My wife recently gave me a book titled Outlines of Industrial Chemistry that was published in 1909. It provides a fascinating look at the state of science, technology, the economy, and everyday life from 106 years ago. The book includes an extensive survey of the industrial topics of its day, including fuels, water purification, fertilizers, cement manufacture, dyes and pigments, ceramics, sugar refining, and even beer brewing. Its author, Frank Hall Thorp, received his degree in Industrial Chemistry from MIT in 1889 and then joined the faculty there. Outlines of Industrial Chemistry was used as a text book at colleges and universities across the United States. I was particularly struck by the juxtaposition of things in Mr. Thorp’s book that seemed archaic alongside those that have hardly changed at all.

Just after the table of contents, there is a list of conversion factors between U.S. Customary Units – feet, pounds, gallons and the like – and metric units. As of 2015, the only countries in the world who do not use the metric system are the United States, Burma, and Liberia. As I looked at those conversion factors, I sat back and pondered the millions and millions of hours that American engineers and scientists have wasted over the last 106 years needlessly converting back and forth between our nonsensical units and the metric system. Someday this silliness needs to end.

Since I have a particular interest in fuels and energy production, this was the first chapter of Mr. Thorp’s book I read. The longest section by far is about solid fuels. There is a discussion of the relative heating values of green versus dried wood and a notation that wood is “too expensive for industrial use.” Next is a long section about coal in which he notes that bituminous coal, a relatively pure and high energy content type of coal, is “the most important of all fuels.” He then goes on make some rather dismissive comments about lower grades of coal. Today, after a century of mining, U.S. production of these lower grades of coal exceeds that of the more desirable bituminous coal. The section on solid fuels concludes with a detailed review on the proper design of a furnace to make charcoal.

After pages and pages on solid fuels, Mr. Thorp dispenses with liquid and gas fuels in a few short paragraphs. The entire section on petroleum is: “Liquid fuel is coming into more general use every year, especially where long flame and high temperature are desired.” It’s interesting to consider that just as Mr. Thorp would have been finishing up the edits to his book in late 1908, the very first of Henry Ford’s Model Ts were coming off the assembly line. Therefore, had there been another edition of Outlines of Industrial Chemistry, liquid fuels, particularly gasoline and diesel, would have certainly received much greater attention.

The section on gas fuels includes two examples. Natural gas is noted as being the “cheapest and most efficient of all fuels.” This statement is still valid 106 years later, and is often used in the advertising copy of energy companies. The other gas listed is “producer gas.” If you heat coal and blow air through it you can recover producer gas, which is composed primarily of carbon monoxide that can then be burned as a fuel. Carbon monoxide is also a deadly poison. From the 1920s to the 1940s, producer gas was distributed via underground pipe lines and burned in street lights in cities all across the U.S. Let’s pause for a moment and consider the quite justifiable outcry here in Chapel Hill if Duke Power proposed to run carbon monoxide pipelines under our roads and sidewalks today.

Next I turned to the chapter on fertilizers. During the late 1800s, there had been a noteworthy increase in agricultural productivity – bushels of crops per acre – due to the use of guano (bird poop) extracted from coastal areas in South America. The key ingredients in the guano were nitrogen compounds that fertilized the crops. By the time Thorp’s book was published in 1909, agricultural productivity was dropping in the U.S. and Thorp notes that the supplies of guano were exhausted. He then reviews a number of chemical processes under development for potential industrial production of nitrogen fertilizers. None of these turned out to be commercially viable, but just as had been the case with Thorp’s comments on petroleum, his book was written a little bit too soon. Later in 1909, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch patented the Haber-Bosch process which converts nitrogen from the air into ammonia, the key raw material for nitrogen fertilizers. This Haber-Bosch process is often noted as the most significant technological advance of the 20th century, and the agricultural revolution it fueled is largely responsible for the human population explosion which followed. For more on this story, see my previous column Fun with Fritz and Carl.

While there are many outdated technologies in Outlines of Industrial Chemistry like how to make glue from the “connective and elastic tissues of deceased livestock,” which made the content of the book seem distant, many of the issues discussed by Thorp still resonate today. Coal remains the primary fuel in the U.S. today, but increasingly we are tapping the lower quality grades that he derided. Natural gas is still relatively inexpensive, but now we need to resort to fracking to maintain its supply. I also enjoyed the picture he included of a filter press which looks exactly like those still in use in chemical plants today.

Although my intention was to confine this column to a review of the technical subjects, the inscription in the book intrigued me. The student who used this text book was W. Purcell Thurston. He signed it with rather impressive penmanship on September 21, 1910 and then leaves the wistful thought “I wonder what I’ll —- on 9/21/11 ??????.” I decided to try to learn more about Mr. Thurston. Here is what I found.

His full name was William Purcell Thurston and he was raised just down the road in Burlington, NC. In 1908, he enrolled in the Civil Engineering program at the North Carolina College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts, the forerunner to North Carolina State University. After completing two years there, he transferred to the University of Virginia – my alma mater! – where he was assigned Mr. Thorp’s book. After graduating, he moved to Richmond and opened a contracting firm called W. P. Thurston Company. I found a number of records from between 1911 and 1925 noting when his company won construction contracts, purchased surplus equipment from the army after World War I, and litigated disputes in court. I am often espousing the benefits of an engineering degree, and it appears that W. Purcell’s education served him well.

I still have all of my engineering text books. After I finish this column I plan to go inscribe them, but my handwriting is not quite as nice as W. Purcell’s. Maybe someone will write a column about one of them in 2121.

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