Man of the Hour Read online

  Meanwhile, two fellow chemistry majors and DU frat brothers, Stanley B. Pennock and Chauncey Loomis, both class of 1915, approached him about going into business together. Conant had spent a lot of time that winter in the lab with Pennock, a burly football player who was attending postgraduate courses and preparing to follow in the footsteps of his father, a senior executive with Solvay Process Company, the Belgian chemical giant. Their plan was to manufacture certain chemicals and drugs that had previously been imported from Germany, and were now in short supply and fetching fabulous prices. The “famine of all things chemical” since 1914 made the adventure attractive: “On paper, it was easy to calculate that vast profits were in store for those engaged in such an operation,” Conant recalled. “Without building a large plant one could, in theory, prepare relatively simple organic chemicals in small batches and sell them without difficulty.”

  Scores of newly minted chemists were abandoning academe for lucrative jobs in industry. While the new venture with his pals Pennock and Loomis was highly speculative, and both Black and Richards protested he was being diverted from his true calling, Conant had already made up his mind. He promised he would only stay in business until the fighting was over. This was a chance to do something useful. And when he eventually took up a teaching position, he would be that much better off, with a “comfortable bankroll” to supplement what he knew would be a “meager salary.” At Harvard’s normal snaillike pace of promotion, he would be lucky to earn $4,000 a year by the time he was forty; as a young instructor, he could expect a little more than a quarter of that sum. And Helen Twitchell was still very much on his mind.

  His failed courtship had compelled him to face facts. While it was not a requirement that Harvard professors come from money, it was a well-established tradition, and many great academic careers—Richards’s included—had been underwritten by family trusts, which rendered their slight wages incidental. Despite his mentors’ disapproval, making a brief sojourn into business seemed to him not only pragmatic, it was “a form of pioneering which appealed to both the scientific and acquisitive instinct.”

  The three Harvard friends set to work in April 1916. They quickly raised the necessary capital to form L.P.C. Laboratories, with Pennock’s father as their primary backer, and rented and equipped a one-story building in the Queens borough of New York. By early summer, the plant was up and running. After weeks of experimentation, they managed to develop a new process for making benzoic acid, a popular food preservative and antiseptic manufactured principally in Germany. As soon as they had perfected their formula, a procedure requiring the “cautious chlorination” of toluene, Conant, LPC’s twenty-three-year-old director of research, filed for a patent. The company’s commercial success seemed assured.

  That August, in the early hours of the morning, while he and Loomis struggled to transfer the laboratory-scale procedure to a large-scale plant operation, they accidentally set fire to the building. In no time, the small structure was completely consumed. Although the sight of the building’s blackened shell should have discouraged them from carrying on, it did not, nor did their lack of experience with what were very complicated and potentially hazardous chemical processes. They were young and in a hurry, and thought only of their good luck—only days earlier, Pennock had signed an insurance policy for the plant. Within weeks, they were back in business, setting up shop in an abandoned slaughterhouse in the Jersey flats near Newark.

  Just as they were preparing to move into their new facility, Conant received a “startling letter” from Harvard offering him a one-year appointment as instructor in organic chemistry. The unexpected vacancy had come about when a young lecturer, Roger Adams, accepted the offer of a professorship at the University of Illinois. The position needed to be filled before the start of the fall term. Harvard wanted an answer at once. Conant could not turn it down: “By what seemed to me a miracle,” he recalled, “I had gotten my foot on the bottom rung of the Harvard academic ladder.” He begged his partners’ forbearance, but opportunities such as this did not come around often and were not refused. The three quickly came to a new business arrangement, awarding Conant an interest in the fledgling company, to be renamed Aromatic Chemical, and he returned to Cambridge.

