History of Synthetic Rubber

Synthetic rubber undoubtedly represents the earliest development of the synthesis of macromolecules. It dates back to the historic discovery by Greville Williams in 1860 that isoprene is the “mother substance” of natural rubber. Attempts to convert isoprene, and later other 1,3-dienes, to a synthetic rubber began shortly thereafter, although the first commercial production of such a material did not take place until a half century later. The period between World War I and II witnessed the first development of a true synthetic substitute for natural rubber, i.e., sodium-polymerized butadiene, which was produced in Germany as Buna rubber and in the USSR as SK rubber. However, during the 1930s, Germany developed the emulsion copolymerization of butadiene-styrene (Buna S), whereas sodium polybutadiene continued as the principal general purpose synthetic rubber in the Soviet Union. The United States which, up till then, had only developed special-purpose synthetic rubbers like neoprene, entered the synthetic rubber age during the emergency of World War II when natural rubber supplies were cut off, and developed a giant industry based on Buna S technology virtually overnight.

Among the synthetic polymers in use today, synthetic rubber is unique in that it was developed not as an interesting new material but to fill a dire need of the modern world. As a matter of fact, here in the United States, it arose solely out of the emergency of World War II.

The reason for this unique position of synthetic rubber is, of course, the unique property of rubber, the only substance which exhibits long-range elasticity, and which therefore fills a special need in modern technology. Natural rubber was discovered in the New World as early as Columbus's voyages, but its use in technology did not really take place until after the Industrial Revolution, i.e., with the start of the 19th century. However, it was not until the latter part of the last century that the first attempts were made to synthesize rubber from simple chemical compounds.     

World War I, international participation and reorganisation of the Japanese chemical community

What kind of "war" did Japanese chemists fight during World War I, and what impact did their experiences have on Japanese chemistry in its aftermath? By focusing on the role of Jōji Sakurai (1858-1939), this paper attempts to answer these questions by looking at the drastic changes in the international relationships of the Japanese chemical community caused by the war. It examines how the Japanese National Research Council was established in 1920 as part of the International Research Council, a product of the reconfiguration of international scientific powers triggered by World War I. This paper argues that Sakurai advocated the establishment of the National Research Council after the American model of wartime mobilisation of science, coordinated fractured Japanese chemical communities for international functions, and facilitated Japan's participation and increased influence in international scientific associations such as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, established in 1919.     

Quality information from the grapevine

A letter by Lucien Herr, a highly regarded leading French intellectual at the time of World War I, provides capsule portraits of chemists such as Gabriel Bertrand, Paul Lebeau, Charles Moureu, and Georges Urbain. It makes us better aware of who they were and of how their contemporaries saw their work, which had much to do with their personalities, whether congenial or abrasive. This article is concerned with the kind of information carried by the so-called grapevine. It can be invaluable to the historian, for the light it sheds on the character of a scientist. The document drawn upon, from World War I (1915), depicts graphically the personalities of some of the French chemists engaged in the rush to design and produce chemical weapons. It is a frank and even brutal appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses. This is the kind of evaluation that scientists routinely engage in, but devoid of the hyperbole, pro or con, which usually flavours it.     

Private initiatives, public support, and war practices: development of fertilisers in Russia

The scarcity of experiments with fertilisers, the poor domestic industry, and high prices for imported products made Russia lag far behind the leading agrarian countries in the research and use of fertilisers. The first experiments on fertilisers were connected mostly with the private estates of Russian nobility. Things began to change slowly by the turn of the twentieth century, when the Ministry of Agriculture launched a policy of agricultural science promotion, including the development of agricultural chemistry. It was the outbreak of World War I that created a powerful stimulus for fertiliser research in Russia. A specific Russian "symbiosis" emerged between military industry and agricultural chemistry. The numerous factories of explosives set up ad hoc produced vast amounts of waste products; modified, they could serve as fertilisers. In 1915, the Public Committee for Support of Fertilisers was organised. Eventually, this committee gave birth to the Institute of Fertilisers, the first institute founded by the Bolshevik government. Thus, the project of "chemicalisation of agriculture," usually described as a revolutionary endeavour, was firmly rooted in World War I.     

