III

THE HAND GRENADES WHICH THESE WOMEN ARE BORINGwill contain potential chemical energy capable of causing a vast amount of destruction when released. During the war the American Government placed orders for 68,000,000 such grenades as are here shown.

THE HAND GRENADES WHICH THESE WOMEN ARE BORING

will contain potential chemical energy capable of causing a vast amount of destruction when released. During the war the American Government placed orders for 68,000,000 such grenades as are here shown.

WOMEN IN A MUNITION PLANT ENGAGED IN THE MANUFACTURE OF TRI-NITRO-TOLUOL, THE MOST IMPORTANT OF MODERN HIGH EXPLOSIVES

The active agent in all these explosives is the nitrogen atom in combination with two oxygen atoms, which the chemist calls the "nitro group" and which he represents by NO2. This group was, as I have said, originally used in the form of saltpeter or potassium nitrate, but since the chemist did not want the potassium part of it—for it fouled his guns—he took the nitro group out of the nitrate by means of sulfuric acid and by the same means hooked it on to some compound of carbon and hydrogen that would burn without leaving any residue, and give nothing but gases. One of the simplest of these hydrocarbon derivatives is glycerin, the same as you use for sunburn. This mixed with nitric and sulfuric acids gives nitroglycerin, an easy thing to make, though I should not advise anybody to try making it unless he has his life insured. But nitroglycerin is uncertain stuff to keep and being a liquid is awkward to handle. So it was mixed with sawdust or porous earth or something else that would soak it up. This molded into sticks is our ordinary dynamite.

If instead of glycerin we take cellulose in the form of wood pulp or cotton and treat this with nitric acid in the presence of sulfuric we get nitrocellulose or guncotton, which is the chief ingredient of smokeless powder.

Now guncotton looks like common cotton. It is too light and loose to pack well into a gun. So it is dissolved with ether and alcohol or acetone to make a plastic mass that can be molded into rods and cut into grains of suitable shape and size to burn at the proper speed.

Here, then, we have a liquid explosive, nitroglycerin,that has to be soaked up in some porous solid, and a porous solid, guncotton, that has to soak up some liquid. Why not solve both difficulties together by dissolving the guncotton in the nitroglycerin and so get a double explosive? This is a simple idea. Any of us can see the sense of it—once it is suggested to us. But Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist, who thought it out first in 1878, made millions out of it. Then, apparently alarmed at the possible consequences of his invention, he bequeathed the fortune he had made by it to found international prizes for medical, chemical and physical discoveries, idealistic literature and the promotion of peace. But his posthumous efforts for the advancement of civilization and the abolition of war did not amount to much and his high explosives were later employed to blow into pieces the doctors, chemists, authors and pacifists he wished to reward.

Nobel's invention, "cordite," is composed of nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose with a little mineral jelly or vaseline. Besides cordite and similar mixtures of nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose there are two other classes of high explosives in common use.

One is made from carbolic acid, which is familiar to us all by its use as a disinfectant. If this is treated with nitric and sulfuric acids we get from it picric acid, a yellow crystalline solid. Every government has its own secret formula for this type of explosive. The British call theirs "lyddite," the French "melinite" and the Japanese "shimose."

The third kind of high explosives uses as its base toluol. This is not so familiar to us as glycerin, cotton or carbolic acid. It is one of the coal tar products, aninflammable liquid, resembling benzene. When treated with nitric acid in the usual way it takes up like the others three nitro groups and so becomes tri-nitro-toluol. Realizing that people could not be expected to use such a mouthful of a word, the chemists have suggested various pretty nicknames, trotyl, tritol, trinol, tolite and trilit, but the public, with the wilfulness it always shows in the matter of names, persists in calling it TNT, as though it were an author like G.B.S., or G.K.C, or F.P.A. TNT is the latest of these high explosives and in some ways the best of them. Picric acid has the bad habit of attacking the metals with which it rests in contact forming sensitive picrates that are easily set off, but TNT is inert toward metals and keeps well. TNT melts far below the boiling point of water so can be readily liquefied and poured into shells. It is insensitive to ordinary shocks. A rifle bullet can be fired through a case of it without setting it off, and if lighted with a match it burns quietly. The amazing thing about these modern explosives, the organic nitrates, is the way they will stand banging about and burning, yet the terrific violence with which they blow up when shaken by an explosive wave of a particular velocity like that of a fulminating cap. Like picric acid, TNT stains the skin yellow and causes soreness and sometimes serious cases of poisoning among the employees, mostly girls, in the munition factories. On the other hand, the girls working with cordite get to using it as chewing gum; a harmful habit, not because of any danger of being blown up by it, but because nitroglycerin is a heart stimulant and they do not need that.

