Trechos de The History Of Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction (2016), de William H. Brock.
The chemists' wars
The Great War of 1914-18 was the first conflict in which European chemists were involved in both defensive and offensive research. In 1914 Germany was still the world's leader in chemical research and the supply of chemicals. Consequently, Britain had much catching up to do. The Chemical Society played its part through its library, which proved a valuable resource of information on pure and applied chemistry.
The Society (like other learned societies) found itself mired in controversy as to whether honorary German Fellows should be stripped of their membership. The Council's decision not to do so caused widespread criticism and controversy in the press; in 1916 the Council capitulated and the names of Baeyer, Fischer, Nernst, and Ostwald (to name the most distinguished German chemists) were removed. It was not until 1929 that four of the surviving names were re-elected, and that new Germans and Austrian chemists were admitted. Strangely, there seems to have been no reciprocal action by the German Chemical Society. Despite the government's action in making qualified scientists reserved occupations in 1915 (following the tragic death of the chemist Henry Moseley that year), some eighty-three British chemists lost their lives on the battlefields of Europe.
The war that erupted in 1914 is popularly known as "the chemists' war" because of the use of poisonous gas warfare. In fact, less than 1 per cent of war casualties were directly attributable to the use of chemical warfare, and the phrase was first used in 1917 to describe the way chemistry had been marshalled to place Great Britain on a war footing. By analogy the 1939-45 war has been called "the physicists' war" because of the effort that was placed upon making an atomic bomb. In fact, chemists were closely involved in the separation of uranium isotopes and in the manufacture of heavy water. And without their skills there would have been no bomb.
In both world wars the chemical industry was dominated by the drive to improve and raise production levels of conventional high explosives and metal production for cannon. [...] [The petroleum soap (napalm)] devised by the Harvard chemist Louis Fieser (1899-1977) [...] became a symbol of the evils of warfare and was responsible for a chemophobic swing against chemistry that has had a lasting effect on popular culture.
All 20th-century wars were chemists' wars, because the blockading of shipping and the cutting of land supply routes forced both the Allies and the Central powers to find new ways of preparing materials that were in short supply or in inventing substitute materials. The best-known example is the scaling up of the Haber process for fixing nitrogen that could be used both to prepare nitric acid for use in explosive weapons and for the production of fertilizers to aid food production. Its application to explosives was directly caused by the Royal Navy's blockade of German shipping carrying Chilean nitre that had hitherto been the source of both fertilizer and explosives.
Although Germany was able to scale up the Haber process in time, British chemists had been left in ignorance and instead industrialized an older German process for "fixing" nitrogen by making calcium cyanamide by passing nitrogen over calcium carbide. Ammonia was then generated from the cyanamide by exposing it to steam. Ammonia was also extracted from urban gas plants. In both Germany and Britain ammonia was then converted to nitric acid by a method that Wilhelm Ostwald had patented in 1902, whereby ammonia was oxidized in the presence of a platinum catalyst. Platinum was far too expensive to use in this process, and during the 1914-18 war German chemists found a cheaper catalyst of iron and bismuth oxides, thus enabling Germany to continue the war after 1916.
On the ammunition front, chemists had to scale up production of various aromatic organic compounds for the manufacture of TNT, amatol, and lyddite for high-explosive shells as well as smokeless cordite as a propellant. In every case chemists were met with bottlenecks as one problem produced another. For example, cordite was made by nitrating cellulose to make guncotton. This was then mixed with nitroglycerine and petroleum jelly. But to make the cordite suitably potable the nitroglycerine jelly had to be dissolved in acetone before it could be extruded into a tubular form.
However, acetone, normally prepared by the distillation of wood, was in short supply. The problem of acetone production was solved by a chemist at the University of Manchester, Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952). He developed an acetone fermentation process based upon brewery methods. Subsequently, a grateful British government signed the Balfour Agreement which gave Zionists like Weizmann a homeland in Palestine. Weizmann was one of the few chemists to have become president of a nation.
German chemists faced similar problems, as blockades that restricted cotton supplies meant that guncotton had to be prepared by an alternative method using rags and wood pulp, and glycerine prepared from sugar fermentation. Max Delbrück (1850-1919), a German brewery chemist, devised fermentation processes whereby yeast could be used to produce animal feed. These were early signs of the application of chemistry to the biotechnology that gained industrial significance after the 1960s.
