Creative chemistry : descriptive of recent achievements in the chemical industries / by Edwin E. Slosson.

  • Slosson, Edwin E. (Edwin Emery), 1865-1929
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Creative chemistry : descriptive of recent achievements in the chemical industries / by Edwin E. Slosson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    These feats of chemistry, performed under the stress of dire necessity, have, no doubt, excited the wonder and interest of our public. It is far more important at this time, however, when both for war and for peace needs, the resources of our country are strained to the utmost, that the public should awaken to a clear realiza¬ tion of what this science of chemistry really means for mankind, to the realization that its wizardry permeates the whole life of the nation as a vitalizing, protective and constructive agent very much in the same way as our blood, coursing through our veins and arteries, carries the constructive, defensive and life-bringing materials to every organ in the body. If the layman will but understand that chemistry is the fundamental science of the transformation of mat¬ ter, he will readily accept the validity of this sweeping assertion: he will realize, for instance, why exactly the same fundamental laws of the science apply to, and make possible scientific control of, such widely diver¬ gent national industries as agriculture and steel manu¬ facturing. It governs the transformation of the salts, minerals and humus of our fields and the components of the air into corn, wheat, cotton and the innumerable other products of the soil; it governs no less the trans¬ formation of crude ores into steel and alloys, which, with the cunning born of chemical knowledge, may be given practically any conceivable quality of hardness, elasticity, toughness or strength. And exactly the same thing may be said of the hundreds of national ac¬ tivities that lie between the two extremes of agricul¬ ture and steel manufacture! Moreover, the domain of the science of the transform