The Genealogical Tree of Nitric Acid From W.Q. Whitman's "The Story of Nitrates in the War," General Science QuarterlyThe Genealogical Tree of Nitric Acid From W.Q. Whitman's "The Story of Nitrates in the War," General Science Quarterly

TNT is by no means smokeless. The German shells that exploded with a cloud of black smoke and which British soldiers called "Black Marias," "coal-boxes" or "Jack Johnsons" were loaded with it. But it is an advantage to have a shell show where it strikes, although a disadvantage to have it show where it starts.

It is these high explosives that have revolutionized warfare. As soon as the first German shell packed with these new nitrates burst inside the Gruson cupola at Liège and tore out its steel and concrete by the roots the world knew that the day of the fixed fortress was gone. The armies deserted their expensively prepared fortifications and took to the trenches. The British troops in France found their weapons futile and sent across the Channel the cry of "Send us high explosives or we perish!" The home Government was slow to heed the appeal, but no progress was made against the Germans until the Allies had the means to blast them out of their entrenchments by shells loaded with five hundred pounds of TNT.

All these explosives are made from nitric acid and this used to be made from nitrates such as potassium nitrate or saltpeter. But nitrates are rarely found in large quantities. Napoleon and Lee had a hard time to scrape up enough saltpeter from the compost heaps, cellars and caves for their gunpowder, and they did not use as much nitrogen in a whole campaign as was freed in a few days' cannonading on the Somme. Now there is one place in the world—and so far as we know one only—where nitrates are to be found abundantly. This is in a desert on the western slope of the Andes where ancient guano deposits have decomposed andthere was not enough rain to wash away their salts. Here is a bed two miles wide, two hundred miles long and five feet deep yielding some twenty to fifty per cent. of sodium nitrate. The deposit originally belonged to Peru, but Chile fought her for it and got it in 1881. Here all countries came to get their nitrates for agriculture and powder making. Germany was the largest customer and imported 750,000 tons of Chilean nitrate in 1913, besides using 100,000 tons of other nitrogen salts. By this means her old, wornout fields were made to yield greater harvests than our fresh land. Germany and England were like two duelists buying powder at the same shop. The Chilean Government, pocketing an export duty that aggregated half a billion dollars, permitted the saltpeter to be shoveled impartially into British and German ships, and so two nitrogen atoms, torn from their Pacific home and parted, like Evangeline and Gabriel, by transportation oversea, may have found themselves flung into each other's arms from the mouths of opposing howitzers in the air of Flanders. Goethe could write a romance on such a theme.

Now the moment war broke out this source of supply was shut off to both parties, for they blockaded each other. The British fleet closed up the German ports while the German cruisers in the Pacific took up a position off the coast of Chile in order to intercept the ships carrying nitrates to England and France. The Panama Canal, designed to afford relief in such an emergency, caved in most inopportunely. The British sent a fleet to the Pacific to clear the nitrate route, but it was outranged and defeated on November 1, 1914. Then astronger British fleet was sent out and smashed the Germans off the Falkland Islands on December 8. But for seven weeks the nitrate route had been closed while the chemical reactions on the Marne and Yser were decomposing nitrogen-compounds at an unheard of rate.

England was now free to get nitrates for her munition factories, but Germany was still bottled up. She had stored up Chilean nitrates in anticipation of the war and as soon as it was seen to be coming she bought all she could get in Europe. But this supply was altogether inadequate and the war would have come to an end in the first winter if German chemists had not provided for such a contingency in advance by working out methods of getting nitrogen from the air. Long ago it was said that the British ruled the sea and the French the land so that left nothing to the German but the air. The Germans seem to have taken this jibe seriously and to have set themselves to make the most of the aerial realm in order to challenge the British and French in the fields they had appropriated. They had succeeded so far that the Kaiser when he declared war might well have considered himself the Prince of the Power of the Air. He had a fleet of Zeppelins and he had means for the fixation of nitrogen such as no other nation possessed. The Zeppelins burst like wind bags, but the nitrogen plants worked and made Germany independent of Chile not only during the war, but in the time of peace.

Germany during the war used 200,000 tons of nitric acid a year in explosives, yet her supply of nitrogen is exhaustless.

World production and consumption of fixed inorganic nitrogen expressed in tons nitrogen From The Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, March, 1919.World production and consumption of fixed inorganic nitrogen expressed in tons nitrogen From The Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, March, 1919.