  On Monday, November 27, 1916, Conant was pulled out of an afternoon lecture in Boylston Hall and informed that the Newark plant had burned to the ground. A far more terrible fire than the one at the Queens factory had been triggered as a large tank of benzoic acid was being prepared. The first powerful explosion ripped through the building, killing Stan Pennock instantly. Two other workers—a mechanic, Samuel Welte, and a plumber, Max Stein, who was repairing a pipeline—succumbed to the fumes. Flames and black smoke had shot from the roof, followed by a series of smaller explosions, which shook buildings for blocks around and kept firemen at bay more than an hour. Loomis, who had been in the mixing room when he spotted the first sign of trouble, had desperately tried to stop the reaction. As the air began to vaporize, he quickly shut down the machinery and raced up a ladder to the top of a 110-gallon vat to close the main supply valve when the first blast occurred, hurling him out through the door and into a ditch. His face and eyes scorched by acid, and his clothes ablaze, he managed to save himself by rolling in water. If he had only reached the valve in time, he told reporters from his hospital bed, his eyes still streaming, “All would have been saved.”

  The tragedy shocked Conant. Pennock, an all-American guard on the Harvard football team for three years in a row, had been a star player and popular student. His sudden, senseless death made all the papers. In the small chemical fraternity, everyone knew Conant was the absent partner. The fact that he had not been there to help his friends see it through made him feel that much worse. The Newark plant had been in only its second week of operation. Loomis and Pennock had spent most of the intervening months fitting up the equipment and had tested the machinery only intermittently to turn out samples of the product. Less than two hours into its inaugural run, it blew. “Because I had not even seen the new plant,” Conant castigated himself later, “and had not witnessed the trial run which ended so appallingly, I could not help feeling I had deserted a post of danger.”

  His subsequent conversations with Loomis, who discreetly held back Conant’s name from the press and from official inquiry into the accident, only deepened his sense of culpability. While the partners were cleared of any criminal negligence, despite the fact that it was an unlicensed factory, Conant felt he had failed to properly assess the risks. The chemical reaction Loomis described had occurred much too soon—and had quickly ignited an explosion. It was not something he had considered possible. “The account Loomis gave me of what had actually happened showed that the procedure had been formulated erroneously,” Conant wrote in his own blunt, unsparing postmortem, “which was no one’s fault but my own.”

  The surviving partners sold up and went their separate ways. The stockholders were paid off, thanks to the royalties from the patent based on Conant’s work. With characteristic Yankee fortitude, Conant pushed all the guilt and sadness to the back of his mind and buried himself in work. He put on a brave front, but could not bear to speak of the accident that had claimed his friend’s life. His reckless foray into free enterprise had left a “permanent mark” and put an abrupt end to his ambitions in industry.

  * * *

  After his disastrous experience with applied chemistry, Conant was grateful to be back in the classroom. He threw himself into teaching. Elementary organic chemistry could be heavy going, and he quickly discovered that holding the attention of a room full of undergraduates was not easy. In the beginning, his “greenness” was all too apparent. Not a lively speaker by nature, he was forced to find ways to improve his lecturing style. He consulted Kohler, who advised him it was not enough to talk in chalk; he needed to develop a sense of showmanship. Conant took his advice to heart. In one particularly dramatic demonstration, he pulled an egg from his pocket, dropped it into a solution he
explained would solidify the albumen, quickly fished it out and heaved it at the wall just over his students’ heads. There was a collective gasp as they registered that their young instructor was right—the egg bounced. Pleased with his efforts, as well as with the midyear examination marks, Conant was confident he would be reappointed. If everything went according to plan, he hoped to “move up in a year or two.”

  All that winter of 1916–17, as war fever swept the campus, Conant stubbornly clung to his skepticism about entering on the Allied side. He could not see what good would come from America joining the carnage that had been ravaging Europe for three years. He remained immune to the growing interventionist sentiment, despite the public outcry that had accompanied Germany’s renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare and the revelation of the infamous Zimmermann telegram, a secret coded telegram that was sent in January 1917 by the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German minister to Mexico offering United States territory to Mexico in return for joining the German cause. Conant’s recalcitrance was rooted in his deep dislike of fanaticism, and fear of what joining the melee would do to the country. He was under no illusions about what taking up arms would mean—the consequences when people quit thinking, no longer valued debate and tolerance, but instead devoted all their energies to destruction. He dreaded being engulfed in the unreasonableness of it all. He had nothing but contempt for the faculty’s eager embrace of the war: “The spectacle of older men urging younger ones to fight seemed to me far from edifying.”

