By Mark M Green
Abstracted from “A Scientist’s View of Almost Everything”
With the complex forces at play in Israel with the Jewish and Palestinian populations it may be useful to look back at the source of the document calling for the formation of Israel and the inevitable conflict in forming a nation composed of large numbers of people inclined to exclude each other.
As the forces leading to World War I were overpowering Europe, a new explosive came on the scene, cordite, a smokeless powder. The importance of cordite is simply told by the fact that the British fired a quarter of a million shells using cordite in WW I and to that should be added the snipers and machine gunners in the war that could fire their weapons without their position being revealed or their vision obscured by smoke. Clearly, the British needed a great deal of cordite. But there was a problem.
Cordite requires a solvent called acetone for its formulation. Acetone is the active ingredient in nail polish remover, and nail polish is reported to date from at least 3000 years BC and presumably the necessity to remove it as well. But the amount of acetone needed for cordite certainly overwhelmed the supply necessary for womens’ nails. And there was no large source of acetone, which had to be made from wood or certain kinds of salts using high temperature processes. Even worse, most of the acetone in England was imported by ship from the United States via shipping lanes under attack from the increasing power of German submarines. What to do?
Chaim Weizmann was a young Jewish man from Motol, which is now in Belarus in an area where the historical border between Poland and Russia was not well defined. Weizmann’s extraordinary abilities took him to Berlin where he studied chemistry and then to Manchester University in England in 1904 where a letter of introduction gained him an independent laboratory and, as his ability was understood, a path to becoming a professor. Weizmann became interested in the problem of producing synthetic rubber and considered that the necessary chemicals might be best obtained by a fermentation process using bacteria, microbial fermentation. Weizmann searched for the necessary microbe and in the years from 1912 to 1914, just before World War I began, he discovered that Clostridium acetobutylicum could act on many different kinds of starches to produce mixtures of acetone and butanol. Butanol was one of the critical chemicals he was searching for and he was about to publish his findings when a call when out to the scientific community in England about the need for acetone.
Weizmann was summoned to the British Admiralty, asked some critical questions about scale, which on being answered successfully led to the Weizmann process being chosen to produce acetone for the war effort. Six distilleries in Great Britain were planned to be adapted to his fermentation process. But a problem arose. There was not enough starch material available to feed the fermentation process. Grain was necessary for the food supply and rationing was introduced. This led to a campaign in England to collect horse chestnuts. Children all over the country collected this source of carbohydrates, which became a major source of starch for the Weizmann process. The other solution was to move the production facilities to somewhere in the Commonwealth where sources of necessary grain were available. In 1916 the fermentation process was transferred to Canada where the Gooderham and Worts Distillery in Toronto, long know for the excellent spirits produced, was converted to the Weizmann process. This solved the acetone problem and allowed production of the necessary cordite.
Near the end of the war Lloyd George, the prime minister, introduced Weizmann to A. J. Balfour, the foreign secretary who asked Weizmann what England could do for him in return for his critical contribution to the war effort. From this arose the Balfour Declaration, which was to lead thirty years later to creation of the state of Israel: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.
The butanol produced in the Weizmann process had no particular value at the time of WW I, although later it became the basis of an industrial solvent important to the automobile industry. But by the 1950s butanol and acetone could be produced by the chemical industry from petroleum far more cheaply then from Weizmann’s fermentation of grain.