Nitrogen is free as air. That is the trouble; it is too free. It is fixed nitrogen that we want and that we are willing to pay for; nitrogen in combination with some other elements in the form of food or fertilizer so we can make use of it as we set it free. Fixed nitrogen in its cheapest form, Chile saltpeter, rose to $250 during the war. Free nitrogen costs nothing and is good for nothing. If a land-owner has a right to an expanding pyramid of air above him to the limits of the atmosphere—as, I believe, the courts have decided in the eaves-dropping cases—then for every square foot ofhis ground he owns as much nitrogen as he could buy for $2500. The air is four-fifths free nitrogen and if we could absorb it in our lungs as we do the oxygen of the other fifth a few minutes breathing would give us a full meal. But we let this free nitrogen all out again through our noses and then go and pay 35 cents a pound for steak or 60 cents a dozen for eggs in order to get enough combined nitrogen to live on. Though man is immersed in an ocean of nitrogen, yet he cannot make use of it. He is like Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" with "water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink."

Nitrogen is, as Hood said not so truly about gold, "hard to get and hard to hold." The bacteria that form the nodules on the roots of peas and beans have the power that man has not of utilizing free nitrogen. Instead of this quiet inconspicuous process man has to call upon the lightning when he wants to fix nitrogen. The air contains the oxygen and nitrogen which it is desired to combine to form nitrates but the atoms are paired, like to like. Passing an electric spark through the air breaks up some of these pairs and in the confusion of the shock the lonely atoms seize on their nearest neighbor and so may get partners of the other sort. I have seen this same thing happen in a square dance where somebody made a blunder. It is easy to understand the reaction if we represent the atoms of oxygen and nitrogen by the initials of their names in this fashion:

NN + OO → NO + NOnitrogen oxygen nitric oxide

The → represents Jove's thunderbolt, a stroke of artificial lightning. We see on the left the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen, before taking the electric treatment, as separate elemental pairs, and then to the right of the arrow we find them as compound molecules of nitric oxide. This takes up another atom of oxygen from the air and becomes NOO, or using a subscript figure to indicate the number of atoms and so avoid repeating the letter, NO2which is the familiar nitro group of nitric acid (HO—NO2) and of its salts, the nitrates, and of its organic compounds, the high explosives. The NO2is a brown and evil-smelling gas which when dissolved in water (HOH) and further oxidized is completely converted into nitric acid.

The apparatus which effects this transformation is essentially a gigantic arc light in a chimney through which a current of hot air is blown. The more thoroughly the air comes under the action of the electric arc the more molecules of nitrogen and oxygen will be broken up and rearranged, but on the other hand if the mixture of gases remains in the path of the discharge the NO molecules are also broken up and go back into their original form of NN and OO. So the object is to spread out the electric arc as widely as possible and then run the air through it rapidly. In the Schönherr process the electric arc is a spiral flame twenty-three feet long through which the air streams with a vortex motion. In the Birkeland-Eyde furnace there is a series of semi-circular arcs spread out by the repellent force of a powerful electric magnet in a flaming disc seven feet in diameter with a temperature of 6300° F. In the Pauling furnace the electrodes between whichthe current strikes are two cast iron tubes curving upward and outward like the horns of a Texas steer and cooled by a stream of water passing through them. These electric furnaces produce two or three ounces of nitric acid for each kilowatt-hour of current consumed. Whether they can compete with the natural nitrates and the products of other processes depends upon how cheaply they can get their electricity. Before the war there were several large installations in Norway and elsewhere where abundant water power was available and now the Norwegians are using half a million horse power continuously in the fixation of nitrogen and the rest of the world as much again. The Germans had invested largely in these foreign oxidation plants, but shortly before the war they had sold out and turned their attention to other processes not requiring so much electrical energy, for their country is poorly provided with water power. The Haber process, that they made most of, is based upon as simple a reaction as that we have been considering, for it consists in uniting two elemental gases to make a compound, but the elements in this case are not nitrogen and oxygen, but nitrogen and hydrogen. This gives ammonia instead of nitric acid, but ammonia is useful for its own purposes and it can be converted into nitric acid if this is desired. The reaction is:

NN + HH + HH + HH → NHHH + NHHHNitrogen hydrogen ammonia

The animals go in two by two, but they come out four by four. Four molecules of the mixed elements are turned into two molecules and so the gas shrinks to halfits volume. At the same time it acquires an odor—familiar to us when we are curing a cold—that neither of the original gases had. The agent that effects the transformation in this case is not the electric spark—for this would tend to work the reaction backwards—but uranium, a rare metal, which has the peculiar property of helping along a reaction while seeming to take no part in it. Such a substance is called a catalyst. The action of a catalyst is rather mysterious and whenever we have a mystery we need an analogy. We may, then, compare the catalyst to what is known as "a good mixer" in society. You know the sort of man I mean. He may not be brilliant or especially talkative, but somehow there is always "something doing" at a picnic or house-party when he is along. The tactful hostess, the salon leader, is a social catalyst. The trouble with catalysts, either human or metallic, is that they are rare and that sometimes they get sulky and won't work if the ingredients they are supposed to mix are unsuitable.

