The Contribution of Creative Chemistry to the Humanities

MR. JUPP: It is three years since we had the pleasure of a visit from our guest speaker today but many of you will remember his address on October 8, 1953 when he talked to us about the impact of the jet in aviation.

Sir Miles Thomas is one of those people who seem to gravitate naturally to the wonder-working industries of his time and it is, therefore, no surprise that he is Chairman of Monsanto Chemicals Limited and has come to speak to us on Creative Chemistry. After the First World War, our guest speaker learned his engineering in the practical school of a Birmingham engineering firm and when that war broke out he promptly joined an armoured car squadron. From the mechanized part of the army he went to the even more advanced form of martial pioneering known as the Royal Flying Corps. It was while fighting in the Middle East that he was awarded the D.F.C. for aerial combat and low ground strafing.

After the war there followed an interlude when Miles Thomas was Technical Editor of motor publications and interested himself in the development of small economical cars. In 1924 Mr. W. R. Morris of Morris Motors, later Lord Nuffield, invited Miles Thomas to advise on sales and commercial development in his organization. This was the beginning of 25 years' association between the two men and this collaboration saw output rise to 3000 vehicles a week. By 1940 Miles Thomas was Managing Director and Vice-Chairman of the whole Nuffield organization and upon him fell the brunt of the organization work necessary to turn over to munitions production. in 63 separate factories and the administration of the big aircraft repair facilities which put 88,000 war planes back into the firing line. He was Knighted for these services in 1943.

Another great contribution in the public service was the Chairmanship of the Southern Rhodesia Development Co-ordinating Commission in 1947 at the invitation of the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia and a Directorship of the British Government Colonial Development Corporation.

In 1948, still in the forefront of developments, Sir Miles was appointed Deputy Chairman of British Overseas Airways Corporation and became Chairman on the 1st of July, 1949. The expansion and increasing efficiency of B.O.A.C. under Sir Miles Thomas' Chairmanship is well known and he must have been very proud of BOAC by the time he resigned as Chairman on June 30, 1956.

He was already a Director of Monsanto Chemicals Limited of London, England and he became Chairman on the 1st July, 1956. Chemistry has achieved great strides thus far in the 20th Century, but no one will deny that it is still on the threshold of developments which will change the look of civilization.

Sir Miles has chosen to talk about this fascinating present and future under the title of "The Contribution of Creative Chemistry to the Humanities" . . Sir Miles Thomas.

MR. THOMAS: Today is Saint Valentine's Day, on which it has been customary for many hundreds of years to exchange tokens of affection. It seems to me, looking back on the events of the last twelve months, that, internationally anyway, there has probably never been such a dearth of affection since Valentine became a saint!

At times like this the bonds of affection and loyalty which unite the member countries of the British Commonwealth assume an even greater significance, and I should like first of all to say how greatly honoured I feel that you should have invited me to talk to you today.

Of course this isn't the first time I have visited this country, though I am here in a somewhat different role on this occasion. Until recently I came here as the chairman of British Overseas Airways and I took great pride in my office, for it was a physical symbol of the ties which exist between the countries of the Commonwealth.

Now I come as chairman of the British offshoot of the big Monsanto group, a company I am equally proud to serve, and which has a similar significance for it has a sister here in Canada. Its last expansion programme was helped in its finance by nearly ten million dollars of Canadian capital, your great insurance companies such as the Canada Life, the Sun Life of Canada, the Confederation Life and others being actively interested.

I am told that the name of Toronto is of Indian origin and means "a place of meeting". It seems unlikely that the Indians had in mind any such meeting as we are holding here today, but then, many things have changed since the meeting place of two hundred years ago became the fine city of today.

In those days Canada was for the most part unexplored territory. Now, in an almost miraculous transformation, she has become a great nation and can boast--though I find it almost impossible to believe--that her dollar is actually worth more than its American counterpart.

The factors which have helped to bring about these changes are far too numerous to repeat here, and in any case you know them better than I do. They boil down, however, to an inspired combination of vision and hard work, backed, of course, by the fabulous natural resources of this great country.

Until quite recently Canada has been more interested in winning a civilisation from the wilderness than in studying of fostering the humanities. This is only proper, for you must bake your cake before you can eat it. Nevertheless, though you are still seeking for and developing primary resources among the mountains, on the prairies and in the bleak northern territories, you are already firmly established in the second phase of your development.

You have become an industrial nation, and among the host of manufacturing activities you have built up you are refining oil and natural gas and turning them into scores of chemical and plastics materials. With these last products you have become producers of the magic building bricks from which the world of tomorrow will be made.

