A CARD OF THANKS

This book originated in a series of articles prepared for The Independent in 1917-18 for the purpose of interesting the general reader in the recent achievements of industrial chemistry and providing supplementary reading for students of chemistry in colleges and high schools.  I am indebted to Hamilton Holt, editor of The Independent, and to Karl V.S.  Howland, its publisher, for stimulus and opportunity to undertake the writing of these pages and for the privilege of reprinting them in this form.

In gathering the material for this volume I have received the kindly aid of so many companies and individuals that it is impossible to thank them all but I must at least mention as those to whom I am especially grateful for information, advice and criticism:  Thomas H. Norton of the Department of Commerce; Dr. Bernhard C. Hesse; H.S.  Bailey of the Department of Agriculture; Professor Julius Stieglitz of the University of Chicago; L.E.  Edgar of the Du Pont de Nemours Company; Milton Whitney of the U.S.  Bureau of Soils; Dr. H.N.  McCoy; K.F.  Kellerman of the Bureau of Plant Industry.

E.E.S.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The production of new and stronger forms of steel is one of the greatest triumphs of modern chemistry Frontispiece

Facingpage

The hand grenades contain potential chemical energy capable of causing a vast amount of destruction when released 16

Women in a munition plant engaged in the manufacture of tri-nitro-toluol 17

A chemical reaction on a large scale 32

Burning air in a Birkeland-Eyde furnace at the DuPont plant 33

A battery of Birkeland-Eyde furnaces for the fixation of nitrogen at the DuPont plant 33

Fixing nitrogen by calcium carbide 40

A barrow full of potash salts extracted from six tons of green kelp by the government chemists 41

Nature’s silent method of nitrogen fixation 41

In order to secure a new supply of potash salts the United States Government set up an experimental plant at Sutherland, California, for utilization of kelp 52

Overhead suction at the San Diego wharf pumping kelp from the barge to the digestion tanks 53

The kelp harvester gathering the seaweed from the Pacific
Ocean 53

A battery of Koppers by-product coke-ovens at the plant of the Bethlehem Steel Company, Sparrows Point, Maryland 60