HAND & BUSH

In industrial chemical research it is proverbial that today's bird in the bush, tomorrow is two birds in the hand--that is, that today's guesses and experiments are the basis of tomorrow's chemical industry. High lights of discovery and speculation at the American Chemical Society's convention last week in Baltimore:

Glycerin, though widely used in medicine, printing and the manufacture of explosives, is a comparatively minor byproduct of soapmaking. Therefore the supply is limited. Three chemists of Shell Development Co. (Emeryville, Calif.) announced a new way of synthesizing huge amounts of glycerin from propylene, a waste product of gasoline refining. The propylene is treated with chlorine to produce allyl chloride, the precursor substance from which glycerin is made.

No Glycerin. Chemist Henry Bohn Hass of Purdue University announced a way of making commercial and military explosives without using glycerin at all --simply from air, steam and natural gas. The air yields nitrogen by one of the standard fixation processes. Nitrogen is a surly element which ordinarily must be bludgeoned, chemically speaking, into combination with other substances. But at Purdue last year it was accidentally discovered that, at certain critical temperatures, nitrogen vapor from nitric acid combines readily and rapidly with methane and ethane from natural gas. This reaction yielded two new high explosives, "nibglycerol trinitrate" and "nibglycol dinitrate." Dr. Hass told a war-jittery world that a small part of the U. S. natural gas supply would yield all the high explosives that the whole world could conceivably use.

Streamlined Molecule. At present the best and costliest aviation gasoline has an octane rating (no knock at high compression) of 100. Last week Dr. Gustav Egloff of Chicago's Universal Oil Products Co. revealed that his company had developed a super-fuel of 125-octane rating, 2-2-3 trimethyl butane. This stuff has seven carbon atoms in its molecule but instead of being arranged in the usual thin chain, the carbons are pulled into a streamlined, fishlike shape which makes for slower, more efficient combustion. First cost of this fuel was $3,600 per gallon. Present cost: $50 a gallon. Dr. Egloff hopes the price will eventually be brought down to the range of practical consumption.

Rubber from Sulphur. Every boy with a toy chemistry set knows that when sulphur is heated it turns to a dark mass like rubber. The resemblance is superficial. However, six chemists from the University of Alabama reported making a new kind of synthetic rubber by combining molten sulphur with vapors of chlorobenzene. It has special properties not possessed by either natural rubber or the famed chlorine-containing synthetic rubber developed by the late Father Nieuwland of Notre Dame and by Du Pont chemists (TIME, May 6, 1935). For example, said the Alabamians, "the rubber-like property is lost when the substance is dissolved and regained upon precipitation with an acid. This may mean that cloth and similar substances may be impregnated." The sulphur-combining process is also expected to create innovations in the manufacture of plastics, drugs, dyes.

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