THAT’S THE WAY THE COOKIE CRUMBLES (18 page)

Ask who invented the lightbulb, and most people will mutter something about Thomas Edison. But Edison did no such thing. Scientists were tinkering with lightbulbs for decades before Edison came along. America’s greatest inventor did, however, develop the first lightbulbs suitable for widespread use and the electrical grid needed to power them.

Way back in 1802, Humphry Davy, one of the most brilliant chemists of all time, became interested in the phenomenon of electricity. By this time, he had already published a treatise on the pain-killing properties of laughing gas and suggested its use in surgical operations. As a result of his chemical prowess, the Royal Institution in London invited Davy to further his career there. The institution’s mandate was to encourage scholars to combine “useful knowledge with the amusement and instruction of the higher ranks.”

Davy had closely followed the work of Italy’s Alessandro Volta, who had just discovered that if he grasped wires attached to silver and copper plates separated by moist cardboard he would experience a shock akin to that caused by grabbing an electric eel. Volta had created a primitive battery. Davy recognized this effect as an excellent device for combining useful knowledge with amusement. In the basement of the Royal Institution, he installed a battery made of two thousand of Volta’s “cells” and noted that a wire connecting the ends began to glow red. Here was a method to produce both heat and light. Could it signal the end of the inefficient and often dangerous gaslight?

Unfortunately, the glow did not last long because the wire melted. No material available to Davy could withstand the intense heat that the device produced. But Davy did observe that sometimes, as the wire melted through, a spark would jump between the two disconnected ends. Intrigued by this phenomenon, he experimented further and discovered that if he interrupted the wire with two pieces of charcoal placed at an exact distance from one another, he could generate a continuous spark, or an electric arc. The light produced by the sparks and the glowing charcoal was brilliant.

Before people could put arc lamps to practical use, however, Davy had to make yet another discovery — namely, Michael Faraday. As a youngster, Faraday worked for a bookbinder. One day, a customer brought in a volume of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
for repair, and, as luck would have it, the book fell open at the entry on electricity. Faraday was captivated and wanted to learn more. He began to attend Davy’s famous public lectures at the Royal Institution, and the great man soon hired him as a lab assistant. Faraday went on to enjoy a brilliant career, unraveling many of the secrets of electricity and magnetism. Perhaps his greatest discovery was that by moving a coiled wire in a magnetic field, he could cause an electric current to flow through the wire. In short, he’d invented the electrical generator, or dynamo.

Arc lights could now proceed full steam ahead. Steam-powered generators delivered the needed electricity, and soon London streets basked in an almost daylight glow. But even though the brilliant light dazzled the public, many scientists had long understood that arc lights were impractical; they needed constant servicing and were much too bright for home use. These scientists had not forgotten Davy’s observation of the glowing wire. Could they find a substance that would not melt when a strong current flowed through it?

As early as 1841, Englishman Frederick DeMoleyns patented an electric bulb that featured powdered charcoal between platinum wires. DeMoleyns’s bulb produced light for a few minutes, but then the charcoal burned. His countryman Joseph Swan improved on it in 1848 by fabricating filaments from paper strips coated with charcoal, which he baked at a high temperature in a pottery kiln. And then Swan had a bright idea. If he pumped the air out of the bulb, then there would be no oxygen present, and the charcoal could not burn. Since vacuum pumps had recently been invented, he was able to test his idea. In 1878, Swan demonstrated an evacuated bulb with a glowing carbon filament.

And this is where Edison enters the picture. Hundreds of inventions, including the stock ticker and the phonograph, had already made him rich and famous. He now began to devote his energy and his massive resources to taking a scientific curiosity — namely, the lightbulb — and turning it into a practical commodity. Edison, by sheer force of will, accomplished this. His “insomnia squad” of workers tried over sixteen hundred different filaments, hoping to find one that could stand up to the electric current. These ranged from beard hair to carbonized sewing thread. Finally, in 1879, just fourteen months after beginning his search, Edison stripped a thin piece of bamboo from a fan and heated it in an oxygen-free environment until it carbonized. The bamboo filament glowed in an evacuated bulb for forty hours.

