Industrial Advances

Nineteenth-century Americans heated their homes with wood or coal, used kerosene lanterns or candles for illumination, and traveled by rail- road, steamboat, horse, or mule. The dawn of the 20th century brought fundamental change. Entrepreneurs wedded scientific knowledge and business savvy, extracting metals, minerals, and motor fuels from natural resources to advance industry and revolutionize our nation's way of life.

Bromine Key to Photography and Pharmaceuticals

In the late 1800s, Herbert Dow was one of many would-be entrepreneurs striving to transform America's vast, untapped natural resources into commercial products that could compete with those of Europe's chemical manufacturers.

Dow dreamed of finding an efficient way to make chemical products from the plentiful deposits of brine just beneath the surface of his native Midwest. His first invention, chemically treating the brine to extract bromine, was much more efficient than the standard boiling method. The young chemist thought he could do better–and he did. He parted bromine and brine with electricity, becoming the first to use an electrolytic cell to manufacture chemicals.

In 1897, Dow founded the company that bears his name: the Dow Chemical Company. Its bromine production process and other innovations gave a needed boost to American commerce, which was running up against tough European competition. Readily available bromine was vital to advancing the infant U.S. pharmaceutical and photographic industries that grew up to become world leaders.

Wresting Aluminum from Ore with Electrochemistry

Aluminum was a novelty metal, comparable in price to silver, when Charles Martin Hall wrested the metal from its ore with electricity in 1886 in his home workshop in Oberlin, Ohio. Two years later, he founded the Pittsburgh Reduction Company–the forerunner of the Aluminum Company of America, later shortened to Alcoa–to commercialize the process.

At first, readily available aluminum was a solution in search of a problem. But its appealing properties–lightweight, rust-resistant, and highly conductive–soon led to new uses ranging from the mundane to the sublime: cooking pots, power lines to transmit electricity long distances, and airplanes to soar the skies.

Lighting Source Sparks Organic Chemical Industry

While seeking an economical way to manufacture aluminum, Canadian inventor Thomas Willson accidentally produced calcium carbide and acetylene. First used for lighting and then for welding, acetylene became a source of the chemicals used to synthesize rubber, plastics, and solvents.

Experimenting with ways to increase his aluminum yield, Willson combined lime (calcium oxide) and coal tar, heated the mixture in the furnace, and found that he had made a strange substance: when thrown into water, it produced a gas that burned. The substance was calcium carbide and the gas was acetylene.

Willson patented his process in 1892 and two years later licensed it to what became the Union Carbide Company. Soon devices fueled by acetylene– which could produce a flame 10 to 12 times brighter than coal gas–were competing with gas lighting and winning in rural and isolated areas.

Chemists Discover Helium in Natural Gas

Chemists discover helium in natural gas When University of Kansas chemists Hamilton Cady and David McFarland analyzed a natural gas sample in 1905, they solved a local mystery and showed that helium–once thought to be a rare element–was abundant on Earth.

Two years earlier, a company advertised a public demonstration of a curious natural gas well in the nearby town of Dexter. The event was slated to climax with lighting the escaping gas to create a "pillar of flame" visible for miles. Trouble was, the gas wouldn't burn. After determining that the gas contained large amounts of nonflammable nitrogen, Cady and McFarland discovered that it also contained helium, then thought to be one of the rarest gases on Earth.

Nonflammable, unreactive, and lighter than air, helium remained a curiosity for another decade, with the entire U.S. supply resting in three glass tubes on a shelf at the University of Kansas. Not until 1917–when England suggested that the United States produce enough helium to inflate lighter-than-air craft for the Allied war effort–did it appear to have a practical application.

Large-scale production of helium to inflate blimps came too late for World War I. But helium was used extensively by the U.S. Navy in World War II, primarily to lift blimps that provided safe escort to troop and supply ships. Helium's varied uses today include pressurizing the space shuttle's liquid propellant, cooling infrared detectors, and researching superconductivity. (Read more)

Petroleum Refining Becomes More Refined

In the 1920s and 1930s, chemistry was key to fueling the automobiles and mechanized farm equipment that were fast transforming America from an agrarian to an industrialized nation. Gasoline was a largely wasted by–product of kerosene distilled from crude oil until Henry Ford introduced his Model T. Then the vehicle population exploded, and with it, demand for gasoline.