But the uranium, osmium, platinum or whatever metal is used as a catalyzing agent is expensive and although it is not used up it is easily "poisoned," as the chemists say, by impurities in the gases. The nitrogen and the hydrogen for the Haber process must then be prepared and purified before trying to combine them into ammonia. The nitrogen is obtained by liquefying air by cold and pressure and then boiling off the nitrogen at 194° C. The oxygen left is useful for other purposes. The hydrogen needed is extracted by a similar process of fractional distillation from "water-gas," the blue-flame burning gas used for heating.Then the nitrogen and hydrogen, mixed in the proportion of one to three, as shown in the reaction given above, are compressed to two hundred atmospheres, heated to 1300° F. and passed over the finely divided uranium. The stream of gas that comes out contains about four per cent. of ammonia, which is condensed to a liquid by cooling and the uncombined hydrogen and nitrogen passed again through the apparatus.

The ammonia can be employed in refrigeration and other ways but if it is desired to get the nitrogen into the form of nitric acid it has to be oxidized by the so-called Ostwald process. This is the reaction:

NH3+ 4O → HNO3+ H2Oammonia oxygen nitric acid water

The catalyst used to effect this combination is the metal platinum in the form of fine wire gauze, since the action takes place only on the surface. The ammonia gas is mixed with air which supplies the oxygen and the heated mixture run through the platinum gauze at the rate of several yards a second. Although the gases come in contact with the platinum only a five-hundredth part of a second yet eighty-five per cent. is converted into nitric acid.

The Haber process for the making of ammonia by direct synthesis from its constituent elements and the supplemental Ostwald process for the conversion of the ammonia into nitric acid were the salvation of Germany. As soon as the Germans saw that their dash toward Paris had been stopped at the Marne they knew that they were in for a long war and at once made plans for a supply of fixed nitrogen. The chief German dyefactories, the Badische Anilin and Soda-Fabrik, promptly put $100,000,000 into enlarging its plant and raised its production of ammonium sulfate from 30,000 to 300,000 tons. One German electrical firm with aid from the city of Berlin contracted to provide 66,000,000 pounds of fixed nitrogen a year at a cost of three cents a pound for the next twenty-five years. The 750,000 tons of Chilean nitrate imported annually by Germany contained about 116,000 tons of the essential element nitrogen. The fourteen large plants erected during the war can fix in the form of nitrates 500,000 tons of nitrogen a year, which is more than twice the amount needed for internal consumption. So Germany is now not only independent of the outside world but will have a surplus of nitrogen products which could be sold even in America at about half what the farmer has been paying for South American saltpeter.

Besides the Haber or direct process there are other methods of making ammonia which are, at least outside of Germany, of more importance. Most prominent of these is the cyanamid process. This requires electrical power since it starts with a product of the electrical furnace, calcium carbide, familiar to us all as a source of acetylene gas.

If a stream of nitrogen is passed over hot calcium carbide it is taken up by the carbide according to the following equation:

CaC2+ N2→ CaCN2+ Ccalcium carbide nitrogen calcium cyanamid carbon

Calcium cyanamid was discovered in 1895 by Caro and Franke when they were trying to work out a newprocess for making cyanide to use in extracting gold. It looks like stone and, under the name of lime-nitrogen, or Kalkstickstoff, or nitrolim, is sold as a fertilizer. If it is desired to get ammonia, it is treated with superheated steam. The reaction produces heat and pressure, so it is necessary to carry it on in stout autoclaves or enclosed kettles. The cyanamid is completely and quickly converted into pure ammonia and calcium carbonate, which is the same as the limestone from which carbide was made. The reaction is:

CaCN2+ 3H2O → CaCO3+ 2NH3calcium cyanamid water calcium carbonate ammonia

Another electrical furnace method, the Serpek process, uses aluminum instead of calcium for the fixation of nitrogen. Bauxite, or impure aluminum oxide, the ordinary mineral used in the manufacture of metallic aluminum, is mixed with coal and heated in a revolving electrical furnace through which nitrogen is passing. The equation is:

