Science: Chemists’ Annual

The world’s biggest scientific group is the American Chemical Society, a polyglot organization of over 36,000. Its scientific cross section embraces professors, industrial chemists, $1,200-a-year research assistants—chemists high & low. Last week, in Manhattan for their annual convention, they were dazed by an unexpected gift. It amounted to $1,000,000 a year.

Santa Claus consisted of a group of eight major oil companies,* who offered to turn over to the Society, lock, stock & barrel, the rich Universal Oil Products Corp. Universal is a research firm which holds patents on oil processes that yield an annual income of $1,000,000. Universal’s owners paid $22,000,000 for the company in 1931, have since used it to pool research and patents. Reason for giving it away (according to well-informed oil men) : the U.S. Department of Justice has been investigating Universal as a possible trust, and to avoid a protracted struggle with the Government, Universal preferred to seek sanctuary.

Petroleum and Old Men. The stunned chemists were not able to say at once what they would do with their new wealth, which would make the A.C.S. the first scientific society ever to become a large property owner. Tentatively, the group planned to continue Universal’s industrial oil research and spend its $1,000,000 income for university studies in pure science related to petroleum.

Petroleum and its wartime by-products dominated the convention talk. General Motors’ Charles F. Kettering reported that his laboratories had developed a method for commercial production of a new gasoline, triptane, potentially four times as powerful as 100-octane. Estimated cost: $.50-$1 a gallon. The Society presented its highest award, the Priestley Medal, to Harvard’s President James Bryant Conant for his work on synthetic rubber and as chairman of OSRD’s National Defense Research Committee. Bernard Baruch declared that President Conant was chiefly responsible for breaking the technological deadlock in synthetic-rubber production. Other highlights:

¶ A.C.S.’s President Thomas Midgley Jr. complained that scientific progress was suffering from “too many old men at the helm.” An inventor who made his most important discovery (tetraethyl lead in gas) at 33, Dr. Midgley, now 55, cited cases (e.g., Sir William Perkin’s invention of aniline dyes at 18) to show that invention is a young man’s game. Said he: “Every executive who has lived beyond the age of 40 is guilty, to some slight extent, of not getting out of the way of the younger man.”

¶ It will be biologically possible for our grandchildren to live in good health for 130 years, said Theodore G. Klumpp, president of Winthrop Chemical Co. The secret: new life-saving drugs. Demanding more solid spending on medical research, he declared: “We have been attacking concrete fortifications with popguns.”

¶ A postwar world in which “night time will be made safer and more colorful” by phosphorescent gadgets was pictured by R.C.A.’s Chemist H. W. Leverenz. He mentioned houses with luminescent walls, ceilings, murals, doorknobs and keyholes; articles of luminescent plastics.

¶ Du Pont announced a cheap, tough new polythene plastic which is sprayed on metal to protect it from corrosion, insulates electrical equipment even under water, can be used for shoes, upholstery, toothpaste tubes, milk cartons.

¶ Potatoes are now peeled with the help of lye. The process, using a lye solution to loosen the skins and water sprays to knock them off, has supplied the Army with great quantities of peeled potatoes and reduced the burden of K.P.

* The eight: Atlantic Refining, Gulf Oil, Phillips Petroleum, Shell Union Oil, Standard of California, Standard Oil (Indiana), Standard Oil Development, Texas Company.