Chemists also contributed to the improvement of glass manufacture, because high-quality optical glass was needed for surveying instruments in warfare; dyestuffs were another area where Britain, which had lost out to Germany (and to France to a lesser extent) at the end of the 19th century, was forced to make its own dye materials. Similar shortages of raw materials were experienced in Germany and Turkey; without direct access to Far Eastern natural rubber, German chemists explored synthetic alternatives which gave their chemists a strong start in the new area of polymer research, which not only produced many new synthetic fabrics, but also proved of long-term value in gaining an understanding of biological chemical systems.
The momentum of war-driven chemical research did not cease in 1918, nor did it in 1945. All these examples, including the use of chemical warfare, were expressions of what John Agar has termed "organized science and managed innovation". It is doubly ironic that the German research on chemical warfare agents was promoted in peacetime in the production of insecticides; one of these, devised by Haber and named Zyklon B, was to be used to gas Jews in concentration camps during the 1940s.
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[...] women were drafted into the chemical industry to perform heavy manual work in the manufacture of explosives. In the aftermath of war, the huge chemical industries built up by America, Germany, and Britain were not decommissioned and dismantled. Instead they were merged to form large and powerful companies. In Germany in 1925, BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and other companies formed IG Farben with 100,000 male and female employees; in America Du Pont expanded into new areas of manufacture; while in Britain, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) was formed in 1926 from the merger of most of the surviving alkali and dyestuffs manufacturing companies.
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On the negative side, the chemists' wars of the 20th century had already coloured public perception of chemistry as a destructive science; this perception of chemistry's ambivalence was further exacerbated by a more general chemophobia produced by revelations of the pollution trails left by heavy industry, the widespread use of pesticides in agriculture and veterinary medicine, and the devastating explosion of a chemical plant in Bhopal in 1984.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/1DAfiaf2zO3AkCj-9zZCj_F2W5hn8aIMa (PBS Doc)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fexHPCQCY4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QxtB6s-4oM
http://www.amazon.com/Gas-Quick-Boys-Chemistry-Changed-ebook/dp/B009CGZLUM
The chemists' warsThe Great War of 1914-18 was the first conflict in which European chemists were involved in both defensive and offensive research. In 1914 Germany was still the world's leader in chemical research and the supply of chemicals. Consequently, Britain had much catching up to do. The Chemical Society played its part through its library, which proved a valuable resource of information on pure and applied chemistry.
The Society (like other learned societies) found itself mired in controversy as to whether honorary German Fellows should be stripped of their membership. The Council's decision not to do so caused widespread criticism and controversy in the press; in 1916 the Council capitulated and the names of Baeyer, Fischer, Nernst, and Ostwald (to name the most distinguished German chemists) were removed. It was not until 1929 that four of the surviving names were re-elected, and that new Germans and Austrian chemists were admitted. Strangely, there seems to have been no reciprocal action by the German Chemical Society. Despite the government's action in making qualified scientists reserved occupations in 1915 (following the tragic death of the chemist Henry Moseley that year), some eighty-three British chemists lost their lives on the battlefields of Europe.
The war that erupted in 1914 is popularly known as "the chemists' war" because of the use of poisonous gas warfare. In fact, less than 1 per cent of war casualties were directly attributable to the use of chemical warfare, and the phrase was first used in 1917 to describe the way chemistry had been marshalled to place Great Britain on a war footing. By analogy the 1939-45 war has been called "the physicists' war" because of the effort that was placed upon making an atomic bomb. In fact, chemists were closely involved in the separation of uranium isotopes and in the manufacture of heavy water. And without their skills there would have been no bomb.
In both world wars the chemical industry was dominated by the drive to improve and raise production levels of conventional high explosives and metal production for cannon. [...] [The petroleum soap (napalm)] devised by the Harvard chemist Louis Fieser (1899-1977) [...] became a symbol of the evils of warfare and was responsible for a chemophobic swing against chemistry that has had a lasting effect on popular culture.
