The chemist is an economical soul. He is never content until he has
converted every kind of waste product into some kind of profitable
by-product. He now has his glittering eye fixed upon the mountains of
sawdust that pile up about the lumber mills. He also has a notion that
he can beat lumber for some purposes.
VII
SYNTHETIC PLASTICS
In the last chapter I told how Alfred Nobel cut his finger and, daubing
it over with collodion, was led to the discovery of high explosive,
dynamite. I remarked that the first part of this process--the hurting
and the healing of the finger--might happen to anybody but not everybody
would be led to discovery thereby. That is true enough, but we must not
think that the Swedish chemist was the only observant man in the world.
About this same time a young man in Albany, named John Wesley Hyatt, got
a sore finger and resorted to the same remedy and was led to as great a
discovery. His father was a blacksmith and his education was confined to
what he could get at the seminary of Eddytown, New York, before he was
sixteen.
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