At that time, fractionation was the sole means of separating crude oil into its constituent hydrocarbons (compounds of hydrogen and carbon). The process, still the first step in refining crude oil, is based on a fundamental physical characteristic: the boiling points of hydrocarbons vary with the number of carbon atoms in their molecules. The more carbon atoms, the higher the temperature at which the compound boils. Methane, which has one carbon atom per molecule, boils at a lower temperature than gasoline, which has 4 to 12 carbon atoms per molecule.

Chemists soon discovered they could wring more gasoline from a barrel of oil with thermal cracking: using heat and pressure to break down large, heavy hydrocarbons into the smaller, lighter molecules of gasoline. Clarence Gerhold, a chemical engineer at the Riverside Laboratory, developed thermal reforming in 1929, a process that rearranged gasoline molecules to provide a better-performing fuel.

Catalytic cracking further increased gasoline yield and provided the first designer fuel: high-octane gasoline. French engineer and racing enthusiast Eugene Jules Houdry accomplished this with catalysts, the chemical equivalent of highly skilled construction workers. In France, he used Fuller's Earth, a mineral found in clay, to convert lignite, a form of coal, into oil and then gasoline. In 1931, he moved to the United States, where he used that approach to make high-octane gasoline from crude oil.

Chemical engineers Warren Lewis and Edwin Gilliland further refined the process, introducing the fluid bed reactor, which made the catalysts more efficient. The invention reduced waste and increased flexibility, provided greater control over the mix of fuels and chemicals produced by refineries, and was an economical means of producing more gasoline, the product in most demand. The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (today ExxonMobil) was the first to use a fluid bed reactor in its refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1942.

Chemistry Opens a New Chapter in an Ancient Craft

When Georgia chemist Charles Holmes Herty found a way to make quality paper from pine trees in 1932, he also founded an industry that brought much-needed jobs to the depression-crippled south. Herty wrote a new chapter in the ancient craft inspired by insects who built paper nests while dinosaurs still roamed the earth. At its root, however, the papermaking process remained the same: the bonding of cellulose, a polymer whose long chains support plant cell walls. (Read more)

New Approach Cuts Acrylonitrile Production Costs

Most of us don't know acrylonitrile by name, yet we touch it each day in clothing and carpeting made of acrylic fibers, in plastic packaging, and in telephone and computer casings.

First synthesized in 1893, acrylonitrile did not become important until the 1930s, when it was used to make acrylic fibers for textiles and synthetic rubber. Manufacturing the chemical was an expensive, multistep process, however, until 1953, when Sohio (today BP Amoco) developed a new method of making acrylonitrile. The method cut production costs dramatically–so dramatically that it is now used to make virtually all acrylonitrile, which has become a key raw material for chemical manufacturing worldwide.

Coal Becomes Source of Acetyl Chemicals

Prompted by the oil embargoes of the 1970s, the Eastman Chemical Company opened in 1983 the first U.S. plant to make acetyl chemicals–building blocks for such consumer products as plastics, textile fibers, and photographic film–from coal rather than petroleum.

In the 1970s, the politically unstable countries of the Middle East–from which the United States imported much of its oil–cut back production, triggering shortages. The price of crude oil shot from $3 to $30 per barrel, and with it the prices of fuels, chemicals, and everything else made from oil. Americans fumed as they waited in line to buy gasoline. Industries of all stripes scurried to find alternatives to oil.

Coal was the obvious choice. Like oil, it is the remains of ancient organic material transformed by pressure and heat into hydrocarbons. Moreover, the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal: known reserves could last hundreds of years and there's more waiting to be discovered.

The Development of High Performance Carbon Fibers

Starting in 1958, scientists at Union Carbide's Parma Technical Society developed and improved carbon fibers, by weight the strongest and stiffest material yet produced. Carbon fibers are used in a variety of applications, including airplanes, satellites, and sporting goods. In addition, carbon fibers are used as the leading edge of the space shuttle's wing. The textile's strength and flexibility has truly revolutionized the world of materials and future applications may include entire automobile body panels and earthquake-proof buildings. (Read more)

The Evolution of Durable Press and Flame Retardant Cotton

Starting in the 1950s, researchers at the Southern Regional Research Center, a U.S. Department of Agriculture facility in New Orleans, began to modify cotton chemically to make it wrinkle resistant and flame retardant. Cotton is a natural seed fiber that has long been used for clothing and household goods. But because it wrinkles easily it had begun to lose market share to synthetic fabrics. The scientists at the SRRC helped reverse this trend by developing processes and additives that made cotton wrinkle resistant. At the same time, research into flame resistance succeeded in yielding cotton that did not flare up when held to a flame. (Read more).