Impending Developments in Chemical Enterprises

Abstract

ATTENTION has already been directed in the columns of NATURE to the sporadic manner in which capital is being diverted into certain branches of industrial chemistry. The shortage of dyes, drugs, and other fine chemicals has rendered this form of manufacturing enterprise very lucrative even to comparatively small capitalists. The commercial success attending these undertakings is a proof in itself that these manufacturers are supplying the essential needs of the community, and to this extent their efforts are entirely praiseworthy. It must, however, be conceded that the multiplication of small businesses engaged in producing the same article will sooner or later lead to competition of a particularly wasteful and disastrous kind, and this clash of internecine interests will become most pronounced at the cessation of hostilities, precisely when all productive energies should be nationalised against external competitors. This danger is not absent even in the larger chemical enterprises, and it is evident that there are great difficulties ahead in the most fundamental of all chemical manufactures, namely, the production of sulphuric acid. At present the explosives factories cannot have too much of this essential chemical reagent, and large plants for producing it have been erected all over the country. Sulphuric acid producers have been circularised recently by the managing director of a firm of acid-makers, who insists on the urgent need for co-operation among this group of industrialists in order to prevent the absolute chaos which must arise in the sulphuric acid trade at the conclusion of peace if manufacturers are not more closely associated. Certain of the remedies proposed are somewhat drastic. It is proposed that Parliament should consent to legislation whereby the entirely wasteful introduction of capital by superfluous and speculative parties without experience in the trade would be prohibited until the merits of the proposition had been examined by a committee of expert manufacturers in conjunction with expert Government representatives. So far as this inhibition is directed against new capital unaccompanied by new ideas something may be said in favour of legal restrictions. But, on the other hand, the history of human invention has always manifested the self-sacrificing obstinacy of the inventor, a characteristic which has mainly benefited, not the individual himself, but the community. One can foresee the short shrift which an inventor, inexperienced in the trade, but with a revolutionary process, would receive at the hands of a committee consisting of manufacturers interested in maintaining the status quo, and Government officials looking forward to an honoured age of pensionable retirement received as the guerdon of a policy of masterly inactivity. Such agencies might possibly prevent some waste of capital; they would, however, be much more likely to expatriate inventive genius.