Read an Excerpt
WE CALLED IT MAG-NIFICENT
DOW CHEMICAL AND MAGNESIUM, 1916â?"1998
By E. N. Brandt Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2013E. N. Brandt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60917-363-0
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Star Shells
While he was pondering what he read in his newspaper, one day during the grim early days of World War I, before the United States entered that conflict, Herbert Dow hatched out an idea. Dow, founder of The Dow Chemical Company, had a new idea just about every day, so that wasn't unusual, but this idea was special, and it was to play a major role in the life of his company for the next eighty-three years.
Magnesium metal was suddenly and unexpectedly in heavy demand because of the war, the newspaper said. A new kind of war was going on in Europe. It was called "trench" warfare, in which each of the belligerents dug a deep trench in which it sheltered the troops on its side of the battle line, and the war ground to a standstill for weeks and months while the two foes glared at each other across "No Man's Land," as they called the area between the opposing lines of trenches. Occasionally one side or the other would leap from its trenches and charge "over the top" in a murderous and often suicidal assault on the opposing trenches. It rained steadily, and the terrible deep mud that resulted bogged down the opposing forces on these fronts even more. The newspaper noted the growing use of pyrotechnics to light up the corridor between the two lines of trenches, the better to prevent surprise attacks in the nighttime. Some nights, the newspaper said, "No Man's Land" was lit up with the eerie light of star shells for hours at a time.
It was the pyrotechnics that sparked off his thinking. These were magnesium flares incorporated in a rocket device commonly called a star shell. A star shell would be fired into the sky from the trenches and would burst at a given height, igniting a magnesium flare and activating a parachute, usually made of fine Japanese silk. The burning flare would slowly drift back to earth under the parachute, taking about six to ten minutes to do so, and lighting up a portion of No Man's Land as it descended.
He also read about the introduction of tracer bullets, which showed where your bullets were going in the darkness, and about the invention of the Very pistol, used to pass pyrotechnic signals along the often extended reaches of the trenches, both of which also employed magnesium. With all of these devices using magnesium, it became clear to him that if, or when, the United States entered the war (as it eventually did in April 1917), or even if it didn't, there was a rapidly escalating demand for magnesium metal as a result of this war.
"We have more magnesium chloride than we know what to do with" he told E. O. (Ed) Barstow, one of his top lieutenants, explaining his idea. It was one of the chief components of the brines underlying central Michigan, which were then the main source of his chemical raw materials. "If we could separate out the magnesium metal we could provide one of the things this country is going to need for the war, and we could use the chlorine we liberated in doing so to make other products." Barstow was immediately enthusiastic about the idea, and the two men began to puzzle out how they might go about producing magnesium metal in Midland from the liquid brine they were pumping from the ground.
They knew that the renowned German chemist Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, Baron von Bunsen, had succeeded in producing magnesium metal by electrolysis— the first to do so— in Germany, back in 1852. Barstow, who was in charge of the Dow cell buildings— the buildings that housed the electrolytic cells— began to put together a cell that might duplicate Bunsen's achievement, but it was slow work and turned out not to be a spare-time job. Indeed, it turned out that Barstow would spend twenty-seven years working on magnesium and be remembered as "the father of magnesium," but they didn't know that at the time.
Herbert Dow's first recorded experiment with a magnesium compound went back to February 1896, when he worked out a method for making magnesium hydrate— "milk of magnesia"— from the brine stream at Midland. By 1914 and the onset of World War I, he was manufacturing four different magnesium compounds from the brine— magnesium sulfate, or Epsom salts; magnesium hydrate, or milk of magnesia; magnesium oxychloride, used in flooring and stucco work; and magnesium chloride, used in cement and also the potential source of magnesium metal.
Dow and Barstow discussed the problem of making magnesium metal from the brine many times in those days before the United States entered the war, and they decided this would be a great challenge to put before Prof. W. R. Veazey, of the Case Institute (now Case-Western Reserve University) in Cleveland. Veazey was in the habit of coming up to Midland to do chemical research during the summer term, when the Case school was mostly closed down, and when he came in 1916, Dow and Barstow had already told him what they wanted him to work on that summer— the production of magnesium metal from magnesium chloride via electrolysis.
The basic problem, Veazey soon found, was that when subjected to electrolysis in the rather crude cell they had put together (made of welded boiler plate and soapstone slabs), they got small globules of magnesium to bubble up from the magnesium chloride cell feed, but could not get them to coalesce, or join together, in a mass. Herbert Dow, looking at the problem, told them he wanted to see not those globules, but "one pound of magnesium in one piece."
Prof. Veazey, who later became a full-time Dow employee, had brought a Case student with him that summer, William R. Collings (who later became founding president of the Dow Corning Corporation), and they were joined by Edward C. Burdick, who had been working with Barstow on the problem, and I. J. (Charley) Stafford, a veteran of Dow's cell operations. Veazey was in charge of operations, Stafford prepared the cell feed (anhydrous, or dry, magnesium chloride), and Burdick was in charge of running the cell.
The first cell, Burdick said, was a square box "welded out of boiler plate about 8 inches by 12 inches by 6 inches, lined with slabs of soapstone, and a soapstone partition divided the box into two halves at the top, leaving the lower part of the interior cavity open for the whole length. An iron plate was inserted in one half of the box and a graphite electrode in the other, and the two electrodes connected with a source of direct current from a low voltage generator."
"This crude cell was heated up in an improvised brick arch by a charcoal fire until it was thoroughly hot, then some molten magnesium chloride was poured in and the current turned on."
The first run of the cell was started late one afternoon on "one of the hottest days of the hottest summer he had ever experienced in Midland," Burdick said. "Much to our surprise, the cell actually 'ran' when it was first started and began to produce some magnesium metal which, after a time, appeared as those small globules floating around in the molten salt bath." The salt bath was maintained in molten condition "at about a bright red heat."
"After having got this cell started we kept it going all night and the next morning when Mr. Barstow appeared we were able to present him with a flat pancake of magnesium which had been dipped out of the cell weighing about one pound. This was practically the first magnesium made in the Dow Plant."
That left the main problem to be solved, getting the globules to coalesce, and they set to work on it.
As Veazey described it later, success came rather unexpectedly on July 28, 1916, another scorching hot day in Midland, two months after they had started. It was the "night shift" (Veazey and Burdick) who hit the jackpot. They decided to try electrolyzing a fused salt bath tha
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WE CALLED IT MAG-NIFICENT by E. N. Brandt. Copyright © 2013 by E. N. Brandt. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
