Science: Recipe for Fuel

To the American Chemical Society convened in Detroit last week, Professor Ernst Berl of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute for Technology made an astonishing announcement. He said he had made, experimentally but successfully, oil, coal, coke and asphalt from grass, leaves, seaweed, sawdust, scrap lumber, corn, cornstalks, cotton.

The earth’s supplies of coal and oil were laid in, once for all, during the Carboniferous Age, 200 to 300 million years ago. Using them is like spending capital. But using coal and oil made from plants would be like spending income, since plants grow prodigally and all the time.

One difference between wood and oil is that wood is mostly carbohydrates (com posed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen) whereas oil is mostly hydrocarbons (composed of carbon and hydrogen only). Chemically these two great classes of compounds behave very differently. But economically the really important difference between wood and oil is that wood-burning locomotives are obsolete, whereas oil-burning Diesel trains are the height of modernity.

Apparently, converting the carbohydrate vegetable matter into hydrocarbons is the most ticklish part of Dr. Berl’s process, and he did not talk about it too freely. He heats the carbohydrate under pressure with limestone and “similar substances.” Probably one or more catalysts (chemical activators) are involved. The time required is only one hour—considerably less than the millions of years that nature needed. The New York Herald Tribune gulped with excitement: “What the Wrights did to distance, he [Professor Berl] has done to geologic time. One’s imagination gags at the possibilities.”

Dr. Berl did not say how much or what fuel would be needed to run his fuel factory (if coal or oil were used, the amount consumed would certainly have to be less than the amount manufactured). He did say that, with natural coal and oil still plentiful and prices low, the cost would be too high to undertake commercially now. But he believes the chemist’s job is to be ready for future shortages.

Other highlights of the A.C.S. meeting:

Antiseptic Paint. After thousands of experiments, Dr. Foster Dee Snell, prolific Brooklyn industrial chemist, and Co-Worker Dr. Samuel Sidney Epstein announced production of a successful antiseptic paint—for children’s rooms, breweries and bakeries, hospitals, food factories. They mix their paint with chlorine and iodine. After nine weeks on the wall it still kills typhoid and some other germs in the air, retains some antiseptic strength for six years. It is not so effective as sterilizing indoor air by ultraviolet radiation, but it is cheaper.

Sunshine & Dew. Automobile makers and owners used to think that the worst enemy of a new car’s gleaming coat of lacquer was sunshine. Chemist Ralph J. Wirshing of General Motors investigated this notion, found it false. Experiments in Florida showed that a car’s paint job suffered most from midnight to noon, least from noon to midnight. Wirshing suspected that dew was the enemy, confirmed this by experiments with artificial dew produced in a “dew box.” For some unknown reason rain is much less harmful than dew. Moral: keep cars sheltered at night, even in summer.

Biotin. For the past decade biochemists in the U. S. and Europe have extracted from yeast powerful, vitaminlike substances, one of which seemed to be a member of the Vitamin B family. Others were called biotin, Vitamin H, Coenzyme R. Two months ago scientists at Cornell and Western Reserve announced that all these substances were one & the same. Biotin seemed to be the most favored name.

J. 0. Lampen and associates of the University of Wisconsin said last week that in minute traces, biotin seems to occur almost everywhere in animal and vegetable tissue. Without it, yeast cells and nitrogen-fixing bacteria cannot live. In animals it seems to be necessary for normal enzyme function and skin and hair health. One gram of biotin dissolved in 25,000,000 gallons of water is enough to keep yeast cells alive. The biochemists conceded last week that biotin is the most powerful physiological substance known.