Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - New Chemistry Building [PAGE 34]

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and an enormous expansion of activity has resulted from the progress of the pure and applied natural sciences." American chemists have had German chemists pointed to as examples almost long enough, but there is some value in concrete examples, and I cannot refrain from comparing our own impoverished condition in the matter of fixed nitrogen to t h a t of Germany, Excepting one or two minor a t t e m p t s , we Americans have made almost no study of the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. I want you to realize the varied and expensive researches, mostly carried on abroad, which were required to reach the present position of the nitrogen question. There were in Germany and, by German capital, in Scandinavia, several direct oxidation processes, carried through the experimental to the practical commercial stage. The Schoenherr process is one of these, the Birkeland and Eyde process another. The direct combination of nitrogen and hydrogen t o form ammonia has been successfully developed in the German Haber process, and t h e cyanamide process, with all its products from carbide to ammonium nitrate, was developed in Germany. There they used not only the peculiar reactions of calcium carbide with nitrogen, b u t t h e production of the nitrogen from liquid air, t h e reaction between water and cyanamide t o form ammonia, and then an oxidation process for obtaining the nitric acid. The oxidation of ammonia to nitric acid by such methods as the Ostwald process, has been studied by many investigators since 1830, and several different schemes are now in use abroad. At the time most of this research work was under way it was not at all clear what use was t o be made of it. Much of it was purely academic research, b u t it was clear that without the knowledge itself, certainly no use at all would be made of it. I do not want you t o look at research as an old, established utility. I want you to see it as I d o : a powerful factor proved by the advance of the industrial welfare of the foremost countries, and a worldexperiment of less than a century's trial, but something still unappreciated in America. I t is true t h a t t h e earliest man and many of the lower animals accomplished ends by research, but I refer now to research in the natural sciences and to the research which in our day is necessary to our desired activities.')!These sciences are already very highly developed, and advanced education is demanded by them. For ex(30