1)eceeihcr. 1932

rated off.

I iv D US T R I A L A N D E N C I N E E R I N G C H E M I S T R Y 1441

The residue was found to be resistaiit to oxidation LITERATURE C r m n with potassium permanganate and appeared to be a mixture of saturated compounds from which nothing definite could be isolated

, ,

(3) Pliillips, J . Am. C h m . Soc., 51. 2420 (1929) (4) Pliilliys. lbid., 51, 2421 (1929). (5) I’lAlips, lbid.. 51, 2423 (lW29). (6) Phillim and Koensn, Ibid.. 53, 1924 (1931).

(.omp&da.”~ol. 1, g . 81. Wiley. 1906.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The apparatus used for the dry distillation experiments

was coustructed by It. Hellbaeh of the mechanical staff of this laboratory. All identifications of conipounds by opti- cal methods were made 1)y G . L. Keenan of the Mieronnalyti- c.al Laboratory of the Food and Drug Administration of t h i s department.

(1) Duolaur, Ann. inst. Pa8tezLI.9.2fi‘J (1895j. 12) Mullikcn. S. P.. “Method for Identification of Pure Organic

R r o r w m July 8. 19:12. ContribuLion 203 irom the Color m d Pnim Waste Divirion. I?ureau oi Chemistry and Soils.

AM E R I C AN C 0 N T E M P 0 H A R I E S

Charles Holmes Herty IND words for the living are viewed asknnee. But omdor will say that Charles IIolmer Ilertp loves his fellaw

man and is in turn beloved. Hia life has been marked by tireless devot ion to onc worthy cause after another. In the day of great need he led in bringing chemistry to t,he service of thr nation. A personal lradrr among chemists, be became a statesman of vision and achieve- ment, unofficial and unmindful of political expediency.

This career of service began half a cent.ury ago. Charles in his early teem, arphaned and living with his mstrmd p a n h o t h e r and aunt, wm not doing re11 at school. Thereupon his aunt. B woman of character and resnurrefulness, led him to his mother’s maw and earnestly unfolded to him the possihilitics that Iny ahead if only he would devote his life to worthwhile ohjrrtives. Then and there thm Saul hecame Paul. apostle ol worthy causes. He made himself the man of the household and munred responsibility for his little &er two years his junior. Devotion grew with the boy and the man until it emhraced the whole Southland, the whole nation, in the furtherance of objectives of far-reaching importnnre.

It w m at Milledgeville, Gs., on December 4,1807, that Charles’s eventful life bcgan. His father, Bernard R. Flerty, who way of Irish Iinm~e, served in the ConJedrm1.e nrmy and was by voca- tion a druggist. His mother, Louisa T. Holmes, came u i old Georgia stork. Both parents died before he was nine yeam old.

Following prepmation a t Georgia Military and Agricultural College, Charles attended tire University of Groraia. Ikrerard there sarriLnt8 us in assuming that he continued t,o “keep hi6 eye an the ball.” Those who have matched their skill against his at tho game of billiard-, may misundemtand the figure of specch. Purely his adept,ness with the cue almost tielies blip

fact that he was graduated a t the ape of Piahtern and at the head of his cIas8. He had the advantage oi not being spoiled by riches, hut poverty had its drawbarks. As honor man it he- came his duty to officiate, spade in band, at. tire planting of the elas- tree. The ceremonial day dawned hot, and the overcmt he felt constrained to wear brnughl bends of perspiration to his tiruw. But the dignity of the occasion rnlght not have h n

preserved had he exposed the seat of his trousers.

Follou,ing his graduation Charles received a legacy of a few thousand dollars. Thk made rasier his further pursuit, oi an e d u c a t i o n . The next lour years were spent with Remsen a t J o h n s I l o p k i n s University. There he studied hml, entcred actively into athletics, and “supered” in the chorus a t the theatre. He received his doctorate at the age of twenty-two.