  On a wet, raw spring night on April 2, 1917, he had just finished dining at the Harvard Club in Boston when he heard over the news ticker that the president had gone before a joint session of Congress at eight thirty that evening to declare war against Germany. “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war,” Wilson told the assembly, which reportedly cheered him as it never had before. The press picked up on the most grandiose line of his battle cry: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” As he read the president’s words, Conant’s spirits plummeted. “The chief reason for my distress was not that Wilson, having been reelected on a platform of noninvolvement, was now asking for complete involvement,” he recalled. “It was because of the effect on my own personal plans.” He had been anxious to “hang on” to his post at Harvard, but now he felt it slipping away. “Teaching was no place for a young man in wartime. It was going to be a period of painful choice.”

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  The Chemists’ War

  We were not soldiers, we were chemists dressed up as officers.

  —JBC

  As soon as Congress voted to declare war on Germany, the country began to mobilize. Almost overnight, Harvard’s campus was transformed into a massive recruiting center. So many upperclassmen were leaving for active service or to attend officer training camps that the college moved to begin giving final exams early. By summer, more than half the student body had enlisted. Most of Conant’s old crowd from Miss Mooney’s already had their marching orders. Charlie Crombie immediately joined the Michigan Naval Militia and was called up on April 6.

  “My friends were going to be involved directly in the war,” he recalled. “To stand aside was out of the question.”

  Realizing that war was inevitable, Conant had written George Kelley at Midvale a week before the president’s address for advice as to whether he should enlist in the army or navy: “There seems to be a strong opinion among those who should know best that the trained chemists will be more useful in connection with industrial military work than by fighting themselves,” he explained. “There is, consequently, both in my mind and in the minds of several of my friends, a great deal of uncertainty as regards what course we had best pursue.”

  After much agonizing, Conant finally concluded he could not carry on teaching and take his chances with the draft. “To wait until its long arm reached one would be ignominious.” There was a job to be done, and once he decided he had to take part, he was anxious to settle the question of where he would be of greater service. “I was not going to stay at Harvard, of that I was certain.”

  When he informed his parents that he was considering becoming a combat officer, they were horrified. It was his old friend and mentor N. Henry Black who made him reconsider his options. He did not want his protégé ending up as cannon fodder. “When the United States entered the war, Jim wanted to join and shoulder a gun,” recalled Black. “I told him: ‘That’s all right for some, but not for you.’ ” Black sent him to talk to people in government laboratories in Wilmington, Delaware, and Washington, DC. Ironically, Conant’s brief stint in industry now proved advantageous. The pace of wartime research differed markedly from that of academe, and experienced men were needed to lead projects where a high priority was placed on speed, hurried testing, and development with minimum delay. In June, he was offered a job by the Bureau of Chemistry in Washington, and was soon back in an industrial lab trying to manufacture compounds that had previously been made only in Germany.

  Sad as he was to quit Harvard, there were also personal reasons for Conant’s reluctance to leave town. At a dance that spring, he had fallen for Grace “Patty” Richards, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Harvard’s Nobel laureate. “A beautiful vision in a crushed rose dress has made a permanent dent in my heart, I fear,” he confessed in his first letter to her, dashed off at the end of the Fourth of July weekend just before he departed for Washington. Despite his romantic flight of fancy, it was hardly love at first sight. He had seen her at least a half dozen times since they met in 1916 at her father’s house, sitting quietly in a corner at the Sunday teas to which favored young instructors were invited. She had been no more than a girl when they were introduced, but sometime in the past year she had blossomed into a tall, willowy young woman with high cheekbones, pale-blue eyes, and long, shining auburn hair. She was a painter, possessed of a precocious intelligence and teasing wit. She quoted Keats, Emerson, and Thoreau with ease, and he was charmed by her noble bookishness. Laughingly, she berated him for his lack of sophistication about art, and he vowed to remedy the situation before they saw each other again. “If I can find a copy of Clive Bell’s Art, I am going to read it and discover the true inwardness of art and the artist,” he promised, convinced that in her he had glimpsed his future happiness.

