201

Splitting coconuts on the island of Tahiti 216

The electric current passing through salt water in these
cells decomposes the salt into caustic soda and
chlorine gas 217

Germans starting a gas attack on the Russian lines 224

Filling the cannisters of gas masks with charcoal made
from fruit pits--Long Island City 225

The chlorpicrin plant at the Bdgewood Arsenal 234

Repairing the broken stern post of the _U.S.S. Northern
Pacific_, the biggest marine weld in the world 235

Making aloxite in the electric furnaces by fusing coke
and bauxite 240

A block of carborundum crystals 241

Making carborundum in the electric furnace 241

Types of gas mask used by America, the Allies and Germany
during the war 256

Pumping melted white phosphorus into hand grenades
filled with water--Edgewood Arsenal 257

Filling shell with "mustard gas" 257

Photomicrographs showing the structure of steel made by
Professor E.G. Mahin of Purdue University 272

The microscopic structure of metals 273

INTRODUCTION

BY JULIUS STIEGLITZ

Formerly President of the American Chemical Society, Professor of
Chemistry in The University of Chicago

The recent war as never before in the history of the world brought to
the nations of the earth a realization of the vital place which the
science of chemistry holds in the development of the resources of a
nation. Some of the most picturesque features of this awakening reached
the great public through the press. Thus, the adventurous trips of the
_Deutschland_ with its cargoes of concentrated aniline dyes, valued at
millions of dollars, emphasized as no other incident our former
dependence upon Germany for these products of her chemical industries.

The public read, too, that her chemists saved Germany from an early
disastrous defeat, both in the field of military operations and in the
matter of economic supplies: unquestionably, without the tremendous
expansion of her plants for the production of nitrates and ammonia from
the air by the processes of Haber, Ostwald and others of her great
chemists, the war would have ended in 1915, or early in 1916,