At the same time you have, like it or not, entered the lists in one of the great intellectual battles of our age. Should your young men and women seize the opportunities offered by Canada's great industrial expansion by becoming engineers, chemists, physicists, or would theymake their greatest contribution to the future of your nation by pursuing the arts and humanities?

Where does the greater challenge lie--in the conquest of the material universe?--or in the conquest of man's own baser qualities? Material progress--in Canada as elsewhere--may sometimes seem to be too much of a good thing. Its blessings are frequently regarded with a healthy scepticism. Today I hope to show you some fresh aspects of the argument, and though I have chosen chemistry as the field of discussion what I have to say can be applied with equal force to any of the so-called material sciences.

It has been said that in the last forty years we have been through a social and economic revolution. These words seem to be somewhat trite. Man is a perpetual source of change. Human civilisation is itself a continuous and frequently violent revolution against Nature's basic doctrine of the inevitability of gradualness. Man is Nature's foremost revolutionary agent. She has achieved through him what, alone, she could never have brought about.

The ability of any living creature to survive is dependent upon the degree of mastery it can impose upon an indifferent and sometimes hostile environment. The majority of living things flourish only where environment is favourable or changes are so slow that evolutionary adaptation is possible.

A few, a very few, are able to exercise even a limited degree of control over their surroundings let alone to change them to their advantage. One creature, and one alone, has extended this control into a potential dominance, and that is Man.

Man is what he is because of his curiosity, and his curiosity stems from the fact that in order to master his environment he must first seek to know it intimately. That is why he has climbed Everest "because it's there", just as he split the atom because it was there to be split.

Some folk ask, "is `progress' necessary?" This is a question with which, irrational though it is, we have all at one time or another had a sneaking sympathy, and no more so than when such products of progress as the hydrogen bomb have seemed to threaten our very existence. Nevertheless, it is a question which no intelligent man can take seriously.

Progress is not a commodity, to be taken or left at will. It is one of the immutable laws of Nature that any species of living being must progress or yield mastery to the more adventurous. Progress is not merely necessary; it is intrinsic to any dynamic society.

The whole of human progress is an upward march towards complete understanding from which, in due course, may come complete mastery. Then and only then, Man's inner drive tells him, can he feel secure.

Where our difficulties lie, and what prompts the fears of the timorous, is in the fact that we have not made commensurate advances in every sector of human knowledge. On the material front Man's obstacles are being pushed back relentlessly and with increasing speed. The faster we advance on the material front, however, the more we expose our moral and spiritual flanks to counterattack.

In our battle for existence there is no such thing as a tactical withdrawal. The pressure must be maintained and the salient held at all costs. Such things as nuclear fission and jet propulsion are today bare-faced facts. We cannot discard our knowledge of them or act as if they had never existed. But we must guard against their side implications.

What then is to be the solution to this problem? It is not peculiar to our times. It has faced Man ever since he first struck fire from flint. It is in magnitude rather than in Nature that it grows more threatening. I believe that it embodies its own ethical solution. Material progress will itself be productive of moral progress.

The humanities, the arts, the moral sciences only came into existence when society had reached a stage at which the privileged few could enjoy modest well-being and a certain amount of leisure. In the days of the classical civilisation of the Eastern and Central Mediterranean such well-being and leisure were the products of slave labour. Since that time we have replaced human slavery, by and large, with the enslavement of the natural forces of the universe. Our cultural progress has been in direct proportion to the growing freedom from our environment which these forces have permitted us to enjoy. Thus, providing we can refrain from the ultimate step of destroying ourselves, the potential advantages of our growing material knowledge far outweigh the dangers.

"I wish," said Alfred Nobel, many years ago, "that I could produce a substance of such frightful efficacy for wholesale destruction that it would make wars impossible."

In dynamite he thought he had achieved his wish but, so far as wars were concerned, the direct effect was to make them more terrible.

But there is another side to the penny. Whilst dynamite was the precursor of a whole field of new and destructive military explosives it also opened the door to a better life for untold millions and nowhere more so than here in Canada.

Today, in every part of the globe, new dams, new irrigation systems, new power houses and new factories provide food, jobs and security for peoples previously enjoying little more than a precarious subsistence.

Without Nobel's frightful dynamite such developments would have been impossible. So would the winds of liberty and moral progress which blow with growing vigour in what for so long have been spiritually airless backalleys of human culture.

