Starch was
finally decided upon as the best material, since this can be obtained
for about a cent a pound from potatoes, corn and many other sources.
Here, however, the chemist came to the end of his rope and had to call
the bacteriologist to his aid. The splitting of the starch molecule is
too big a job for man; only the lower organisms, the yeast plant, for
example, know enough to do that. Owing perhaps to the _entente cordiale_
a French biologist was called into the combination, Professor Fernbach,
of the Pasteur Institute, and after eighteen months' hard work he
discovered a process of fermentation by which a large amount of fusel
oil can be obtained from any starchy stuff. Hitherto the aim in
fermentation and distillation had been to obtain as small a proportion
of fusel as possible, for fusel oil is a mixture of the heavier
alcohols, all of them more poisonous and malodorous than common alcohol.
But here, as has often happened in the history of industrial chemistry,
the by-product turned out to be more valuable than the product.
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