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Show The Stored-up Sunshine of Other Ages Is Handed Down as a Heritage to Modern Civilization (Told In Eight Sketches) By JOHN RAYMOND No. VI PREHISTORIC SUNSHINE Coal may well be described as prehistoric pre-historic sunshine. Ages before the dawn of our own era vast forests covered cov-ered large portions of the earth's surface. sur-face. In this ancient vegetation were stored up the treasures of nature and after the lapse of ages it became the heritage of civilization. For centuries after it came into use coal was looked upon as valuable only as fuel. Later coke was obtained from it, then sulphur and lampblack, and finally gas for purposes of illumination. That seemed to be the limit of its possibilities pos-sibilities a few years ago but today it would be difficult to enumerate all the articles of commerce extracted from its by-products. Coal contains a little of everything that goes to make up trees but it would be a mistake to imagine that everything that comes out of coal tar is contained within it. While there are only about a dozen primary products extracted from coal tar, from these the chemist is able to develop hundreds of thousands of new substances. This is synthetic chemistry, or the process of building up intricate compounds step by step. 9 Raw material for the development of these coal tar by-products war materials, mate-rials, fertilizers, colors, drugs and a host of other things exists in abundance abund-ance in this country, but we must be sufficiently interested in our future -jrvv, , ' ! indep endence to f i-rf save it. We can k - 4A not go on indefi-t indefi-t - J' i nateIy wasting bil ls Ci'ji ''ons f dollars Vil''rh worth of this inval-vi'' inval-vi'' J'J ' iPtl ua'J'e substance if It'jJsfjt1 iVH 'n future years we ri'-Vi-' iP'Vl n0Pe t0 stand on an fj.'.f kL 1 cven footing with J? If ytftr7-l!' those nations that Sll'lli"'7-;- ' long have rccog-IAlv'? rccog-IAlv'? -; "C n'zed ',s va'uc-Uf va'uc-Uf jSW---' The development r . S of these products iHiivt-m,Af'mMt?l and co m p o u n d s (Released by the Institute of J goes back to , the o o-1-- color industry. KslhJ' "r. This is not a large "i 'l ( business in itself ? ( J )M IV but it certainly is f tiVJifi A ( f strategic one be- '-wfio ( ' j 'J cause American in- LvAif ' j dustries employing f ( more than two mil- -i.-iL jji ' ) lion workers and ;,:jiiVli! : f : producing approxi- ' f& I -' f matcly three billion 'VY v ' Im') dollars' worth ot M.jfM products. every year pT ' "-''-s,rM are directly depen - Jj dent upon dyes. ,,wi Take, for instance, textiles, leather, paper and paint. New wonders are constantly being discovered in coal tar. Recently a French scientist succeeded in producing produc-ing several small but perfect diamonds and synthetic rubies have been on the market for some time. Instead of sending traders on perilous quests to the four corners of the world for needed things a mnn may now stay at home and trust to the chemists to produce pro-duce every necessity and most of the luxuries. No longer need wc be dependent de-pendent upon the potash deposits of Germany if wc make our own fertilizers. fertili-zers. Far off rubber trees are not so important if we manufacture our own rubber in the laboratory. Brigadier-General Amos A. Fries, Chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, Ser-vice, U. S. A., in a recent paper said: "What a thrill it must have given the German himself when he realized the almost limitless power the control of the dye industry would give him when waging war. He felt that with that control he could win in a war against the whole world. And few indeed are they who know just how close Germany Ger-many came to winning that war. The lesson which that bit of history teaches us is to make ourselves masters of the chemical industry in all its ramifications, ramifica-tions, resting secure in the knowledge that if wc do so no power on earth can overcome us for lack of war materials." Ml Vmcrican business. New York) |