I am, of course, propounding an intellectual platitude when I say that man's material discoveries are in themselves neither good nor evil. Their value, as with dynamite and nuclear energy, depends solely upon the way in which they are used.

Nowhere is this more. apparent than in the field of chemistry where, to take isolated examples, chlorine may be the means of purifying water; or of killing a man; and quicklime can be used to mix a mortar or destroy the damning evidence of an unwanted corpse.

Moral progress is of no real significance to the vast under-privileged majority of mankind until certain basic material needs are met. A saint may embrace poverty, but national poverty will not breed a race of saints.

It is the destiny of science to create the material climate which will nurture moral progress. The arts may point the way to paradise on earth, but it is science, and not the least the science of creative chemistry, which provides the means of getting there.

Chemistry began when man first sought to find out what went to make the things he found around him. As we all know, his early attempts at discovery led him far from the truth. When classical civilisation collapsed into the chaos of the Dark Ages there arose the alchemists, men nearer to fairground tricksters than modern scientists.

From them, however, sprang a band of honest seekers after truth who sowed the seeds from which grew the chemical industry. It is poetically apt that alchemy should, over the centuries, have given rise to those modern elixirs, the antibiotics and hormone drugs, and that from it should have grown a science which changes one element into another and creates substances where none was known before.

Yet even a hundred years ago the chemical industry could hardly be said to have existed as a coherent entity. In 1850 it was a sprawling, shapeless infant, odoriferous and dirty, loved, like so many small children, only by those responsible for bringing it into the world. Chemists in many lands were exploring, isolating, propounding, but most of the products which are revolutionizing our lives today were laboratory curiosities or much more likely still-unknown.

As for chemistry's making a contribution to Man's cultural treasury, nothing could have been considered more ludicrous. Culture, in the nineteenth century, stopped short of science. Chemists, physicists and engineers were the new barbarians from whom chaos had come again.

How times have changed! Chemistry has become creative. A reaction induced on the laboratory bench may, like yeast in inert dough, leaven the whole of mankind, lightening and lifting it to heights undreamed of by its ancestors. In this respect Fleming and Florey were greater social revolutionaries than Marx and Engels.

The contemporary scene is dominated by the atom. Nuclear fission is one of the major discoveries of all time, and the circumstances of its birth have inevitably done much to impress the layman with the destructive rather than the constructive powers of the science that brought it into being.

Yet in the years ahead the technique of what is known as chemical synthesis may come to be regarded as far more important than splitting the atom, and I think it singularly appropriate that it should be so. Synthesis which is creative chemistry--presents one of the most exciting challenges yet offered to human kind. It presents, to those who are bold and imaginative enough to accept it, the key to a literally new world.

Indeed, it may give us the key to life itself. The growth of a babe to a man depends upon complex chemical changes and synthesis which, slowly but surely, are being unravelled and simulated on the laboratory bench.

Already, human blood plasma can be replaced by man-made products, one obtained from sugar, another a completely synthetic chemical based on acetylene as the raw material. Thus, acetylene, which was once burned to give light, can now be used to support the very flame of life itself.

There is much more to it than this. We are beginning to see that a little reshuffling in the world of atoms and molecules may even change man himself--perhaps into superman! Maybe H. G. Wells was more of a prophet than he realised himself.

A hundred years ago, despite previously unparalleled advances in technology, our building bricks were still those provided by Nature. Now all that is changed. In the world of technology we have been promoted to a higher income group in which our materials can be tailormade rather than. just taken "off-the-peg."

In my own company we have a slogan--"Monsanto chemicals bring a better future closer"--and that, in common with other chemical companies throughout the world, is just what we are trying to do. In our research laboratories at Ruabon, Newport and elsewhere enthusiastic teams of scientists are playing with molecules with the same facility as our forebears played with building bricks. They are building, dismantling and rebuilding in ever more fascinating arrangements and all with the ultimate effect of making man's lot happier and more prosperous.

It would not be possible to itemise all the fields in which the chemist is actively interested at the present time. I would nevertheless like to consider in a little more detail some of the more important aspects of his work.

I shall also, quite deliberately, concentrate your attention upon some of the controversies which arise from the broader issues of this work.

Take, for example, the question of transport. Today our civilisation is firmly based on wheels driven by the internal combustion engine. What we must do, and are doing all the time, is to make the whole process of quick transport ever more foolproof, and the creative chemist plays a leading part in this task. The early car tire had an average life of 5,000 miles. Thanks to a variety of specialist chemicals which my company among others has pioneered in developing, this life has increased to more than 30,000 miles and now, again through the endeavours of the chemist, we are talking seriously of the 100,000-mile tire. The day when cars do not carry a spare wheel is not too distant either.