Edison’s genius, however, lay not only in producing a practical bulb but also in rapidly envisioning and designing a complete electrical distribution network, from the power plant and the transmission wires to home switches and sockets. On New Year’s Eve 1880, he dazzled more than three thousand onlookers when he lit up his Menlo Park, New Jersey, “invention factory” with forty bulbs. Within two years, Edison had built the Pearl Street Generating Plant in Manhattan and was supplying electricity to eighty-five houses, shops, and offices. As he worked, Edison had carefully patented his progressive discoveries; Swan had not. Edison now had the temerity to sue Swan for patent infringement, in spite of the fact that Swan had built his first lightbulb when Edison was only one year old. Eventually, the two settled their differences and collaborated on the commercial production of “Ediswan” bulbs.

Over time, the Ediswan bulb has been improved upon. Filaments made of tungsten, the metal with the highest melting temperature, were introduced in 1911. Tungsten bulbs burned for hundreds of hours before their filaments evaporated, often producing the characteristic black deposit on the inside surface. Filling the bulb with a mixture of argon and nitrogen slowed this evaporation and allowed for a product that could function at higher temperatures and give off more light. Then, if manufacturers added a halogen, such as iodine, to the bulb, it reacted with the evaporating tungsten atoms and redeposited these on the filament. Halogen lamps could therefore operate at even higher temperatures and produce even brighter light. But the bulbs had to be made of more expensive quartz, because ordinary glass would melt at these temperatures.

Today, tungsten-filament lightbulbs routinely last for 750 hours. But in the offing is a bulb that has no filament and burns for over ten thousand hours. The bulb is made of quartz and filled with argon and a small amount of sulfur. The sulfur atoms produce a stunning amount of light when excited by microwaves. Prototypes already light the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, but so far the bulbs are too bright for home use. Shades of the arc lamp.

The moans and groans coming from the Philadelphia hotel room alarmed other guests passing by in the hallway. But by the time the manager appeared and opened the door, the sounds had ceased. Wallace Carothers, the man whose invention was the very embodiment of DuPont’s famous slogan “Better Things for Better Living . . . Through Chemistry,” lay sprawled on the floor, dead.

One of the most popular attractions at the 1939 New York World’s Fair was the DuPont exhibit. There, steel balls came crashing down onto sheets of glass laminated with polyvinyl- butyryl, a brand-new plastic. Miraculously, the glass did not shatter. This was obviously the perfect material for automobile windshields. Then there was Princess Plastic, a synthetic lady dressed from heel to hat in materials created in the DuPont laboratories. But for many a gentleman, the greatest attraction was Miss Chemistry, a shapely young lady who reclined on a couch with her skirt hitched high to demonstrate DuPont’s newest invention. Ladies also flocked to this exhibit, drawn not by Miss Chemistry’s legs, but by what those legs were sporting. They were absolutely amazed by the newfangled stockings, which seemed as sheer as silk but were made of a fiber stronger than steel. A fiber that — according to the company’s advertising — was made of coal, air, and water. This was the triumphant debut of nylon.

Carothers never dreamed that his invention would capture the public’s fancy in this fashion. He never imagined that on N-Day, May 15, 1940, women would line up at the doors of department stores across the country, eager to be among the first to purchase a single pair (one per customer) of nylon stockings. Five million ladies went home happy that day. But this was only the beginning. Soon, nylon found its way into parachutes — a critical development, since Japan had cut the U.S. off from its Oriental silk suppliers. Indeed, the military encouraged women to turn in their old nylon stockings to be recycled into parachutes. Actress Betty Grable championed this cause and auctioned off a pair of nylons that had sheathed her famous legs, fetching forty thousand dollars’ worth of war bonds. The new material was also used to make ropes, tires, tents, and numerous other items essential to the war effort. Curiously, this most practical of discoveries had been the handiwork of Carothers, a man who had accepted a job at DuPont under the condition that the company would not require him to carry out research aimed at turning a profit.

