Science: Chemists at Work

Chemistry will win the war and sweeten the peace. Such is the categorical opinion of a man exceptionally well-informed about chemists. In a new book (The Chemical Front—Knopf, $3), Williams Haynes, ex-publisher of Chemical Industries and ex-editor of the Chemical Who’s Who, this week told about some of the prodigious recent achievements of U.S. chemists. Many of them, in oil, rubber, drugs, are already familiar. But Haynes had some little-known facts to report:

> The light metal magnesium, virtually ignored in the U.S. before the war, is revolutionizing U.S. metallurgy. Thanks to chemists, it is now being produced cheaply and plentifully, playing a big role in the war (e.g., in a four-motored bomber it saves enough in engine weight alone, as compared with aluminum, to increase the bombload-by 360 lb.). Among its many postwar possibilities, Haynes sees a magnesium grand piano that one husky man can lift by himself.

> A new, concentrated, albumin blood plasma has been developed. It can be injected with a hypodermic; four ounces is equivalent to two pints of the old plasma.

> New incendiary bombs are appearing in great and deadly variety. The Russians are said to be using a rocket-propelled phosphorus bomb that explodes over troop concentrations, causing extremely painful burns to soldiers and dislodging them from foxholes, trenches, barricades.

> Smoke also is becoming a potent weapon. It is now extensively used as camouflage, sometimes in color, particularly to protect airfields and cities from bombers. Chemists are also experimenting with special types of smoke as a disrupter of tanks and vehicles—by gumming up their machinery.

>Amazing is the chemists’ progress against bugs. Every soldier now carries a tin of powder (pyrethrum plus a synthetic insecticide called IN-930) with which he can deflea himself in a jiffy, a tiny vial of fumigator (methyl bromide) with which he can quickly delouse his clothes in a sealed paper bag.

Another new insecticide, phenothiazine, has been found extraordinarily effective against tent caterpillars, cattle ticks, Mexican bean beetles, corn borers, many another pest.

Chemists have even found a potent new defense against the Japanese beetle. This is a helpful chemical called tetramethyl-thiuram disulphide, which, dusted on a favorite beetle plant or on the beetle itself, permanently kills the beetle’s appetite, even for undusted plants. The investigators do not yet know the reason why, but they have noticed that the chemical partly paralyzes a beetle’s forelegs and mouth.