Al2O3+ 3C + N2→ 2AlN + 3COaluminum carbon nitrogen aluminum carbonoxide nitride monoxide

Then the aluminum nitride is treated with steam under pressure, which produces ammonia and gives back the original aluminum oxide, but in a purer form than the mineral from which was made

2AlN + 3H2O → 2NH3+ Al2O3Aluminum water ammonia aluminum oxidenitride

The Serpek process is employed to some extent in France in connection with the aluminum industry. These are the principal processes for the fixation ofnitrogen now in use, but they by no means exhaust the possibilities. For instance, Professor John C. Bucher, of Brown University, created a sensation in 1917 by announcing a new process which he had worked out with admirable completeness and which has some very attractive features. It needs no electric power or high pressure retorts or liquid air apparatus. He simply fills a twenty-foot tube with briquets made out of soda ash, iron and coke and passes producer gas through the heated tube. Producer gas contains nitrogen since it is made by passing air over hot coal. The reaction is:

2Na2CO3+ 4C + N2= 2NaCN + 3COsodium carbon nitrogen sodium carboncarbonate cyanide monoxide

The iron here acts as the catalyst and converts two harmless substances, sodium carbonate, which is common washing soda, and carbon, into two of the most deadly compounds known to man, cyanide and carbon monoxide, which is what kills you when you blow out the gas. Sodium cyanide is a salt of hydrocyanic acid, which for, some curious reason is called "Prussic acid." It is so violent a poison that, as the freshman said in a chemistry recitation, "a single drop of it placed on the tongue of a dog will kill a man."

But sodium cyanide is not only useful in itself, for the extraction of gold and cleaning of silver, but can be converted into ammonia, and a variety of other compounds such as urea and oxamid, which are good fertilizers; sodium ferrocyanide, that makes Prussian blue; and oxalic acid used in dyeing. Professor Bucher claimed that his furnace could be set up in a day at a cost of less than $100 and could turn out 150 pounds ofsodium cyanide in twenty-four hours. This process was placed freely at the disposal of the United States Government for the war and a 10-ton plant was built at Saltville, Va., by the Ordnance Department. But the armistice put a stop to its operations and left the future of the process undetermined.

A CHEMICAL REACTION ON A LARGE SCALEA CHEMICAL REACTION ON A LARGE SCALE

From the chemist's standpoint modern warfare consists in the rapid liberation of nitrogen from its compounds

Courtesy of E.I. du Pont de Nemours Co.Courtesy of E.I. du Pont de Nemours Co.

BURNING AIR IN A BIRKELAND-EYDE FURNACE AT THE DU PONT PLANTAn electric arc consuming about 4000 horse-power of energy is passing between the U-shaped electrodes which are made of copper tube cooled by an internal current of water. On the sides of the chamber are seen the openings through which the air passes impinging directly on both sides of the surface of the disk of flame. This flame is approximately seven feet in diameter and appears to be continuous although an alternating current of fifty cycles a second is used. The electric arc is spread into this disk flame by the repellent power of an electro-magnet the pointed pole of which is seen at bottom of the picture. Under this intense heat a part of the nitrogen and oxygen of the air combine to form oxides of nitrogen which when dissolved in water form the nitric acid used in explosives.

BURNING AIR IN A BIRKELAND-EYDE FURNACE AT THE DU PONT PLANT

An electric arc consuming about 4000 horse-power of energy is passing between the U-shaped electrodes which are made of copper tube cooled by an internal current of water. On the sides of the chamber are seen the openings through which the air passes impinging directly on both sides of the surface of the disk of flame. This flame is approximately seven feet in diameter and appears to be continuous although an alternating current of fifty cycles a second is used. The electric arc is spread into this disk flame by the repellent power of an electro-magnet the pointed pole of which is seen at bottom of the picture. Under this intense heat a part of the nitrogen and oxygen of the air combine to form oxides of nitrogen which when dissolved in water form the nitric acid used in explosives.

Courtesy of E.I. du Pont de Nemours Co.Courtesy of E.I. du Pont de Nemours Co.