Wallace Carothers had earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Illinois, working under Roger Adams, probably the best-known American chemist of the era. He went on to teach at Illinois for a year before accepting a professorship at Harvard. It was the research he conducted there, into the fledgling field of polymer chemistry, that roused the interest of DuPont. Hermann Staudinger, in Germany, had made the controversial suggestion that small molecules could be linked together into long chains, called polymers, which had decidedly different physical properties from the starting material. Yet no one knew exactly what sort of forces held the small molecules together, so Carothers applied himself to solving the problem. He quickly concluded that there was no great mystery. Scientists already understood that atoms in molecules were held together by the sharing of electrons. Such covalent bonds could also be forged, Carothers surmised, between atoms of different molecules, creating a long chain.

DuPont had made its fortune producing gunpowder and explosives, but it had begun to branch into other areas. Plastics, which were made of polymers, seemed to be the wave of the future. And Wallace Carothers was one of the brightest lights in this field of research. The only problem was that he had no interest in practicalities — he admired the pure academic quest for knowledge. On numerous occasions, DuPont representatives had tried unsuccessfully to entice Carothers away from Harvard. Then they sweetened the pot. They promised Carothers that he would have unlimited research funds and as many assistants as he needed; there would be absolutely no company interference in his work; he would be allowed to pursue his academic interests; and if there was a practical spin-off, that would be gravy. Carothers acquiesced.

In 1928, within weeks of moving to DuPont, Carothers decided to prove his theory about the bonding in giant molecules by building one. One of the best-known reactions in organic chemistry involves creating compounds called esters by joining together certain acids and alcohols. Carothers hypothesized that molecules that had acid functions on both ends could be reacted with molecules that had alcohol groupings on both ends in order to form long chains. He was right: Carothers had invented polyesters. Unfortunately, these early polyesters melted at a very low temperature and were impractical for fabrics. People were not interested in clothing that they couldn’t wash in hot water or iron. But Carothers knew that organic acids also formed bonds with compounds called amines to generate amides, and that these bonds were particularly strong. In 1935, with the help of his longtime assistant Julian Hill, Carothers made the first heat-resistant polyamide that could be drawn into a fiber. It was almost like drawing a rabbit from a hat. DuPont even considered naming the new material “Dooparooh,” for “DuPont pulls a rabbit out of a hat.” Some favored “norun,” but in the end the company settled on “nylon.”

Nylon was durable and resilient. Carothers was not. Throughout his life, he had suffered from periods of depression, and he even carried around a capsule of cyanide in case he needed it. He became convinced that after creating nylon he would never again have another idea to match it. So, in 1937, in that Philadelphia hotel room, he dissolved his cyanide in lemon juice and drank it. The man who gave us nylon, one of the best examples of “better living through chemistry,” would not live to see the results of his work.

It’s hard to fight an effective war without rubber. Fan belts, gaskets, gas masks, and tires are critical to the war effort. In 1930, a certain young American army officer was well aware of this, and he welcomed his assignment: to search for alternative sources of rubber. During World War I, the U.S. had lost access to the rubber plantations of South East Asia, and this had brought home to people the fact that reliance on foreign sources was a dangerous business. The officer’s task was to investigate the possibility of using the latex of the guayule plant, which grew freely in Texas, as an alternative source of rubber. Discovering that this was indeed a viable plan, he recommended that the plant be protected and reserved for emergencies. But his superiors ignored his advice.

Then came Pearl Harbor. Within weeks of the attack, the Japanese had advanced into the Asian rubber-producing countries, and the U.S. lost about ninety percent of its supply. A hastily appointed presidential commission reported that the very success of the Allied cause was at stake. Luckily, American ingenuity came to the fore, and by 1942 U.S. chemical companies were producing over 200,000 tons of synthetic rubber — twice the amount the Germans were cranking out. German scientists had begun research on synthetic rubber in the 1930s, because Germany had also learned its lesson during World War I, when the Allies had cut off its rubber supplies. Pioneering chemist Hermann Staudinger had offered his country a head start: he had proposed that rubber was a polymer, a giant molecule made up of repeating units called monomers.