The same story applies in the case of the engine itself. The piston engine has been pushed to ever greater efficiency and petroleum chemistry has progressed, far from the first "straight run gasolines," to the "super" high octane fuels of today.

Crude oil has been shattered to molecular fragments by heat and catalysts, then reassembled to produce the special fuels which make possible our speedy and economical modern transport.

Similarly, jet and turbo-jet aircraft engines have de5 new lubricants which are met in many cases only by certain synthetic chemicals.

In the early days of the motor industry lubricating oils were more or less as supplied by Nature. Today, in our laboratories, batteries of petrol and diesel engines run almost nonstop, year in and out, testing tailor-made lubricants in which carefully synthesised molecules have wrought an amazing transformation. Without these molecules the world's millions of petrol and oil engines would more quickly grind to a halt, cylinders choked, bearings seized up, engines overheated and ruined.

All these things add up to safer and more efficient transport. They are important, but I believe that it will be the growing range of plastics materials which will bring about the greatest improvements in human comforts in automobiles. Canada, which has become an important producer of plastics materials, increasing its output of them by seven-fold since 1947, will have a large stake in such developments.

Already plastics play a great part in making roadfaring safer. The safety glass used in windscreens originated as a sandwich of a plastic sheet laminated between two glass sheets. The result is strong and splinter-proof.

I forecast that in the next fifteen years the interior fittings of the popular car will be fabricated almost entirely from plastics, only a basic shell being made of metal!

Our American parent company recently commissioned an experimental car interior in which plastics were used exclusively. The combined seat, its bottom and back frame is a one-piece reinforced moulding upholstered in polyurethane foam. Textured and pliable plastics replace traditional leather on the cushioning. The door and roof liners are of one-piece polystyrene and snap in or out of position, and plastic foam lining provides thermal and acoustical insulation. The instrument panel is a one-piece moulding and the floor covering is sprayed or laminated plastic.

In addition foamed plastics will be used for crash pads, and throughout the car the resilience of the new materials, combined with their flame-proof qualities and washability, will make for new standards of safety, comfort and cleanliness.

Aircraft, which like cars have played an important part in my life, are another example of the mixed blessing. Nothing is so likely to capture the headlines of the press as an air crash, nothing less likely to receive well-merited publicity than a million miles of safe flying. That, of course, is human nature, but once again it prompts some folk to think that life without aeroplanes would be a pleasanter experience.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Aircraft can carry bombs but they also carry relief for pain and suffering. They are sources of noise but also of a vast and growing international understanding which widespread travel brings. They are shrinking the face of the globe, making entire continents our next-door neighbours. From that, provided we grasp our opportunities, nothing but good can come.

The occasional disaster which is the price of such progress is also a challenge which is evoking some of the most intensive research the world has ever known. Thousands of men and women, many of them chemists, are working ceaselessly to improve upon the already high safety records of the world's airlines.

Flameproof materials of every description have been developed for use in the construction and furnishing of the modern airliner, and one of the most potent contributions towards the elimination of the fire risk on aircraft is the development in Monsanto Research Laboratories of a flame-proof hydraulic fluid called Skydrol that is now being used in all U.S. Air Force and Navy Transports and which is now available at major air terminals throughout the free world.

The new aircraft, which it would be impossible to produce without the help of the chemist in a hundred different ways, are working their own individual revolution in Man's ways and thoughts. Communications are the nerve system of civilisation and by helping in the great and continuous process of intermingling the world's peoples, their beliefs and their ways of life, the brotherhood of man is brought that much nearer.

Yet there are greater needs than rapid transport before that brotherhood can be made a reality. The air age has shown millions of less advanced peoples that life can provide something more than disease, semi-starvation and crushing poverty.

When discussion turns to the chemist's contribution to health one naturally thinks of what the daily papers refer to as "miracle drugs." It is certainly true that chemists, in collaboration with their medical colleagues, have produced a series of spectacularly effective weapons in the fight against disease. It must never be forgotten, however, that for every new antibiotic or sulpha drug there are scores of less glamorous materials which, in every country in the world, are helping the doctor in his mission of healing.