A BATTERY OF BIRKELAND-EYDE FURNACES FOR THE FIXATION OF NITROGEN AT THE DU PONT PLANT

We might have expected that the fixation of nitrogen by passing an electrical spark through hot air would have been an American invention, since it was Franklin who snatched the lightning from the heavens as well as the scepter from the tyrant and since our output of hot air is unequaled by any other nation. But little attention was paid to the nitrogen problem until 1916 when it became evident that we should soon be drawn into a war "with a first class power." On June 3, 1916, Congress placed $20,000,000 at the disposal of the president for investigation of "the best, cheapest and most available means for the production of nitrate and other products for munitions of war and useful in the manufacture of fertilizers and other useful products by water power or any other power." But by the time war was declared on April 6, 1917, no definite program had been approved and by the time the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, no plants were in active operation. But five plants had been started and two of them were nearly ready to begin work when they were closed by the ending of the war. United States Nitrate Plant No. 1 was located at Sheffield, Alabama, and was designed for the production of ammonia by "direct action" from nitrogen and hydrogen according to the plans of the American Chemical Company. Its capacity was calculated at 60,000 pounds of anhydrousammonia a day, half of which was to be oxidized to nitric acid. Plant No. 2 was erected at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to use the process of the American Cyanamid Company. This was contracted to produce 110,000 tons of ammonium nitrate a year and later two other cyanamid plants of half that capacity were started at Toledo and Ancor, Ohio.

At Muscle Shoals a mushroom city of 20,000 sprang up on an Alabama cotton field in six months. The raw material, air, was as abundant there as anywhere and the power, water, could be obtained from the Government hydro-electric plant on the Tennessee River, but this was not available during the war, so steam was employed instead. The heat of the coal was used to cool the air down to the liquefying point. The principle of this process is simple. Everybody knows that heat expands and cold contracts, but not everybody has realized the converse of this rule, that expansion cools and compression heats. If air is forced into smaller space, as in a tire pump, it heats up and if allowed to expand to ordinary pressure it cools off again. But if the air while compressed is cooled and then allowed to expand it must get still colder and the process can go on till it becomes cold enough to congeal. That is, by expanding a great deal of air, a little of it can be reduced to the liquefying point. At Muscle Shoals the plant for liquefying air, in order to get the nitrogen out of it, consisted of two dozen towers each capable of producing 1765 cubic feet of pure nitrogen per hour. The air was drawn in through two pipes, a yard across, and passed through scrubbing towers to remove impurities. The air was then compressed to 600 pounds per squareinch. Nine tenths of the air was permitted to expand to 50 pounds and this expansion cooled down the other tenth, still under high pressure, to the liquefying point. Rectifying towers 24 feet high were stacked with trays of liquid air from which the nitrogen was continually bubbling off since its boiling point is twelve degrees centigrade lower than that of oxygen. Pure nitrogen gas collected at the top of the tower and the residual liquid air, now about half oxygen, was allowed to escape at the bottom.

The nitrogen was then run through pipes into the lime-nitrogen ovens. There were 1536 of these about four feet square and each holding 1600 pounds of pulverized calcium carbide. This is at first heated by an electrical current to start the reaction which afterwards produces enough heat to keep it going. As the stream of nitrogen gas passes over the finely divided carbide it is absorbed to form calcium cyanamid as described on a previous page. This product is cooled, powdered and wet to destroy any quicklime or carbide left unchanged. Then it is charged into autoclaves and steam at high temperature and pressure is admitted. The steam acting on the cyanamid sets free ammonia gas which is carried to towers down which cold water is sprayed, giving the ammonia water, familiar to the kitchen and the bathroom.

But since nitric acid rather than ammonia was needed for munitions, the oxygen of the air had to be called into play. This process, as already explained, is carried on by aid of a catalyzer, in this case platinum wire. At Muscle Shoals there were 696 of these catalyzer boxes. The ammonia gas, mixed with air to providethe necessary oxygen, was admitted at the top and passed down through a sheet of platinum gauze of 80 mesh to the inch, heated to incandescence by electricity. In contact with this the ammonia is converted into gaseous oxides of nitrogen (the familiar red fumes of the laboratory) which, carried off in pipes, cooled and dissolved in water, form nitric acid.

But since none of the national plants could be got into action during the war, the United States was compelled to draw upon South America for its supply. The imports of Chilean saltpeter rose from half a million tons in 1914 to a million and a half in 1917. After peace was made the Department of War turned over to the Department of Agriculture its surplus of saltpeter, 150,000 tons, and it was sold to American farmers at cost, $81 a ton.

For nitrogen plays a double rôle in human economy. It appears like Brahma in two aspects, Vishnu the Preserver and Siva the Destroyer. Here I have been considering nitrogen in its maleficent aspect, its use in war. We now turn to its beneficent aspect, its use in peace.

