Substitutes

APROPOS of the artificial flowers which grace the window boxes of the Chemists’ Club — a symbolism worthy of Swift — we were discussing substitutes.

Said the gloomy chemist: ‘Have you observed at all critically another row of blooming artificials — our “women who work,” bound, via subway, for shop and office?

‘Every mother’s daughter of them,’ he continued, ‘wears on her head a Fourteenth Street imitation of a Fifth Avenue imitation of a Paris hat, and on her feet pumps that imitate snake or lizard skin. The styles each affects are copies of expensive models designed for fine ladies in limousines, and as appropriate for her day’s work as overalls on the golf course. Her furs are cat, rat, and rabbit dyed and manipulated to masquerade as seal, fox, or beaver. Her silks are rayon; her linen, cotton; her wool is chiefly shoddy — all of them improperly used to simulate the more expensive materials. Every single girl wears a neckband of synthetic pearls, a brass-plated slave bracelet, an imitation platinum wrist watch. Each has an imitation complexion and imitation curly hair. Each is reading an imitation newspaper with an imitation brain. And I submit to you, the whole outfit — clothes, jewelry, and girl — is worth, biologically and economically speaking, just $39.98.’

‘Your own borrowed plumes,’ protested the cheerful chemist, ‘are worth even less. You deck out a sound scientific training and hard-won industrial experience with a lot of ragtags from Aldous Huxley, Mencken, and Havelock Ellis and parade about as one of our young intellectuals, which is quite as ridiculous as, and much more pernicious than, a shopgirl’s masquerade as a débutante. Imitation ideas are a more serious matter than five-and-tencent-store jewelry.

‘What difference can it make if these misguided girls so flagrantly display their poor taste? Their very excesses will but speed the counter-revolution of modesty and simplicity. Even their bad judgment in buying tinsel and tawdry at least puts money into circulation. Uneconomic, doubtless; but their foolish demands have built up vast industries which are the most direct and profitable stimulators of chemistry. Where would our rayon manufacturers be without their “undies” and stockings? Think of the tons of celluloid they consume as tortoise shell, lapis, ivory, coral, turquoise, amber, and what not. Coal-tar chemistry contains nothing prettier than the synthesis of aromatics to supply the market they create for cheap perfumery. Use your own brains, instead of peddling secondhand ideas; and you would be singing the praises of the flapper as the patroness of modern chemical industrialism.’

I

Some irrepressible statistician has calculated that each of us consumes seven times as much of the world’s raw materials as did the Englishman of Queen Elizabeth’s time. Anyone may question such figures, but nobody can prove them false — which is, I take it, the cardinal virtue of statistics. They are, however, quite correct in that they represent vividly the tremendous lift in the scale of our daily living.

According to all reports the subjects of good Queen Bess were plucky trenchermen who doubtless ‘polished off’ as many foot pounds of foodstuff energy as the best of us in these concentrated and dyspeptic days; but their beef and mutton, beans and turnips, were homegrown, and even that curious and adventurous sponsor of tobacco and potatoes, Sir Walter himself, might not have grapefruit for breakfast. In annihilating time and space, by replacing the stagecoach and sailing vessel, we have increased almost pro rata our drafts upon the world’s raw materials. There is an obvious, basic economic difference between power generated by the wind, which is free, or from horse fodder, which can be grown in a twelvemonth, and that generated from coal or petroleum, the supplies of which are fixed and irreplaceable. By bringing bananas from Central America and pineapples from Hawaii — to say nothing of strawberries in January and fresh peas the year round — we have o’erleaped, in an economic sense, the very rigid physical limits to that quantity of food one person may eat in three hundred and sixty-five days.

No such limit restricts other human wants. For all his gaudy doublets and elaborate ruffs, Sir Philip Sidney actually owned fewer clothes than a successful merchant of Atlanta or Des Moines. An installment bungalow in a suburban development contains more plumbing than did the palace at Greenwich where the royal daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn was born. There are greater tonnage and length, and vastly more elaborate equipment, in a score of pleasure yachts that cruise Long Island Sound than in the flagship of Sir Francis Drake, destroyer of the great Armada and Admiral of the Indies. All those worthy booksellers, printers of the first editions of Shakespeare, Spenser, Bacon, and of their brilliant, prolific contemporaries who made the golden Elizabethan Age of English literature, consumed less paper in a year than a week’s issues of any one of fourscore of our larger newspapers. The paper in one Sunday’s edition of the Chicago Tribune strips bare twenty acres of virgin spruce forest — a horrid thought that we cannot quite banish by boasting cheerfully that, for all their achievements in literature, architecture, and exploration, the Elizabethans had nothing to place in comparison with our 21,264,752 motor cars, our 74,131,085 miles of telephone and telegraph wires, our 755,418 miles of railway lines. It is to the point to add that they had no corresponding stupendous consumption of metals, rubber, fabrics, coal, gasoline, and lubricants.