Aspirin, of which Monsanto has recently produced its one hundred millionth pound, was discovered just over a century ago. It is only today that we are beginning to realize what a versatile and invaluable drug it is. Indeed it is within the last year or so that medical research showed it to be almost as effective as cortisone for some rheumatic complaints, and much safer. This and other gifts of the chemist are lifting age-old burdens from less advanced peoples in many parts of the world, and as one disease after another is tamed or put to rout, so the population of our planet grows.

Each daily increase in roughly equal to the population of the busy city of London, Ontario. It is obvious, therefore, that we must do all we can to increase the world's food supplies.

We have all heard the gloomy forecast of the followers of Malthus. One day, they say, the world's peoples will outrun their supplies of food, with consequences which need hardly be dwelt upon. I find myself unable to accept this argument. When I walk through our chemical research laboratories I find on every hand the evidence of chemistry's growing contributions to the feeding of hungry humanity.

Fertilisers, weed and insect killers and other chemicals have, as every Canadian farmer knows, resulted in crop yields multiplying from five to ten times over the last century, although believe it or not some 50,000 diseases must be kept at bay to grow man's food and clothing. In addition those same chemicals have opened up to agriculture lands which were previously the undisputed domains of such killers as the tsetse fly and the anopheles mosquito.

Add to these factors such things as food preservatives, cheap, light and hygienic food containers, the role of plastics in the refrigeration industry, and you will understand my optimism. Science has been in the food producing industry for not much more than two centuries at the outside and its real contribution has only been felt in the last fifty years. We have scarcely made a beginning.

The same applies to clothing, which is another major requirement if we are to bring the backward races into the full comity of nations. Wool, cotton and other natural sources of textiles are already insufficient to clothe the world's population despite the huge increase in production which chemical protection of crops and livestock has brought about. The new chemical fibres will not merely fill the gap. They will eventually provide the larger share of human needs and in so doing they will free for foodproducing purposes vast tracts of land which, equipped from the chemists' armoury, will go far to meeting increasing demands.

The widespread and growing use of synthetic detergents is also playing a notable part in increasing available food supplies, for edible oils formerly diverted to soap-making are now being freed in increasing quantities for human consumption.

And so I could continue. From the chemist's tubes come more food and clothing, better housing and safer transport, colours to delight our eyes, medicines to combat our ailments and a thousand new materials with which to transform our world. These are not the seeds of destruction, they are the instruments of a new hope and a new mastery.

Even the destruction of the atom itself is a source of hope. At our Newport factory is the first British industrial laboratory in which fission products are being put to peaceful and creative uses. One particular reason for our building such a laboratory is the attraction of a high-level energy source which may trigger off useful chemical reactions without the use of very high temperatures and pressures. It may be that, in due course, we shall learn how to replace traditional methods of chemical manufacture with comparatively simple radiation techniques which will enable us to produce valuable chemicals and plastics even more cheaply than at present.

I feel sure it will not be long before such a truly peaceful use of radio-active materials will become commonplace, merely another tool with which the chemists of Monsanto and other companies will mould and tailor the world of the future.

I am stressing the work of the chemist, but of course he only does half the job. When he has finished developing his new materials it is the turn of the technologists--the experts in engineering and production techniques.

The chemist synthesises a new large molecule or polymer. He knows its physical and chemical properties, but its practical applications are sometimes far beyond his initial expectations. What the new material will do by itself is so often immeasurably increased when technology has allied it with other materials.

The result, in many cases, is an alliance of the latest with the oldest, the synthetic with the natural, to produce substances which enrich humanity as neither could do alone.

Thus gear wheels are built from plastics reinforced with traditional fibres, wool and cotton are made shrink-resistant and waterproof, glass and wood find a hundred new applications in alliance with synthetic resins. The waste products from the forests of your own and other countries are allied with synthetic glues to provide new structural materials.

The whole vast panorama of technical progress today is the outcome of a series of alliances--Man with Nature, chemist with engineer, designer with craftsman and dreamer with doer. From these fruitful unions pours a swelling flood of benefits for human kind.

The classical requirements for happiness was a healthy mind in a healthy body. The fulfillment of spiritual needs is a major factor in creating mental and physical wellbeing but it is indisputable that material needs must be met before the seeds of moral progress can germinate. Until all mankind, rather than a chosen few, can live free from want, disease and discomfort it is of little use to bewail the lack of moral and spiritual standards.

The parable of the sower is still relevant. Some stony ground still remains. It must be tilled before the seed can sprout; and that is what creative chemistry is doing and will continue to do. Therein lies its contribution to the humanities--bringing the better future nearer.

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Mr. A. E. M. Inwood, a Past President of the Club.