As early as 1826, Michael Faraday had distilled rubber and identified a small molecule called isoprene as one of its decomposition products. By 1879, chemists treating isoprene with hydrochloric acid had produced the first synthetic rubbery materials, but they were unable to explain how this actually happened until Staudinger introduced the concept of polymers. Now it became clear to them that the key to synthetic rubber lay in joining isoprene units into long chains. But their attempts to do this ended in failure. So the Germans started experimenting with molecules similar to isoprene and finally found that a mixture of styrene and butadiene would yield a suitable rubbery copolymer when treated with a sodium catalyst. This “Buna-S” rubber (the name derives from butadiene, sodium [Na], and styrene) served Germany’s needs. They produced massive amounts; slave laborers in an Auschwitz factory made most of it.

Making Buna-S was not a simple business, as American scientists discovered. The polymerization worked best when the monomers were suspended in a solvent in the form of an emulsion, very much like fat droplets are suspended in water to form homogenized milk. Emulsifiers were needed to prevent the tiny droplets from coalescing, and soap was an ideal candidate. After all, soap works by emulsifying oil and water. The scientists selected Ivory soap, because they considered it to be the purest available. But there was a problem. While the soap was an excellent emulsifier, it somehow inactivated the sodium catalyst. Victor Mills, a chemist working for Proctor and Gamble, had an idea. Maybe the problem was the small amount of perfume that the makers of Ivory mixed in to mask the soapy smell. Mills made a special batch of scentless soap and found that it did the job perfectly. Normally, such discoveries would have been tightly guarded as industrial secrets, but the 1940s was no ordinary time. President Roosevelt had created the Office of the Rubber Director under William Jeffers, and he asked rubber manufacturers to pool their resources. Petroleum had been the classic source of styrene and butadiene, but now scientists were finding methods of making butadiene and styrene from the alcohol produced by fermenting of grain, potatoes, and molasses. By 1944, the U.S. was producing 700,000 tons of synthetic rubber, far outstripping Germany. Victor Mills’s discovery undoubtedly helped win the war.

Charles Goodyear would have been astounded by these developments. Just about a hundred years earlier, he had produced the first practical samples of rubber. But Goodyear did not invent rubber. South American native peoples were already using this exudate of the
Hevea brasiliensis
tree when the European explorers first arrived on the continent. Columbus described how they played games with rubber balls and even coated fabrics with the latex to make primitive galoshes. Europeans found few uses for the substance. But Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, determined that it could rub pencil marks off paper, and he coined the term “rubber.” Charles Macintosh sandwiched a layer between sheets of fabric and created the first raincoat. But rubber got hard in winter and soft and tacky in summer. Goodyear dedicated his life to solving this problem. He tried mixing everything he could think of with the tree sap, including soup and cream cheese. Financing his work was a constant difficulty. Goodyear even sold his children’s schoolbooks to help fund his research. Then came a happy accident. He had mixed the rubber with sulfur and spilled some of the mixture onto a hot stove. When the rubber was cool, it still had its elastic properties, but it was no longer sensitive to temperature. This vulcanized rubber eventually took the world by storm, but Goodyear, who had believed that God had assigned him the task of curing rubber, never benefited, and he died in debt.

The use of both synthetic and natural rubbers has increased dramatically in recent years. So have allergies to rubber. Research into this received a boost when Everett Koop, the former U.S. surgeon general, developed an allergy to the elastic in his underwear. We now know that certain proteins, present in small amounts in the latex, are responsible. This has renewed interest in extracting rubber from the guayule plant, which does not appear to have allergenic proteins. Perhaps researchers should have listened when that army officer recommended the use of guayule back in 1930. They would have listened twenty-two years later, when that army officer, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was sworn in as president.