From such figures a thoughtful man with a tincture of pessimism can calculate himself into a panic over the fate of the human race. Malthus did so a century and a half ago. Already our world population of close to two billions approaches the mark he set for poverty and starvation, deterioration and death. Nevertheless, we are better fed, better housed, better clothed, than Malthus’s own contemporaries, and we enjoy hundreds of conveniences and luxuries of which even his brilliant mind had not dreamed.

In the United States our per capita wealth has mounted ($624 in 1870 to $2919 in 1922) so that, had we been content to jog along behind grandfather’s old gray mare instead of rushing ahead in next year’s model of a motor car we shall pay for the year following, we should have never heard even of ‘the high cost of living.’ If we were but a bit more contented, we might to-day create an Elysium in which four hours a day of honest toil would provide a comfortable competency for all. The socialist jingo has a good deal of justification for pointing out that

But we are never satisfied. How quickly we come to consider as mere comfortable decencies the rare luxuries of yesterday! Our children will demand them as necessities; and, once they fall into that rapidly expanding class, invention has always produced them in abundant stocks.

It is upon these premises that our scientists, the most tolerant and optimistic thinkers among us, can quote these identical statistics in praise of this greedy, selfish materialism of ours. They ignore Malthus and they despise Marx. Their argument runs: If necessity is the mother of invention, ambition is its father; and with such fecund parents mankind will never lack an army of willing servants to provide all material wants. At some distant day it may even come to pass that, having satiated our material desires, we shall come to demand mental, even spiritual, satisfactions.

II

In the meantime we are passing, almost imperceptibly but swiftly, from the age of power to that of chemicals. Since the Industrial Revolution, a century and a half ago, the application of power to those complicated tools we call machines has been the dominant, the universal characteristic of the economic era. Power turned handicraft into ‘ factoricraft ’ and drove division of labor into specialization. Power gave us trains and automobiles for stagecoaches; telephones and telegraphs for the post chaise and the pony express; the linotype for the printer’s apprentice; the incandescent bulb for the tallow wick. Mass production, corporations, trade-unions, cities, all result from the use of power. Our laws, finances, the entire social structure, were changed by the Industrial Revolution, and now, before we have been able to perfect the radical readjustments it forced upon us, we stand face to face with a Chemical Revolution.

Throughout all the long centuries that man was inventing new tools and slowly improving them, he was blindly discovering curious ways of making chemicals work for him. Ages ago some cave-man genius discovered, quite by chance, that the greasy hide of a sabretoothed tiger could be more quickly and easily cleaned by rubbing it in wood ashes. By some lucky accident another found that soaking it with the bark or leaves of certain trees made the leather more durable and more water-resistant. Neither knew they were using alkalies and tannic acid. The Abnaki Indians of the New England coast made offering to the gods of bountiful harvest by planting in every corn hill a dried fish. They were actually using a highly concentrated nitrogenous fertilizer. Today, in modern tanneries, the green hides are degreased and dehaired, cured, tanned, softened, and dyed by sloshing them about in great vats filled with different chemicals, accomplishing, in as many hours, work that cost the primitive tanner so many long days of hard physical labor. Our nitrogen we extract from the air, a cheaper, more convenient, and much more efficient fertilizer. Thus in two ways do we increase our food supply: by growing larger corn crops and by saving the codfish for Sunday morning breakfast.

A hundred and fifty years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, chemicals, as such, were but little used by man. Acetic acid in the form of vinegar was the most abundant, cheapest acid, and a very weak and unsatisfactory acidulating tool it was. The common alkalies were saltpetre, dug from caves; potash, which was then literally pot ashes; and alum, made by a simple chemical process brought from Arabia during the thirteenth century and long a monopoly of the Popes. Abroad the trade name of ‘Roman alum’ still clings to this chemical, as ‘brimstone’ recalls the days when sulphur was stone that burned.