The Great War not only starved people: it starved the land. Enough nitrogen was thrown away in some indecisive battle on the Aisne to save India from a famine. The population of Europe as a whole has not been lessened by the war, but the soil has been robbed of its power to support the population. A plant requires certain chemical elements for its growth and all of these must be within reach of its rootlets, for it will accept no substitutes. A wheat stalk in France before the war had placed at its feet nitrates from Chile, phosphates from Florida and potash from Germany. All these were shut off by the firing line and the shortage of shipping.

Out of the eighty elements only thirteen are necessary for crops. Four of these are gases: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and chlorine. Five are metals: potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron and sodium. Four are non-metallic solids: carbon, sulfur, phosphorus and silicon. Three of these, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, making up the bulk of the plant, are obtainablead libitumfrom the air and water. The other ten in the form of salts are dissolved in the water that is sucked up from the soil. The quantity needed by the plant is so small and the quantity contained in the soil is so great that ordinarily we need not bother about the supplyexcept in case of three of them. They are nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. These would be useless or fatal to plant life in the elemental form, but fixed in neutral salt they are essential plant foods. A ton of wheat takes away from the soil about 47 pounds of nitrogen, 18 pounds of phosphoric acid and 12 pounds of potash. If then the farmer does not restore this much to his field every year he is drawing upon his capital and this must lead to bankruptcy in the long run.

So much is easy to see, but actually the question is extremely complicated. When the German chemist, Justus von Liebig, pointed out in 1840 the possibility of maintaining soil fertility by the application of chemicals it seemed at first as though the question were practically solved. Chemists assumed that all they had to do was to analyze the soil and analyze the crop and from this figure out, as easily as balancing a bank book, just how much of each ingredient would have to be restored to the soil every year. But somehow it did not work out that way and the practical agriculturist, finding that the formulas did not fit his farm, sneered at the professors and whenever they cited Liebig to him he irreverently transposed the syllables of the name. The chemist when he went deeper into the subject saw that he had to deal with the colloids, damp, unpleasant, gummy bodies that he had hitherto fought shy of because they would not crystallize or filter. So the chemist called to his aid the physicist on the one hand and the biologist on the other and then they both had their hands full. The physicist found that he had to deal with a polyvariant system of solids, liquids and gasesmutually miscible in phases too numerous to be handled by Gibbs's Rule. The biologist found that he had to deal with the invisible flora and fauna of a new world.

Plants obey the injunction of Tennyson and rise on the stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things. Each successive generation lives on what is left of the last in the soil plus what it adds from the air and sunshine. As soon as a leaf or tree trunk falls to the ground it is taken in charge by a wrecking crew composed of a myriad of microscopic organisms who proceed to break it up into its component parts so these can be used for building a new edifice. The process is called "rotting" and the product, the black, gummy stuff of a fertile soil, is called "humus." The plants, that is, the higher plants, are not able to live on their own proteids as the animals are. But there are lower plants, certain kinds of bacteria, that can break up the big complicated proteid molecules into their component parts and reduce the nitrogen in them to ammonia or ammonia-like compounds. Having done this they stop and turn over the job to another set of bacteria to be carried through the next step. For you must know that soil society is as complex and specialized as that above ground and the tiniest bacterium would die rather than violate the union rules. The second set of bacteria change the ammonia over to nitrites and then a third set, the Amalgamated Union of Nitrate Workers, steps in and completes the process of oxidation with an efficiency that Ostwald might envy, for ninety-six per cent. of the ammonia of the soil is converted into nitrates. But if the conditions are not just right,if the food is insufficient or unwholesome or if the air that circulates through the soil is contaminated with poison gases, the bacteria go on a strike. The farmer, not seeing the thing from the standpoint of the bacteria, says the soil is "sick" and he proceeds to doctor it according to his own notion of what ails it. First perhaps he tries running in strike breakers. He goes to one of the firms that makes a business of supplying nitrogen-fixing bacteria from the scabs or nodules of the clover roots and scatters these colonies over the field. But if the living conditions remain bad the newcomers will soon quit work too and the farmer loses his money. If he is wise, then, he will remedy the conditions, putting a better ventilation system in his soil perhaps or neutralizing the sourness by means of lime or killing off the ameboid banditti that prey upon the peaceful bacteria engaged in the nitrogen industry. It is not an easy job that the farmer has in keeping billions of billions of subterranean servants contented and working together, but if he does not succeed at this he wastes his seed and labor.

