The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-12-01
USEFUL CHEMIST.
Experts worth 00y000, ,000a Year Due
 to His Applied Science

1 to His Applied Science.
 Boston Special
 The various experiments which the | United States government mas been conducting to determine standaros oi purity of foodstuffs have brought m | to special prominence this year ,ne modern development Of chemistry og | which. having become fundamen.al In a great many manufacturing and me- chanical processes 1t is now constd- | cred A prime requisite in tecnincal training. There is hardly a branch of the twentieth century industry Tn which an important part Is not as- signed to the chemist. He Is no long l CT merely a scientific theorist; he is a professional man whose work IS plainly practical and whose accom- | plishments are doing at least as much as those of any other profession to get the world forward on the road or progress.
 The striking thing about the tweff- tieth century chemistry Is the rela- ton of the pure science. which Is what the, laymen generally thinks of, to the applied, which is the practical utili- zation of the experimenter's discov- cries. Indeed, though physical chem istry Is commonly regarded as dealing with abstract questions. the United States now market annually over $100, ,000, 900 worth of products ob- tained by the application of only a portion of it's results-such products for example, as aluminium. carborun- dunn, sodium and bleaching powder The demands of manufacturers for in- proved processes of products, the utilization of waste and so on. has stimulated and facilitated pure" in- vestigation; and. on the other hand. the spurring of the scientist has driv- en on the industrial chemist to experi- ments of as great general value as of commercial worth
 So important Is this interdependen- cy considered to be- in fact, that the Massachusetts Institute of Technolo- gy has recently established a special research laboratory, the first connected with an American educational insti- tuition, wherein a group of workers are devoting their entire energies to | the purely scientific problems that so often lead to the applied chemistry of tomorrow. At the. recent international meeting of scientists 1t was said that the man. ner and method of training men who will apply to industrial needs the phe- | nomena discovered by the scientific rec1use are matters which have to do with not only the future of chemi- cal industries, but with the very vi- | tality of nations"
 What pure and applied chemistry
 working together. have wrought for the modern man and woman makes an
 almost endless list. yet their work has but just begun. The drug trade demanded a quinine that should be devoid of the bitter taste which made that valuable remedy so difficult to administer sometimes. but should re- tain all its antimalarial properties, and the chemist made quinine tasre> | less. Thorium oxide was known for
 talf a cetnury before 1t was utilized as the basis for Welsbach mantels
 that have given new Illuminating pow
 CTS to our gas lights; the waste mai-
 terial from pitchblende was thrown
 away after most of the uranium had
 been removed, until suddenly 1t was
 discovered that radium could be ex-
 tracted from it; twenty-five years ago Professor Ira Remsen. as a result of
 strictly scientific Investigations. dis covered benzoic sulphimide, which un- der its more familiar name of saccha,-
 rine has been a boon to thousands of
 sufferers from i'll health who could
 not with safety use sugar: and in sev-
 eral branches of industry what was
 once considered a waste by product
 has become the main material of lac- tories.
 The chemist has his share in prac-
 tically all forms of productive activ-
 ity. The Department of Agriculture
 while 1t is testing foods. is at the
 same time experimenting with meth,-
 ods of treating soils. In the cotton
 dustry for instance, the chemist
 begins his work with the cultivation
 of the ground in which the seed Is to
 be planted and does not finish 1t until the tinted fabric Is wound and bun
 dled to be put on sale In the store:
 he begins with the digging of ore
 from the mine and follows the crude
 material through its manifold changes till it becomes one of the great en-
 zines that distribute our commerce
 over the earth. Chemistry and a bat
 tleship seem far enough removed. yet chemistry Is one of the important stu dies of the young men whom Uncle
 sam selects from the Naval Academy
 at Annapolis and sends to the Insti-
 tute of Technology to be turned into
 naval constructors. In modern naval
 construction, to take a single instance.
 the whole problem of armored war
 ships turns upon chemical methods of securing such intimate combinations of