Hermann Staudinger und der Kunstpfeffer. Ersatzgewürze

During the First and Second World Wars, Germany could no longer import colonial goods, such as coffee, pepper and other tropical spices. Although these commodities were not essential for the daily caloric requirement of the German people, their absence was felt considerably. Chemists began to search for a lot of appropriate substitutes, which in the end meant an enormous impact on the industry of artificial flavours. When pepper, the most important hot tasting condiment, became rare, Hermann Staudinger, the later Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, and Paul Immerwahr were anxious to find a process that would allow the large‐scale production of a synthetic pepper‐substitute by a method easier and cheaper than the one based on synthetic piperine. Staudinger's pepper‐substitute was produced by the Chemische Fabrik Dr. Höhn & Co. in Neuss on the Rhine during the First World War and by the Hoechst plant of I.G. Farben and C.F. Boehringer Mannheim during the Second World War.     

Quality Information from the Grapevine

Abstract

A letter by Lucien Herr, a highly regarded leading French intellectual at the time of World War I, provides capsule portraits of chemists such as Gabriel Bertrand, Paul Lebeau, Charles Moureu, and Georges Urbain. It makes us better aware of who they were and of how their contemporaries saw their work, which had much to do with their personalities, whether congenial or abrasive. This article is concerned with the kind of information carried by the so-called grapevine. It can be invaluable to the historian, for the light it sheds on the character of a scientist. The document drawn upon, from World War I (1915), depicts graphically the personalities of some of the French chemists engaged in the rush to design and produce chemical weapons. It is a frank and even brutal appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses. This is the kind of evaluation that scientists routinely engage in, but devoid of the hyperbole, pro or con, which usually flavours it.     

Malaria chemotherapy and the "kaleidoscopic" organisation of biomedical research during world war II

The paper describes the organisational and scientific evolution of the US antimalarial program during World War II. This program screened some 14,000 compounds for antimalarial activity, selected atabrine as the drug of choice in 1943, and later identified chloroquine as a superior compound. It became, arguably, the largest biomedical research effort of the first half of the twentieth century, involving chemical and pharmaceutical companies, diverse university researchers, and non-profit and government laboratories. Beyond scientific research, the innovations of the wartime antimalarial program were chiefly in three areas, communication, scale and administration. The program drew on resources - intellectual, material and organisational - created in Germany by researchers at Bayer, and in the US by the Rockefeller Foundation and Institutes. The paper examines the antimalarial program as one of the formative models for later programs such as the National Institutes of Health. This account supports the claim that wartime work was essential to the development of NIH, if only because the confused and faltering structures of the early war years, 1939-1943, do not suggest that all the organisational infrastructure for large scale, multi-centre co-operative research was in place prior to World War II.     

Chemische Kampfstoffe: Ein Überblick

For a long time people used chemicals to weaken or incapacitate their opponents. In World War I a sad peak was reached with the massive use of poisonous gas. Iraq's success using chemical weapons against Iran stimulated some emerging countries to acquire chemical weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The intelligence community estimates their number of up to 30 countries. In 1997 an international law came into force to stop further proliferation and guarantee destruction of chemical weapons till 2007. So far already 147 countries ratified this treaty — but not countries like Iraq, Syria and North Korea. Even for an individual with sufficient criminal energy it is possible to spread terror with chemical weapons. So, control is mandatory, panic certainly not.     

Anecdotal History of Styrene and Polystyrene

A formal history of styrene and polystyrene from 1839 through 1952 appears in the Styrene monograph edited by Boundy and writer but now out of print. Updating of the story by several teams of Dow writers appeared in the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of Polymer Science and Technology, and the SPE Award address of Amos. We propose a more personalized history written from the perspective of one whose 40-year professional career was involved in scientific and technological aspects of the subject. We view this history as a complex interplay of science, technology, industrial activity, management decisions, legal and patent activities, people, and the vagaries of World War II. Germany had an early industrial lead prior to 1941 with a monomer process and mass polymerization techniques. Original work on styrene-butadiene elastomers was another first. Germany also had a scientific lead as academic scientists such as Staudinger, Kern, Schulz, Jenckel, and Ueberreiter became involved in the chemistry and physics of styrene and polystyrene (PS). Mark was first in industry and then in the university. Several United States companies were active with styrene and PS, also prior to 1941. Involvement of the United States in World War II lead to a government decision to produce SBR. This catapulted styrene into a major synthetic chemical. The lead passed from Germany to the United States, especially with the large excess capacity for monomer after 1945. Management decisions encouraged diverse large-scale polymer uses for styrene, aided by the low price for the monomer. Through a bizarre series of events (war, people, and legal action), proprietary industrial knowledge in both Germany and the United States had diffused into the domain of public knowledge. Styrene and PS now face the problems of any petrochemical product.     

