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April 2, 2015
Another short story about a worker on the graveyard shift adding sulfur to a batch of what will be resin. It's a pleasant little story and gives us a peek at what happens behind the scenes in an industrial plant of this type. Otherwise it isn't that interesting to me and I'm going to skip it. But, before I conclude with my usual bonus section on the element sulfur, this might be the place to mention that Levi's involvement with the varnish industry, right after the war, is particularly interesting to me because my dad was a paint salesman after the war. He was one of the people selling the products -- paints, stains, varnishes -- being created and manufactured by people like Levi. I grew up with the smell of mineral spirits, turpentine, and oil based paints. We often tested the latest breakthrough products, and usually got to see how poorly they worked. I seem to recall that I could properly clean a brush (pre-latex days) before I could ride a bike. Today's paints and stains seem to work better but they don't smell nearly as good as they did when I was a child, and Levi could probably have told us what chemicals were to thank and to blame for this.
Sulfur (S 16) -Wiki
“It is an abundant, multivalent non-metal. Under normal conditions, sulfur atoms form cyclic octatomic molecules with chemical formula S8. Elemental sulfur is a bright yellow crystalline solid when at room temperature. Chemically, sulfur can react as either an oxidant or a reducing agent. It oxidizes most metals and several nonmetals, including carbon, which leads to its negative charge in most organosulfur compounds, but it reduces several strong oxidants, such as oxygen and fluorine.
Sulfur occurs naturally as the pure element (native sulfur) and as sulfide and sulfate minerals. Elemental sulfur crystals are commonly sought after by mineral collectors for their distinct, brightly colored polyhedron shapes. Being abundant in native form, sulfur was known in ancient times, mentioned for its uses in ancient India, ancient Greece, China and Egypt. Fumes from burning sulfur were used as fumigants, and sulfur-containing medicinal mixtures were used as balms and antiparasitics. Sulfur is referred to in the Bible as brimstone (burn stone) in English, with this name still used in several nonscientific tomes.[5] It was needed to make the best quality of black gunpowder. In 1777, Antoine Lavoisier helped convince the scientific community that sulfur was a basic element rather than a compound.
Elemental sulfur was once extracted from salt domes where it sometimes occurs in nearly pure form, but this method has been obsolete since the late 20th century. Today, almost all elemental sulfur is produced as a byproduct of removing sulfur-containing contaminants from natural gas and petroleum. The element's largest commercial use (after mostly being converted to sulfuric acid) is to produce sulfate and phosphate fertilizers, because of the relatively high requirement of plants for sulfur and phosphorus. Sulfuric acid is also a primary industrial chemical outside fertilizer manufacture. Other well-known uses for the element are in matches, insecticides and fungicides. Many sulfur compounds are odoriferous, and the smell of odorized natural gas, skunk scent, grapefruit, and garlic is due to sulfur compounds. Hydrogen sulfide produced by living organisms imparts the characteristic odor to rotting eggs and other biological processes.
Sulfur is an essential element for all life, and is widely used in biochemical processes. In metabolic reactions, sulfur compounds serve as both fuels (electron donors) and respiratory (oxygen-alternative) materials (electron acceptors). Sulfur in organic form is present in the vitamins biotin and thiamine, the latter being named for the Greek word for sulfur. Sulfur is an important part of many enzymes and in antioxidant molecules like glutathione and thioredoxin. Organically bonded sulfur is a component of all proteins, as the amino acids cysteine and methionine. Disulfide bonds are largely responsible for the mechanical strength and insolubility of the protein keratin, found in outer skin, hair, and feathers, and the element contributes to their pungent odor when burned.”
Above is, I believe, our first reference to salt domes. The history of the dye and chemical industry of the 19th century is largely the history of brine and coal tar. The history of the Dow Chemical Company starts with the salt deposits under Midland, Michigan which Henry Dow turned into brine and then into a variety of chemicals. Salt domes were originally sought out as sources of brine and then it was noticed that there was often oil and gas below. Spindletop and the oil fields of East Texas are a prime example of the connection between salt domes and oil deposits. Thus the first generation of the chemical and dye industry is directly connected to the second (petrochemical) generation by this geological formation.
I thought it was sulfa drugs that had finally defeated (temporarily) tuberculosis, ever relevant to this blog, but in fact it was Streptomycin. The Wiki path that led me to this information included the following two interesting passages,
“At the end of World War II, the United States Army experimented with streptomycin to treat life-threatening infections at a military hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. The first patient treated did not survive; the second patient survived but became blind as a side effect of the treatment. In March 1946, the third patient—Robert J. Dole, later Majority Leader of the United States Senate and Presidential nominee—experienced a rapid and robust recovery.[13]”
“Sulfonamide drugs were the first antibiotics to be used systemically, and paved the way for the antibiotic revolution in medicine. The first sulfonamide, trade-named Prontosil, was a prodrug. Experiments with Prontosil began in 1932 in the laboratories of Bayer AG, at that time a component of the huge German chemical trust IG Farben. The Bayer team believed that coal-tar dyes which are able to bind preferentially to bacteria and parasites might be used to attack harmful organisms in the body. After years of fruitless trial-and-error work on hundreds of dyes, a team led by physician/researcher Gerhard Domagk[5] (working under the general direction of Farben executive Heinrich Hörlein) finally found one that worked: a red dye synthesized by Bayer chemist Josef Klarer that had remarkable effects on stopping some bacterial infections in mice.[6] The first official communication about the breakthrough discovery was not published until 1935, more than two years after the drug was patented by Klarer and his research partner Fritz Mietzsch.
Prontosil, as Bayer named the new drug, was the first medicine ever discovered that could effectively treat a range of bacterial infections inside the body. It had a strong protective action against infections caused by streptococci, including blood infections, childbed fever, and erysipelas, and a lesser effect on infections caused by other cocci. However, it had no effect at all in the test tube, exerting its antibacterial action only in live animals. Later, it was discovered by Bovet,[7] Federico Nitti and J. and Th. Jacques Tréfouël, a French research team led by Ernest Fourneau at the Pasteur Institute, that the drug was metabolized into two pieces inside the body, releasing from the inactive dye portion a smaller, colorless, active compound called sulfanilamide.[8] The discovery helped establish the concept of "bioactivation" and dashed the German corporation's dreams of enormous profit; the active molecule sulfanilamide (or sulfa) had first been synthesized in 1906 and was widely used in the dye-making industry; its patent had since expired and the drug was available to anyone.[9]”
IG Farben has been a fascination to me ever since I first read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow. I might have left it alone here, but it is also the company that “employed” Levi as a slave scientist at Auschwitz -- the Buna Werke plant was an IG Farben facility. (It is interesting that it is only identified as an IG Farben plant as IG Farben was the cartel that included Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Agfa and a few other companies. One of these companies must have operated the Buna Werke but it is in the interest of that company that we think of the collective (IG Farben) and not the particular. Here is what Wiki has about the Buna Werke with the very subtle suggestion that, since “Buna” was a BASF tradename, it was actually a BASF run facility.)
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