Chemists in Atlanta

To counterbalance the workaday side of a convention there are always light moments devised by thoughtful committees. Most of these at last week's Atlanta meeting of the American Chemical Society were for the scientists' ladies. Included: a barbecue by Atlanta's public-spirited Coca-Cola works, an auto ride to the Federal Penitentiary, excursions to nearby fertilizer factories.

While wives were thus disporting themselves, busy husbands were scurrying about Atlanta in taxicabs which gave badge-wearers a flat 25-c- rate, attending divisional meetings, talking shop.

The 1,500 members attending the convention (the Society's 79th) were divided into 15 groups covering various phases of industrial and experimental chemistry. Of the 500 papers read before the sections many were on new angles of old subjects. Others, saved for the convention, were notes on new subjects. Some angles, some notes:

Refrigerants. Frequent have been deaths attributed to escaped gas from mechanical refrigerators. In many of the 22 commercial types poisonous gases are used.

Thomas Midgley Jr., Dayton chemist, inventor of ethyl gasoline, placed a dish of a new refrigerant devised by him on a table before his section. Leaning low over the boiling dish he inhaled the white gas given off by the steaming liquid. Through a rubber tube he then blew the gas out of his lungs into a dish containing a burning candle, extinguished it.

The only effect of the gas on humans is to produce a "kind of intoxication." Said Experimenter Midgley: ''The best way I can describe this sensation is to say that it is deadening. Instead of the exhilaration such as is credited to alcohol, these fumes do not arouse a desire to sing or to recite poetry."

Midgley's refrigerant, a combination of fluorine, chlorine, carbon, was developed in a General Motors laboratory with the aid of Dr. A. L. Henne, Belgian chemist.

Uranium. Topping the atomic weight scale (though not highest in specific gravity) is uranium,-- a metal which has been virtually impossible to isolate. So-called ''pure" uranium is almost always contaminated with oxides. This contaminated material and salts of the metal are used in the ceramic industry, to produce high-speed steels, in dye manufacture.

Dr. F. H. Driggs, Westinghouse researcher, announced that he had been able to reduce a salt of uranium, in an electric vacuum furnace, to the free metal. Cost per lb.: $400.

Chief use of free uranium is the manufacture of photo-electric cells.

Xylose, a rare sugar which until recently sold for $100 the lb., may now be produced from cottonseed hull bran. Chief virtue of xylose: to many plump people it is nonfattening.

Dr. W. T. Schreiber, U. S. Bureau of Standards chemist, in association with other workers at Anniston, Ala., has been producing xylose on a semi-commercial basis. Each year the U. S. produces a million and one-half tons of cottonseed hull bran which might be converted into xylose.

The new process was developed in line with the Federal search for means of utilizing the land's waste products. Cotton seeds* were attractive because they were being gathered for use in the vegetable oil industry (TIME. April 7).

Atom Building. Patiently, the University of Chicago's Dr. William Draper Harkins sat beside a nitrogen tube and took 10.000 photographs, attempting to get an "atom collision" on the print. Each turned out badly, revealed nothing.

Then came a good one. The picture showed a threadlike path through the tube, splitting and continuing Y fashion in two paths. After examining the photographs Dr. Harkins concluded that he had broken down two atoms, built two new ones.

Specifically he was shooting helium atoms (alpha particles derived from radio active thorium) from a shuttered, camera-like box into a tube containing nitrogen and water vapor. The helium atoms traveling at a clip of 11,000 mi. per sec. smashed into the nitrogen atoms. The force of the impact caused the atoms to merge for an instant to form fluorine which immediately broke down, with explosive force, into hydrogen and oxygen.

Other Business. Winners of many of the Garvan Prizes which total $50,000, were announced. In the U. S. 288 high school pupils will receive $120 each for essays, six of the group will get scholar ships which will send them through col lege. Next year Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur will be chairman of the awards committee, succeeding Herbert Clark Hoover.

*Named by the discoverer of uranous oxide, Marin Heinrich Klaproth, after the planet Uranus. Not until 60 years later was ''uranium" broken down into the true metal.

*0ther cottonseed products: rayon and paper, made from the fuzz stripped from the seed.

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