Hemostatic efficacy and tissue reaction of oxidized regenerated cellulose hemostats

Oxidized regenerated cellulose (ORC) has been used as an absorbable hemostat since World War II. In the present study, hemostasis time was determined in a spleen incision model in swine. The effect of mass on absorbable hemostat efficacy and hemostasis time was evaluated by standardizing the ORC materials on a mass basis. The median hemostasis time for a single layer of the new nonwoven ORC was as much as 51 % shorter than woven ORC (P < 0.001). The mean hemostasis time for nonwoven ORC was not affected by the mass of hemostat applied to the wound. The hemostatic efficacy of woven ORC increased with the mass (layers) of hemostat applied to the wound. Nonwoven ORC is significantly faster in achieving hemostasis than woven ORC, and its hemostatic efficacy is not influenced by the mass of material applied. Tissue reaction was minimal and the material was fully absorbed by 14 days.     

Fritz Haber und Clara Immerwahr. Lernen aus der Geschichte

This contribution about Fritz Haber (1868–1934) and his wife Clara Immerwahr (1870–1915) shows us not only the changeful life of these two personalities which began their life full of hope and finished it then in tragedy. Their time is embedded into the history about the break‐up and then come‐down by the First World War of the first period of the German Empire, and also points out exemplarily science and industry of this time.     

Radiation Processing: Current Status and Future Possibilities

Radiation processing developed following the Second World War and employs gamma- or electron-irradiation to process polymers, cure alkene-based inks and coatings, sterilize medical supplies, irradiate food, and manage wastes. The current status of these applications is described with the probable direction of future developments.     

One hundred years of the Fritz Haber Institute

We outline the institutional history and highlight aspects of the scientific history of the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI) of the Max Planck Society, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, from its founding in 1911 until about the turn of the 21st century. Established as one of the first two Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, the Institute began as a much-awaited remedy for what prominent German chemists warned was the waning of Germany's scientific and technological superiority relative to the United States and to other European nations. The history of the Institute has largely paralleled that of 20th century Germany. It spearheaded the research and development of chemical weapons during World War I, then experienced a "golden era" during the 1920s and early 1930s, in spite of financial hardships. Under the National Socialists it suffered a purge of its scientific staff and a diversion of its research into the service of the new regime, accompanied by a breakdown in its international relations. In the immediate aftermath of World War II it suffered crippling material losses, from which it recovered slowly in the postwar era. In 1952, the Institute took the name of its founding director and the following year joined the fledgling Max Planck Society, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Institute supported diverse research into the structure of matter and electron microscopy in its geographically isolated and politically precarious location in West Berlin. In subsequent decades, as Berlin benefited from the policies of détente and later glasnost and the Max Planck Society continued to reassess its preferred model of a research institute, the FHI reorganized around a board of coequal scientific directors and renewed its focus on the investigation of elementary processes on surfaces and interfaces, topics of research that had been central to the work of Fritz Haber and the first "golden era" of the Institute. Throughout its one-hundred-year history, the Institute's pace-setting research has been shaped by dozens of distinguished scientists, among them seven Nobel laureates. Here we highlight the contributions made at the Institute to the fields of gas-phase kinetics and dynamics, early quantum physics, colloid chemistry, electron microscopy, and surface chemistry, and we give an account of the key role the Institute played in implementing the Berlin Electron Synchrotron (BESSY I and II). Current research at the Institute in surface science and catalysis as well as molecular physics and spectroscopy is exemplified in this issue [Angew. Chem. 2011, 123, 10242; Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 10064].     

