lish, who had been beaten by the Germans in the dye business
where they had the start, were determined not to lose in this. Prof.
W.H. Perkin, of Manchester University, was one of the most eager, for he
was inspired by a personal grudge against the Germans as well as by
patriotism and scientific zeal. It was his father who had, fifty years
before, discovered mauve, the first of the anilin dyes, but England
could not hold the business and its rich rewards went over to Germany.
So in 1909 a corps of chemists set to work under Professor Perkin in the
Manchester laboratories to solve the problem of synthetic rubber. What
reagent could be found that would reverse the reaction and convert the
liquid isoprene into the solid rubber? It was discovered, by accident,
we may say, but it should be understood that such advantageous accidents
happen only to those who are working for them and know how to utilize
them. In July, 1910, Dr. Matthews, who had charge of the research, set
some isoprene to drying over metallic sodium, a common laboratory method
of freeing a liquid from the last traces of water. In September he found
that the flask was filled with a solid mass of real rubber instead of
the volatile colorless liquid he had put into it.

Twenty years before the discovery would have been useless, for sodium
was then a rare and costly metal, a little of it in a sealed glass tube
being passed around the chemistry class once a year as a curiosity, or a
tiny bit cut off and dropped in water to see what a fuss it made. But
nowadays metallic sodium is cheaply produced by the aid of electricity.
The difficulty lay rather in the cost of the raw material, isoprene. In
industrial chemistry it is not sufficient that a thing can be made; it
must be made to pay. Isoprene could be obtained from turpentine, but
this was too expensive and limited in supply. It would merely mean the
destruction of pine forests instead of rubber forests. Starch was
finally decided upon as the best material, since this can be obtained
for about a cent a pound from potatoes, corn and many other sources.
Here, however, the chemist came to the end of his rope and had to call
the bacteriologist to his aid. The splitting of the starch molecule is
too big a job for man; only the lower organisms, the yeast plant, for
example, know enough to do that. Owing perhaps to the _entente cordiale_
a French biologist was called into the combination, Professor Fernbach,
of the Pasteur