  Conant spent the first part of the summer working for the Bureau of Chemistry, and succeeded in finding a more efficient, inexpensive way of producing a scarce drug. Frustrated that his endeavors were “only remotely related to the war,” however, he finally made up his mind to join the army as a noncommissioned officer with an outfit being sent to France to train soldiers in the use and repair of gas masks. He was on his way to the enlistment office in Washington when by chance he bumped into James F. Norris, an eminent organic chemist he had known since his undergraduate days, on the street. When Norris heard that Conant was headed overseas, he said, “You’re crazy! You could do more good for your country by staying here.” Norris, who had been called to Washington to head up the new chemical warfare program, detained him on the busy sidewalk for the next hour and convinced Conant that his talents would be put to far better use producing new poison gases stateside. He did not let up until he had his way, in the end hiring the young Harvard chemist on the spot.

  * * *

  By the time America joined the fight, the Allied scientific effort to combat poison gas had taken the form of both defense and retaliation. The question of morality “rarely” came up, Conant recalled, but “since everything German was being condemned, no one was inclined to justify its first use.” The Germans had introduced chlorine gas early in the conflict. On April 22, 1915, a special unit of the German army opened the valves on six thousand steel cylinders of pressurized liquid chlorine that had been secretly installed in the trenches along their defensive perimeter at Ypres, Belgium. Within ten minutes, a huge yellow cloud of chlorine gas rolled down over the opposing French lines, killing more than a thous
and soldiers and wounding four thousand more. The “poison bombs,” as they were called in newspaper accounts the following day, all but paralyzed the French division, the smoke and fumes causing terror and confusion, and forcing a panicked retreat. Those who did not collapse from choking and convulsions ran, but the gas oozed after them.

  Dr. Harvey Cushing, in charge of Harvard Medical School’s first surgical unit to serve in France, treated a trainload of victims and reported their terrifying stories in the Alumni Bulletin that spring:

  The smoke was suffocating and smelled to one like ether or sulphur, to another like a sulphur match times one thousand—to still another like burning rosin. One man said there were about one thousand Zouaves of the Bataillon d’Afriques in the lines, and only sixty got back—either suffocated or shot as they clambered out of the trenches to escape . . . In any event, there’s the devil’s work going on around Ypres.

  The Germans’ surprise use of chlorine gas—in flagrant defiance of the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 which banned the use of “poison or poisonous weapons”—caught the Allies totally unprepared. General John French, commander in chief of the British forces in France and Belgium, immediately denounced the treacherous gas attack as a “cynical and barbarous” act. It had been cunningly executed, requiring weeks of preparation and careful study of the winds. The German gas initiative marked a turning point in the history of military technology. As a weapon, gas had existed principally on paper; Leonardo da Vinci had described a shell containing fine sulphur and arsenic dust that could be hurled against enemy ships. Other accounts of these novel weapons are scattered throughout history, and by the late 1880s, with the evolution of industrial chemicals such as chlorine and phosgene, dangerous gases existed, but militarily they were unknown and untested. The spirit of Hague I and II had been to prohibit the implementation of new chemical projectiles before they caused unnecessary suffering. When the Germans unleashed gas at Ypres—which they repeated on at least four occasions, causing slow death to five thousand and agonizing injuries to fifteen thousand French colonial and Canadian troops—they not only rewrote the rules of war but also pioneered the use of a weapon of mass destruction.