Nor was there, before the mass production of power-driven factories, any great demand for chemicals in industry. Natural dyewoods, natural tanstuffs, mineral pigments, natural acids and alkalies, were sufficient for the limited output of handicraft. When flax was spun and woven by hand in a thousand cottages, it was all very well to bleach the linen by spreading it in the sunlight on the grass. When a week’s output of a mill with power looms exceeded the year’s work of a hundred hand-weavers, the bleachers were put to it to find space for bleach fields. In 1788 the use of chlorine was introduced by the French chemist Berthollet, and it has been estimated that to-day in England alone, during every twenty-four hours, sufficient cloth is bleached to cover all the open fields of Great Britain. The bleaching problem was solved by the use of a chemical which does its work effectively whether the sun shines or the clouds lower, in summer or winter; and it does this work better, producing whiter goods at a saving of something like sixty hours of bleaching time.

In this way chemicals have been called upon to solve hundreds of similar problems arising out of industrial development. It was perhaps not entirely a happy coincidence that the science of chemistry was born at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Chemists had just learned to tear apart the simpler chemicals, to study their composition, to isolate the elements; and in time they learned to build up new and complex chemical compounds. To the saving of human labor, as in modern tanning; to the saving of foodstuffs, as in the fertilizer industry; to the saving of time, as in the bleaching process, chemists now add the saving of raw materials through their creative work in making chemical substitutes.

III

‘ Substitute ’ — especially ‘ chemical substitute ’ — has some nasty connotations. Yet no such stigma attaches itself to glass, although glass is a chemical product (sand, limestone, and soda ash fused together) which long ago replaced natural products — so long ago, in fact, that we do not know who discovered it, though we are certain it was manufactured in Egypt before 1500 B.C. We have forgotten that the tumbler we drink from substituted for the brass bowl of the East and the horn flagon of the North. Even our windowpanes are a quite recent chemical substitute for a piece of thin-scraped parchment. Ordinarily we think of glass as neither a chemical nor a substitute. Nevertheless it is both, and it possesses those characteristics which in the future will make synthetic products invaluable to mankind.

In the first place, a chemical substitute replaces natural products, freeing them for other uses. When indigo was first made from coal tar, its introduction ruined many a prosperous indigo plantation in India. To-day those acres, once devoted to growing the dye plant, are sown to rice and millet. Every head of cattle in the United States would be slaughtered for its hide to supply the automobile industry’s demand for seat upholstery and tops if it were not for artificial leather. In such an event sirloin steak might be selling at two cents a pound, as a by-product of our tanneries; but on the other hand a pair of shoes might be costing a hundred dollars. This is fanciful economics; but it is a plain fact that artificial leather is a more suitable and lasting material for automobile use than the natural product .

In the second place, glass and the other chemical substitutes are manufactured from abundant, available raw materials, and accordingly can be produced cheaply in unlimited quantities. Varnish is a natural gum (several varieties come from Australia, India, China, and Africa) dissolved in boiled linseed oil and turpentine, both natural products. Lacquer is cellulose, the fibrous material of any plant, treated chemically and dissolved in chemicals. For twenty-five years the supply of varnish gums has been dwindling and the price advancing, while the greater the output of cellulose lacquers, the lower the price will drop.

Within a century the world’s population will double. Who dares prophesy what further drafts we shall be making upon the earth’s limited stock of raw materials a hundred years hence, or how high the standards of living in China, or India, or Russia will have been raised? Plainly, we can ill afford to ignore chemical substitutes. Already we regard them in quite a different spirit from the open suspicion with which our grandfathers first greeted celluloid, vegetable lard, and aniline dyes. Our own grandchildren will doubtless accept rayon and lacquers, as we do glass and paper, without conscious appreciation that they are chemical products.

Even these very new chemical goods, so long as they do not masquerade as something richer or rarer than themselves, and make no attempt to trick our palates or our pocketbooks, are given at least a fair test. They cannot compete with luxuries, since their very economic purpose is to become cheap and plentiful; and glass mounted as a diamond, or paper in the sole of a shoe, deserves contemptuous exposure. For there is a misuse of chemical substitutes just as there has been sophistication of natural materials. But, properly used to save human effort, to save time, and especially to conserve our dwindling stocks of natural goods, these chemical products are, and increasingly will be, one of the best material blessings of our chemical age in industry.