The Legacy and Future of Radioactive Waste Management at the Millennium

Wastes containing radioactive materials have been produced ever since ore recovery and processing began; however, such materials did not become of public concern until the large-scale activities involving uranium and thorium ores and nuclear fission during and after World War II. Efforts to provide disposal sites for radioactive wastes, especially those associated with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, have been largely unsuccessful for the past 40 years or so and are nearing crisis proportions as the new millennium begins — its eventual resolution is believed to require greater reliance on stewardship and a larger governmental presence.     

Direct electrochemistry of hemoglobin immobilized on CdS:Mn nanoparticles

The First International Congress of Applied Chemistry was organised by the Association of Belgian Chemists in 1894, the eighth and last was held in Washington and New York in 1912. These congresses, unlike the early congresses on pure chemistry, were very successful and held with the highest patronage in the host countries. The ninth planned for St. Petersburg in 1915 was not held due to the intervention of the First World War. The initiative passed to IUPAC but due to political and financial restraints the International Congresses of Pure and Applied Chemistry did not commence till 1934.     

Global Solar UV Index: Australian measurements, forecasts and comparison with the UK

The 2002 revision of the UV index (UVI) issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Meteorological Office (WMO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) (World Health Organization [2002] Global Solar UV Index: A Practical Guide. WHO, Geneva) was motivated by the need to further standardize the use and presentation of the UVI. Awareness of the hazards of solar UV radiation (UVR) is generally high in Australia, but more effective use of the UVI will assist in promoting further changes to the population's sun exposure behavior. UVI levels for a number of cities around Australia as measured by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), covering the time period 1996-2000, are presented. Also shown are UVI forecasts from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). Agreement between the BOM data and the measurements varies depending on the location but is within 2 UVI units approximately 75% of the time. UVI levels are supplied to the media, and in summer values in excess of 12-14 are regularly recorded, although the more northerly locations occasionally reach 16 and 17. The factors affecting the solar UVR environment and the measured UVI are also discussed and compared against measurements from the UK.     

Immunomodulation by food: promising concept for mitigating allergic disease?

The importance of a properly functioning and well-balanced immune system for maintaining health has become strikingly evident over the past decades. Roughly since World War II, there has been an apparent decrease in the prevalence of “traditional” infectious diseases, with a concomitant increase in immune-related disorders, such as allergies. Causally, a relationship with changes in life-style-related factors such as the increasing use of hygienic practices seems likely. Diet and nutrition can affect the functioning of various immune parameters. This concept can be utilised in attempts to prevent or mitigate allergic reactions via the development of targeted food products or ingredients. This review describes recent findings with respect to food products and ingredients that show potential in this respect, with special emphasis on pro- and prebiotics, β-glucans and fungal immunomodulatory proteins. What all of these approaches have in common is that they appear to strengthen Th1-mediated immunity, thus possibly restoring defective immune maturation due to overly hygienic living conditions: a little bit of dirt does not seem bad!     

A history of atomic absorption spectroscopy

Spectrochemical analysis originated with the work of Kirchoff and Bunsen in 1860 but found relatively little application until the 1930s. Arc-spark emission and, to a lesser extent, flame emission methods then became popular. Following World War II flame emission became very popular. In 1955 the modern era of atomic absorption spectroscopy began with the work of Walsh and Alkemade and Milatz. The time since 1955 can be divided into seven year periods. The first was an induction period (1955–1962) when AA received attention from only a very few people. This was followed by a growth period (1962–1969) when most of what we see today was developed, and then by a period of relative stability (1969–1976) when AA contributed greatly to other fields. We are now in a period of great change, which started in about 1976, due to the impact of computer technology on individual laboratory instruments.     

Letter to the Editor Industrial Mixed Acid Nitration

Abstract

Biochemistry — including molecular biology — constituted a major part of Dutch chemical research over the period from 1940 to 1980. However, the Netherlands did not occupy a strong position in that field of research after the Second World War. The present paper seeks to explain the successful development of biochemistry in the Netherlands into an independent discipline of international standing. Formulating the goal of biochemistry as “science for its own sake” played an important role in this development. Post-doctoral positions, senior fellowships and editorships of journals were crucial for biochemistry in the Netherlands in building a network of international contacts that could keep researchers informed about current developments. Westenbrink and Slater were key participants in the development of these networks. These two scientists developed international contacts via fellowships and as editors of major biochemical journals. It was through these forms of communication that the hitherto peripheral Dutch biochemical research community gained a more central position.