All 20th-century wars were chemists' wars, because the blockading of shipping and the cutting of land supply routes forced both the Allies and the Central powers to find new ways of preparing materials that were in short supply or in inventing substitute materials. The best-known example is the scaling up of the Haber process for fixing nitrogen that could be used both to prepare nitric acid for use in explosive weapons and for the production of fertilizers to aid food production. Its application to explosives was directly caused by the Royal Navy's blockade of German shipping carrying Chilean nitre that had hitherto been the source of both fertilizer and explosives.
Although Germany was able to scale up the Haber process in time, British chemists had been left in ignorance and instead industrialized an older German process for "fixing" nitrogen by making calcium cyanamide by passing nitrogen over calcium carbide. Ammonia was then generated from the cyanamide by exposing it to steam. Ammonia was also extracted from urban gas plants. In both Germany and Britain ammonia was then converted to nitric acid by a method that Wilhelm Ostwald had patented in 1902, whereby ammonia was oxidized in the presence of a platinum catalyst. Platinum was far too expensive to use in this process, and during the 1914-18 war German chemists found a cheaper catalyst of iron and bismuth oxides, thus enabling Germany to continue the war after 1916.
On the ammunition front, chemists had to scale up production of various aromatic organic compounds for the manufacture of TNT, amatol, and lyddite for high-explosive shells as well as smokeless cordite as a propellant. In every case chemists were met with bottlenecks as one problem produced another. For example, cordite was made by nitrating cellulose to make guncotton. This was then mixed with nitroglycerine and petroleum jelly. But to make the cordite suitably potable the nitroglycerine jelly had to be dissolved in acetone before it could be extruded into a tubular form.
However, acetone, normally prepared by the distillation of wood, was in short supply. The problem of acetone production was solved by a chemist at the University of Manchester, Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952). He developed an acetone fermentation process based upon brewery methods. Subsequently, a grateful British government signed the Balfour Agreement which gave Zionists like Weizmann a homeland in Palestine. Weizmann was one of the few chemists to have become president of a nation.
German chemists faced similar problems, as blockades that restricted cotton supplies meant that guncotton had to be prepared by an alternative method using rags and wood pulp, and glycerine prepared from sugar fermentation. Max Delbrück (1850-1919), a German brewery chemist, devised fermentation processes whereby yeast could be used to produce animal feed. These were early signs of the application of chemistry to the biotechnology that gained industrial significance after the 1960s.
Chemists also contributed to the improvement of glass manufacture, because high-quality optical glass was needed for surveying instruments in warfare; dyestuffs were another area where Britain, which had lost out to Germany (and to France to a lesser extent) at the end of the 19th century, was forced to make its own dye materials. Similar shortages of raw materials were experienced in Germany and Turkey; without direct access to Far Eastern natural rubber, German chemists explored synthetic alternatives which gave their chemists a strong start in the new area of polymer research, which not only produced many new synthetic fabrics, but also proved of long-term value in gaining an understanding of biological chemical systems.
The momentum of war-driven chemical research did not cease in 1918, nor did it in 1945. All these examples, including the use of chemical warfare, were expressions of what John Agar has termed "organized science and managed innovation". It is doubly ironic that the German research on chemical warfare agents was promoted in peacetime in the production of insecticides; one of these, devised by Haber and named Zyklon B, was to be used to gas Jews in concentration camps during the 1940s.
- - -
[...] women were drafted into the chemical industry to perform heavy manual work in the manufacture of explosives. In the aftermath of war, the huge chemical industries built up by America, Germany, and Britain were not decommissioned and dismantled. Instead they were merged to form large and powerful companies. In Germany in 1925, BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and other companies formed IG Farben with 100,000 male and female employees; in America Du Pont expanded into new areas of manufacture; while in Britain, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) was formed in 1926 from the merger of most of the surviving alkali and dyestuffs manufacturing companies.
- - -
On the negative side, the chemists' wars of the 20th century had already coloured public perception of chemistry as a destructive science; this perception of chemistry's ambivalence was further exacerbated by a more general chemophobia produced by revelations of the pollution trails left by heavy industry, the widespread use of pesticides in agriculture and veterinary medicine, and the devastating explosion of a chemical plant in Bhopal in 1984.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/1DAfiaf2zO3AkCj-9zZCj_F2W5hn8aIMa (PBS Doc)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fexHPCQCY4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QxtB6s-4oM
http://www.amazon.com/Gas-Quick-Boys-Chemistry-Changed-ebook/dp/B009CGZLUM