The layman regards the soil as a platform or anchoring place on which to set plants. He measures its value by its superficial area without considering its contents, which is as absurd as to estimate a man's wealth by the size of his safe. The difference in point of view is well illustrated by the old story of the city chap who was showing his farmer uncle the sights of New York. When he took him to Central Park he tried to astonish him by saying "This land is worth $500,000 an acre." The old farmer dug his toe into the ground, kicked out a clod, broke it open, looked at it, spit on itand squeezed it in his hand and then said, "Don't you believe it; 'tain't worth ten dollars an acre. Mighty poor soil I call it." Both were right.

Courtesy of American Cyanamid Co.Courtesy of American Cyanamid Co.

FIXING NITROGEN BY CALCIUM CARBIDEAview of the oven room in the plant of the American Cyanamid Company. The steel cylinders standing in the background are packed with the carbide and then put into the ovens sunk in the floor. When these are heated internally by electricity to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit pure nitrogen is let in and absorbed by the carbide, making cyanamid, which may be used as a fertilizer or for ammonia.

FIXING NITROGEN BY CALCIUM CARBIDE

Aview of the oven room in the plant of the American Cyanamid Company. The steel cylinders standing in the background are packed with the carbide and then put into the ovens sunk in the floor. When these are heated internally by electricity to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit pure nitrogen is let in and absorbed by the carbide, making cyanamid, which may be used as a fertilizer or for ammonia.

Photo by International Film ServicePhoto by International Film Service

A BARROW FULL OF POTASH SALTS EXTRACTED FROM SIX TONS OF GREEN KELP BY THE GOVERNMENT CHEMISTS

NATURE'S SILENT METHOD OF NITROGEN FIXATIONNATURE'S SILENT METHOD OF NITROGEN FIXATION

The nodules on the vetch roots contain colonies of bacteria which have the power of taking the free nitrogen out of the air and putting it in compounds suitable for plant food.

The modern agriculturist realizes that the soil is a laboratory for the production of plant food and he ordinarily takes more pains to provide a balanced ration for it than he does for his family. Of course the necessity of feeding the soil has been known ever since man began to settle down and the ancient methods of maintaining its fertility, though discovered accidentally and followed blindly, were sound and efficacious. Virgil, who like Liberty Hyde Bailey was fond of publishing agricultural bulletins in poetry, wrote two thousand years ago:

But sweet vicissitudes of rest and toilMake easy labor and renew the soilYet sprinkle sordid ashes all aroundAnd load with fatt'ning dung thy fallow soil.

The ashes supplied the potash and the dung the nitrate and phosphate. Long before the discovery of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria, the custom prevailed of sowing pea-like plants every third year and then plowing them under to enrich the soil. But such local supplies were always inadequate and as soon as deposits of fertilizers were discovered anywhere in the world they were drawn upon. The richest of these was the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru, where millions of penguins and pelicans had lived in a most untidy manner for untold centuries. The guano composed of the excrement of the birds mixed with the remains of dead birds and the fishes they fed upon was piled up to adepth of 120 feet. From this Isle of Penguins—which is not that described by Anatole France—a billion dollars' worth of guano was taken and the deposit was soon exhausted.

Then the attention of the world was directed to the mainland of Peru and Chile, where similar guano deposits had been accumulated and, not being washed away on account of the lack of rain, had been deposited as sodium nitrate, or "saltpeter." These beds were discovered by a German, Taddeo Haenke, in 1809, but it was not until the last quarter of the century that the nitrates came into common use as a fertilizer. Since then more than 53,000,000 tons have been taken out of these beds and the exportation has risen to a rate of 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 tons a year. How much longer they will last is a matter of opinion and opinion is largely influenced by whether you have your money invested in Chilean nitrate stock or in one of the new synthetic processes for making nitrates. The United States Department of Agriculture says the nitrate beds will be exhausted in a few years. On the other hand the Chilean Inspector General of Nitrate Deposits in his latest official report says that they will last for two hundred years at the present rate and that then there are incalculable areas of low grade deposits, containing less than eleven per cent., to be drawn upon.

Anyhow, the South American beds cannot long supply the world's need of nitrates and we shall some time be starving unless creative chemistry comes to the rescue. In 1898 Sir William Crookes—the discoverer of the "Crookes tubes," the radiometer and radiant matter—startled the British Association for the Advancementof Science by declaring that the world was nearing the limit of wheat production and that by 1931 the bread-eaters, the Caucasians, would have to turn to other grains or restrict their population while the rice and millet eaters of Asia would continue to increase. Sir William was laughed at then as a sensationalist. He was, but his sensations were apt to prove true and it is already evident that he was too near right for comfort. Before we were half way to the date he set we had two wheatless days a week, though that was because we persisted in shooting nitrates into the air. The area producing wheat was by decades:[1]

Back to Index Next