources. By the war's end, because we needed it to fight, we had an almost self-sufficient chemical industry. Today its independence of foreign sources is complete.

In 1940 U. S. industrial chemistry was supplying its heavy chemicals to other industries in tonnages far in excess of the production peak of World War I. This is an index not only of the expansion of U. S. industry but of its mastery of chemical technology. It is no longer possible to define the limits of the chemical industry. The metals industry, with its alloys, and the petroleum industry, with its synthetic fuels, have notably ceased to be mere refiners of natural materials and have become chemical creators of new materials. Wood products are being revolutionized by coal-tar resins that bind plywood into sheets stronger than steel. To textiles, chemistry has brought synthetic fibers that compete with nature's whole line of silk, cotton and wool. From four of its most inexhaustible raw materials, air, water, limestone and coal, industrial chemistry has compounded its own industry, producing in sheet and molded plastics materials that have no precedent in nature.

Already in World War II, U. S. industrial chemistry has begun to project the lines of its future progress. Its first major triumph is magnesium, heretofore an incendiary curiosity, now to become, in light, high-strength alloys, the most efficient aircraft metal. Because it must provide more powerful aviation fuels and replace lost sources of rubber, it is distilling and cracking an ever longer list of the rich hydrocarbons locked in coal and oil.

On the following color pages are shown the raw materials of industrial chemistry. Next, in color (pp. 74-75), the principles of the science of chemistry are diagramed. This is followed by demonstrations of basic industrial processes which, as any high-school student can see, are his own experiments many times magnified.

Salt
Common table salt, here pumped in a brine from a natural well into purifying tanks at the Westvaco plant, is composed of two violent, poisonous elements, chlorine and sodium. Separated from each other by electrolysis, each has its own important use. Chlorine is not only a battlefield gas; it is a powerful germicide and bleaching agent. Sodium compounds into household lye and is essential to glass, paper and textile manufacturing.

Limestone
A compound of the element calcium, limestone has long done duty in cement, mortar, plaster and quicklime. Here, in a Union Carbide furnace. limestone is roasted with coke to incandescence to produce calcium carbide. Mixed with water, calcium carbide yields the hydrocarbon acetylene gas that burns in welding torches and is an ingredient in nylon and a synthetic rubber.

Petroleum
Central object in this display is a jug of crude petroleum. With it is shown a sampling of the products which chemistry has begun to distill, crack and synthesize from its green-black and evil-smelling collection of hydrocarbon compounds. Most spectacular is the Plexiglas bomber nose housing the display, which is made from a resin compounded from the highly reactive ethylene fraction of crude. Far more important, however, are the new synthetic 80- and 100-octane motor fuels, dyed red and blue respectively. It is 100 octane fuel that gives U. S. warplanes their supreme range and altitude. The jugs of fuel stand on a yellow sheet of crude Ameripol rubber. whose crucial ingredient is the butadiene fraction. When the higher fractions and the lower waxes and oils have been distilled off, there remains solid black "petroleum coke," a cheap industrial fuel.

Posted April 14, 2022