Cdlcd to t a c h chemistry a t his Alma Mater, the University of Georgia, young Doctor IIerty brought m t h him thc spirit of research, and n l m Pop Vl’nmcr and the game of football, [ ,hen new to t h e colleges of t.he S o u t h . While a t floplrins, Remen had hken him to task lor soendine so much time in extracur-

ricular activities. But Berty coiitended that lie II’RS prepurin8 himself to be a teacher and wanted to bo B porsonwl leader of his pupils. A pict,ure of Georgia’s baseball team of 1891 reveals in uniform Doctor Charles 11. Herty, first faculty director of rzthlctics at Georgia. I2o~our yeam later we find him denominated I’liyaieni Director and Adjunct Profrssar of Chemistry. In this dual til.le the order af mention may have been significant. It --as at, least prophetic. “Doc“ Ilerty v’m a boy among the boys ha sought to lend to a knowledge of chemistry. Charley Iierty, B chemist among chemists, was fimt of all a man among men. It remained for vision, dovotion, and initiative to pro- vide tho strong persons1 leadership that came to mean so much in bringing oitr nation’s lawmakers and citizen8 in general to a knowledge of the importance of ch-mintry to nationti1 nelfare. IIerty has always enjoyed sporb, hut he finds in them lessons for life’s more important pursuits. Baseball to him inculcate the principles that make for success in all organized effort--coneen- trution, aeemacy, coo id~~dedn tas , qui& deeision, rand, above all, t,rurnwork.

13ecuming adjunct professor must have suggeatcd to young Doetor Herty the p o d i i i t y of assuming a d d 4 responsibilit,iq for the itme year ho took RS his bride Miss Sophie Sehnller, t,lie belle of Athens. Thus began a life-long devotion that was later shared by two sons, Charles fiolmes, Jr., and 1“mnk Bernard, and a daughter, Sophie Dorothea.

Herty’s first paper hefore the AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY was presented in 1894. It was a seared boy who addressed his.

1442 I N D U S T R I A L A N D E N G I N E E R I N G C H E M I S T R Y Vol. 24. No. 12

colleagues on “Mixed Halides of Lead and Potassium.” Or was it that the bag of peanuts he felt it necessary to substitute for a square meal gave his spirit inadequate support? The meeting was at Brooklyn, N. Y., which to an underpaid college instruc- tor was a good many dollars from Athens, Ga.

Ten years after leaving Hopkins, Herty spent a year abroad to work under Werner a t Zurich, and Witt and Knorre a t Berlin. One day Witt characterized the American method of turpentine orcharding as “butchery of the pines.” Indignant, yet too little acquainted with conditions to reply, Herty resolved to investi- gate the charge. Thus was he led to undertake his first great public service. His cup and gutters, substituted for the ruinous rrbox” that for a hundred years had been hewn into the tree trunk to receive the oozing gum, saved our Naval stores industry from extinction. The report of his three years spent in the pine forests of Georgia is an epic of early industrial research.

1905-1916 were years devoted to teaching and research, as Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the School of Applied Science at the University of North Carolina. In the councils of the AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY he grew in helpfulness and im- portance. He was elected to the presidency of the SOCIETY in 1915 and again the following year. With the rest of the world at war, the need for the chemist was increasing daily. To this need President Herty brought vision and his genius for leader- ship. He planned a census of chemists and thelr special qualifi- cations. He pointed out our chemical deficiencies, and urged their correction. The presidency gave him a national viewpoint and a broadened influence. Our urgent need of chemical war preparedness provided a great cause. Opportunity for rare achievement came in the editorship of the JOURNAL OF INDUS- TRIAL AND ENQINEERINQ CHEMISTRY, when war was only a few months away.

He made known his earnest desire to serve as a coordinating influence in those “helter-skelter, everybody-on-the-jump, vibrant days of individual effort.” This desire was abundantly gratified. He was trusted by lawmaker and manufacturer alike. To mem- bers of our National Congress he became one of the few sources of personally disinterested information, and a rallying point for those who placed their country’s war preparedness above all other considerations. Our nation having declared war, he drove home to us anew our chemical weaknesses. In the beginning it was a shortage of toluene, with T N T the growing need; an ambitious aviation program, and not enough acetic acid for “dope;” platinum required for munitions and research, not for adornment. He held up to ridicule the propaganda that American coal is not suited and the American chemist not qualified for the manufacture of dyes. He published the amaz- ing declaration of our War Department that it had no need for chemistry. He urged the allocation of chemlsts to the much needed chemical war work. He fought for the establishment of the Chemical Warfare Service, and, the war over, for its re- tention as a discrete unit.

