Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

RESEARCH FOR INDUSTRY 267
molasses and the waste waters of sugar manufacture. Despite an intensive
search, the Bureau to its surprise found little or nothing on the subject in the
scientific literature, in any language.
A closely guarded commercial secret, the processes for recovering
amines, ammonia, cyanides, nitrogenous nonsugars, potash, alkalies, and
miscellaneous products such as glycerine, esters and fatty acids from sugar
wastes, were carefully buried in the patent literature. More than a thousand
of these processes were found in German patents alone. As was true of Ger-
man dye, drug, glassmaking, rare sugar and other patents confiscated at the
outbreak of the war, it was unmistakable "that every legitimate means had
been used by foreign patentees to create as many difficulties as possible in the
trailing of patents." 133
After considerable research, the Bureau compiled a "Summary of the
technical methods for the utilization of molasses" and made these findings
available to the industry.134 Before the decade was out much simpler and
far less expensive processes for producing industrial chemicals were to be
developed by the petroleum industry, and waste molasses substantially re-
mained an ingredient of cattle feed.
The early promise of the levulose and waste molasses research sug-
gested to the Bureau and the Secretary of Commerce that gums, sugars, and
cellulose products of great economic value might well be recovered from
such farm wastes as cornstalks and straw, and that this research warranted
Government initiative and suppOrt.'35 Under a special congressional &nuro-
priation. to investigate the "utilization of waste products from the land,"
the miscellaneous materials division of the Bureau was reorganized as the
division of organic and fibrous materials and Warren E. Emley was brought
from the Pittsburgh laboratory as its chief.
Before long a stream of products issued from the new division, includ-
ing a stout wrapping paper made from the waste fibers in manila rope manu-
facture; wall, insulating, and pressed board from cornstalks; fertilizer from
cotton burrs; and textile sizing from sweet potato starch. With the hope of
utilizing the fifty million tons of cereal straws wasted on American farms
annually, the Bureau developed a satisfactory kraft paper from wheat and
rye straw pulp. Shortly before the program was transferred to the Depart-
ment of Agriculture in the midthirties, the group developed a process for
making a high-grade cellulose from cornstalks, oat hulls, and straw. Together
iuNBS Annual Report 1920, PP. 121—122; Annual Report 1922, Pp. 109—110.
"C145 (1924).
" NBS Annual Report 1926, p. 44. Industry and Government were anticipated in this
type of research by George Washington Carver, famed chemist at Tuskegee, who by
1920 had evolved over 145 byproducts from the peanut, including face powder, coffee,
wood stains, and relishes.