Chemists

Leaving their laboratories, leading chemists of the world are meeting at State College, Pa., this month for an Institute of Chemistry held by the American Chemical Society. Sessions began last week with some 200 gentlemen present whose business it is to determine what the world is made of and how it may be put together in better combinations of the ingredients. In Industry. The importance of chemistry in industry is now too obvious to need emphasis, but the delegates took special satisfaction in knowing that the huge U. S. Steel Corp. has lately organized a pure research department "of proper magnitude," with Professor John Johnston (from Yale) as active head and Director Robert Andrews Millikan of California Institute of Technology as chief adviser, to study alloys. Game. Dr. Charles Holmes Herty of Manhattan proposed a game for undergraduate chemists--let them try to find new uses for the many strange derivations that analysts have obtained from petroleum and other raw materials. Gassing a City. Dr. Harry Nicholls Holmes of Oberlin College (Ohio) took up the chemist's brief for gas warfare. He suggested that some city of perhaps 10,000 population be given about as much warning as it would get in wartime, that gas masks and other protection be provided for the citizens and "possibly . . . horses," that the city then be gassed. This would show, thought Dr. Holmes, the humanity of gas as a weapon. "The belief that gas warfare is devilish should be abolished." Dr. Holmes was talking throughout only about tear gases (bromacetone, xylyl bromide, diphosgene, etc.).

X-Rays. Several speeches set forth the new usefulness of X--rays in studying the crystal structures of pearls, limes, asbestos, butter, wax, etc. The X-ray studies of C. Norman Kemp in England on coal and coke cited, praised. X-raying of the structure of rubber, which is amorphous (noncrystalline) when unstretched and develops fibre-crystals when stretched at various tensions, was noted as a likely road to the discovery of how to make synthetic rubber.

Movies. In the Nittany Theatre, where Penn State undergraduates stamp their feet and throw peanuts at the shadows of Harold Lloyd and Gloria Swanson, the chemists admired cinematic views of chemical wonders. A strip of animated drawings designed and presented by the General Electric Co. projected the electron theory of atoms into visible action, showing protons and their spinning satellites moving about to form molecular cubes, circles, chains, polymorphs.