A SNAPSHOT OF CHEMISTRY FROM THE FALL OF 1908

It has often been observed that whiles times may change, people dont. While the tools we use and the methods we employ may be vastly different, society may create the same challenges to chemists 100 years from now that are present today. Indeed looking 100 years into the past shows that the issues of pure food, electric cars, and substance abuse were very much on the minds of chemists.

A quick look through the pages of the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the popular press shows that food safety and purity were clearly two of the hottest research topics of 1908.

Ordinary optical microscopy was emerging as a powerful new tool in the detection of impure or adulterated foods. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act had only been on the books for two years but unscrupulous manufactures had long experience in hiding adulterants. While the work of chemists was praised as being crucial to the success of the new act, many of the then current analytical methods were not sufficiently specific to distinguish the adulterant from the pure food. The federal governments Bureau of Chemistry (the agency charged with enforcing the Pure Food and Drug Act) established a new microscopy section under the direction of a one B.J. Howard. The section consisting of himself and his assistant W.J.Young.

Some common food adulterants such as sawdust, seeds, and sand were visible to the naked eye or under a magnifying glass. The Bureau of Chemistrys scientists expanded on this idea. Pepper for instance was commonly adulterated by the addition of ground peas or beans resulting in an excess of starch that was easily detected by a chemist. The dishonest producer counteracted this excess by adding ground olive pits or pepper shells to the pepper. But under the microscope the angular pepper grains were easily distinguished from the rounded grains of peas and beans. Expensive coffee was often diluted by adding inexpensive chicory but the two substances were so alike that they could not be distinguished by the available chemical tests. But coffee made from beans has a very different appearance under the microscope from chicory which is made from roots. Today we are accustomed to using agars from seaweed or any number of different gums as thickening agents in food products. In 1908 however, the chemists were shocked to discover that these materials, along with corn starch, were present in jams, jellies, and ice cream. Their chemical analyses had not previously distinguished the thickeners from the fruit. As with other materials, microscopic examination revealed grains of cornstarch and distinctive microstructures formed by the agars.

Few of the adulterants discovered by the microscopists at the Bureau of Chemistry were particularly harmful. Lemon oil diluted by turpentine however was not so benign. Before1908 the method to detecting this adulterant was to distill 10% of the oil and compare the optical rotation of the distillate and the original oil. If the lemon oil was pure, the difference in optical rotation would not be greater than 2 degrees, 57 minutes. This technique was shown to detect turpentine in concentrations down to about 3%. The method was highly dependent on the analyst's skill and it did not positively identify turpentine. Another problem was that turpentines optical rotation was not well established, values ranging from 6 to 30 degrees had been published. H.M. Chase in the Bureau of Chemistry published a new method where the terpenes were converted to nitroso chlorines. When limonene and pinene underwent this reaction they formed distinctive crystals that could be identified under the microscope.

New methods were also introduced for other types of food analyses. Edward Gudeman published a procedure to detect the illegal colorants added to animal feeds for the purpose of disguising impurities. A paper about Òreducing sugarsÓ in meats was presented to the American Chemical Society at New Haven Connecticut, by A. Lowenstein and W.P. Dunne.(Reducing sugars contain a free aldehyde or ketone group. They undergo the Maillard Reaction with the amino-groups on proteins to cause browning and alter flavor.)

The purity and freshness of meats was very much on the minds of the editors of the Journal of the American Chemical Society who devoted much of the October 1908 issue to the problems of the ÒDeterioration and Commercial Preservation of Flesh Foods.Ó W.D. Richardson and Erwin Scherubel began their paper on frozen beef by observing that the complexity of modern life increased the distance between consumers and the sources of their food. The authors identified the corn growing region between Illinois and Kansas as the nations primary meat producing region and noted that preservation of meats in transit was now a major concern.

The purity of food and drugs was very much an international issue. In 1907 the International White Cross was founded for the purpose of coordinating international efforts at eradicating cancer, tuberculosis, epidemic diseases, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, and food adulteration. Its first congress was held in Geneva in September 1908. The 700 delegates from around the world attempted to create an universally applicable definition of pure food. This was seen as the first step in creating uniform international legislation against adulteration. The producers of impure foods were not idle at this time. In December of 1908 a letter to the editor appeared in the New York Times in which an unidentified woman castigated the efforts of food producers to have Dr. Harvey W. Wiley removed from his position as head of the Bureau of Chemistry. Since becoming chief chemist at the department of agriculture in1883, Wiley has been one of the leaders in the campaign for a pure food act and a tireless crusader against food adulteration. The efforts to remove him from the bureau were ultimately unsuccessful and he remained at there until 1912.

In other science news the first successful production of artificial sapphires was announced to the French Academy of Sciences at its meeting in November. Chemists had been trying to develop sapphires from melted alumina but the coloring agent always separated during crystallization. Louis Paris developed a formulation where the blue colorant was mixed with lime and magnesium hydroxide producing a Òbeautiful blue sapphires crystal.Ó

George I. Kemmerer published a portion of his PhD thesis from the University of Pennsylvania in which he determined the atomic weight of palladium. Palladium had originally been discovered in the early 1800s. No fewer than a dozen previous attempts to establish its atomic weight were made when Kemmerer started work on the problem. He began with the pure metal and prepared chlorine and cyanide salts which were then reduced. Multiple gravimetric determinations with a precision of 0.02 milligrams resulted in a mean value of106.434 grams per mole. Kemmerer did not have the last word on the subject as other scientists further refined the value. The modern atomic weight is given by the National Institute of Standards and Technology as 106.42.

In November Oliver P. Fritchie a chemist, electrician, and president of the Fritchie Automobile and Battery Company of Denver Colorado, completed an 1,800 mile electric automobile trip from Lincoln, Nebraska to New York City. Fritchie made the trip in twenty-eight days, averaging 90 miles per day. The inventor said that he would have completed the trip sooner had he not stopped for sight seeing in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Gettysburg. An assistant traveled ahead of Fritchie to arrange locations where the cars batteries could be recharged. Electric car dealerships maintained charging stations but these were few and far between. When asked if an ordinary motorist might make a similar trip, Fritchie was not encouraging. In most towns, he had to do all of the battery recharging himself, often at the nearest electrical generating station. In one small coal mining town east of Pittsburgh he found a movie theater with a broken projector. In exchange for repairing it, the theater owner provided electricity for a battery charge.

The 1908 Nobel Prize for Medicine was shared by the German chemist and bacteriologist, Paul Ehrlick and Chemist Iyla Metchnikoff of the Pasteur Institute. The prize was awarded for research into the chemical binding of antigen to antibody. At the time Metchnikoff was better known among the general public for his then unorthodox idea that with healthy habits, it might be possible to live to the age of 140.

Contact Information:

Kevin Olsen

Instrumentation SpecialistDepartment of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Montclair State University,

Montclair, NJ, 07042