Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Cullen was in fact quite insistent on chemistry's role as handmaid to
industry - in this same article he went on to say:
Does the mason want a cement? Does the dyer want a means of tinging a
cloth of a particular colour? Or does the bleacher want the means of dis-
charging all colours? It is the chemical philosopher who must supply
these. [Cullen c.1766, quoted in Donovan 1975, p. 107.]
Powers points out how industry provided both the means and the motives
for fundamental chemical research, in particular with the aim of finding
out how to synthesize the molecules that were extracted at considerable
cost and hazard from natural sources, and how they might be modified
and improved:
Chemistry was not the means to soapmaking. Soapmaking was, rather, a
means toward the consummate chemical end. To that goal, the elements
moved from one incarnation to the other the way that the seasons, vari-
ously advantageous, moved through the eternally renewing year. If Na-
ture were no more than eternal transformation, Man's meet and right
pursuit consisted of emulating her. [Powers 2001, p. 79]
And just as, in
The Monkey's Wrench
, Primo Levi exploited the fact that
he was writing a novel rather than a textbook to show us a molecular
diagram that no popular science writer would dare place before the read-
er, so Powers can risk displaying the most extraordinary chemical detail
in describing the activities of the Clare company. He gives us in all its
stoichiometric glory the Leblanc process for making soda from salt:
2NaCl + H
2
SO
4
= Na
2
SO
4
+ 2HCl
Na
2
SO
4
+ 2C = Na
2
S + 2CO
2
Na
2
S + CaCO
3
= CaS + Na
2
CO
3
Or, as an illustration of how the company made economies and at the
same time diversified by recycling by-products as raw materials, we are
shown on page 171 a diagram of the various uses of Glauber's salt.
What, one might ask, is this textbook material doing in a novel? Well,
novels can do that kind of thing. Readers will tolerate it today because
learned asides have become part of the modern novelist's technique. In a
novel, unlike a non-fiction topic, you do not feel you have to
understand
this stuff; you merely absorb it as a signifier of authenticity. Powers re-