There was a personal directness about the Herty editorial exhortations that compelled attention. Had one eavesdropped on their preparation, the secret of their power would have been evident. At night, alone in his study, pencil in hand, his index finger saying (‘this means you,” he drove home to an imaginary group before him the truths he burned to impart. Then a soda cracker, and to bed at three.

Appointed by President Wilson after the war to negotiate abroad for America’s quota of the reparation dyes, he found an attempt being made to bring American dye users again under the foreign yoke. He returned to renew the fight for American chemical independence. Repeatedly he called the attention of o w statesmen and the country a t large to the intimate chemi- cal relation between dyes and synthetic medicinals, on the one hand, and explosives and toxic gases on the other. Eventually our statesmen and dye conaumers, as well a8 dye manufacturers,

The new editor’s watchword was “cooperation.”

became a unit in the demand for American independence in the matter of dyes and other organic synthetics.

With the December, 1921, issue of the JOURNAL, Herty retired from the editorship to become president of the newly formed Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association. In a farewell editorial he reviewed briefly the work of his “five happy years” of editorship. Then he strongly commended to us his successor, closing with two words now famous: “Here’s Howe.” During the years of his presidency of the S. 0. C. M. .4., he continued to enjoy the confidence of our lawmakers and of men everywhere, many of whom might well have said with Congress- man Fordney, Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee: “Herty advised me for fifteen years and never led me astray.’’ When later he allied himself with the Chemical Foundation, xhose ardent champion he had been from the beginning, his message continued to be that of the constructive power of chem- istry for national well-being. The nation now safeguarded in the matter of dyes and thus in chemical war Preparedness, he pleaded with earnest eloquence and renewed vigor the cause of chemico-medical research. He had been chairman of the com- mittee that prepared the comprehensive report on “The Future Progress of American Medicine in the Age of Chemistry.” His work in the cause of health he has called the greatest endeavor of his life. Passage of the Ransdell bill, creating the National Institute of Health, came as a fitting climax.

Four years ago Herty announced his intention to devote the remainder of his life to the development of the natural resources of the southern states. Instinctively he turned to the pine forests, saved from destruction through hls earlier researches. Already an interesting story is unfolding, the gist of which is that the wood of the young trees contains no more resin than that of northern spruce and lends itself to digestion by the sulfite proc- ess in the production of white paper. The vast acreages in- volved and the rapid reforestation possible in this land of sun- shine and moisture give grounds for confidence that cotton will not always be the principal crop of the South. We are now de- pendent on foreign sources for much of our newsprint and raw material of our growing cellulose industries. So again it is a movement for national self-containedness.

When recently “for noteworthy and outstanding service to the science of chemistry and the profession of chemist in America,” Doctor Herty was awarded the medal of the American Institute of Chemists, he accepted it as given to “one who has been simply a cheer-leader, endeavoring to stimulate others to play this game called Chemistry to the best of their ability.”

Herty has been a cheer-leader but not an unthinking partisan. He has grown in power as a leader first of all because of his rare personal qualities, but more especially because he possesses in marked degree that determining attribute of greatness, a keen sense of relative values. It is this that has led him to espouse great as well as worthy causes; t o choose for emphasis the issues of major importance; and, in the pursuit of his life’s ideals, to maintain a consistent course throughout.

Werner early predicted for his pupil the leadership of Ameri- can thought in industrial chemistry. As though Werner’s pre- diction were not now sufficiently justified, we find Charles Holmes Herty at sixty-five only increasing his pace, apparently unmind- ful of the fact that there are already laid up for him a crown of constructive achievement and a lasting place in the heart of the nation. A. V. H. MORY

CORRECTION. In the discussion on Pumps [IND. ENG. CHEM., 24, 1109 (1932)] by C. W. Cuno, through an inadvertence, due acknowledgment was not made for the reproduction of Figures 4, 7, 9, 11, 15, and 16, which were from “Elements of Chemical Engineering” by Badger and McCabe.