1939 PLASTICS etc magazine articles Modern Materials, info. history color photos

Description

Selling are 2 magazine article from 1939:
Modern Materials, Plastics etc
Title: Chemists Make A New World
Author: Frederick Simpich
Subtitled “Creating Hitherto Unknown Raw Materials, Science Now Disrupts Old Trade Routes and Re-vamps the World Map of Industry”
Quoting the first page “At a New York fashion show, we saw a girl clad from head to foot in artificial materials. Everything she wore was made from synthetic stuffs created by chemists.
Her hat was Cellophane; her frock was rayon. She wore "Nylon" stockings and carried a patent-leather handbag and stood in imitation alligator shoes and wore "jade" bracelets and "ivory" beads; her parasol handle was from beautifully colored plastic.
Even the faint hint of musk on her imitation silk handkerchief came from a synthetic perfume; on her nails there glistened a synthetic dye, and other coal-tar dyes imparted rich shades to her ensemble.
No wool or linen, no silk or cotton, no ivory or jade, not even any leather, figured in her costume. Only the girl herself was natural-natural flesh and bone wrapped in her own waterproof skin.
There she stood, a startling symbol of this new artificial world risen so fast since the World War. In newspapers, every few days, you read of yet another "miracle" from this or that great chemical laboratory -"wool" from milk; alcohol, rubber, and false teeth from gas; licorice from old stumps-or a new way to poison grass-hoppers.
That this burst of activity in the rise of new man-made fibers, plastics, dyes, etc., today brings startling, almost revolutionary changes into our industry is plain, even to laymen.
But what does it all mean? What needs, or forces, suddenly set all our laboratories at this miracle-making?
Clear answers lie in the recent words of Dr. C. M. A. Stine, vice president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company.
At the end of the World War, Dr. Stine points out, "Sheep, plants, and worms supplied the fibers for our textiles. Bone, hides, tusks, horn, the saps and barks of trees, the excretions of insect and animal life, and countless other products as ancient as commerce filled motor trucks and freight cars and the holds of ships, just as they made up the burdens of caravans in the days of Marco Polo.
"We were building and designing better homes, but of the same materials-stone, brick, and wood-of which homes had been built for thousands of years. We were wearing the same clothing that our great-grandfathers wore, merely cut to a new style and woven by machine instead of by hand. We were eating the same foods, using the same perfumes, sleeping in the same types of beds that the Caesars and Pharaohs knew."
Then a wave of inventive genius swept over the chemical world, and "we began to see wood, metal, fiber, rubber, and all other natural products not as raw materials in themselves, but as compounds of raw materials that are ever present in superabundance in the air, the water, and the soil."
Coal, for instance, to a chemist, is far more than fuel; it is an almost limitless source of carbon. Air and water, too, are "inexhaustible reservoirs of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen." Hence now, in these three sources-coal, water, and air-the chemist finds "the primary building blocks employed in the natural creation of silk, rubber, wood, camphor-in short, most organic things and their by-products."
Explore these chemical miracles further-see how they now affect our industry and daily lives-and you run into astonishing facts and unexpected thoughts. Also, you come to understand why the fashion show girl's outfit, though wholly synthetic, was yet beautiful, practical, and inexpensive.
Many of man's raw materials, even when he has carried them long distances, are not always perfect, or adequate. Wool, flax, hemp, hides, lumber, silk, even cotton, each in its own way has often given man a headache. Each, in its natural state, may have certain limitations. Metals he must make…”
7” x 10”; 23 pages, 22 B&W photos.
Title: From Natures Hidden Building Blocks
Photos by: William Culver
No text, just photo captions.
7” x 10”; 16 pages, 26 color photos of the ‘modern’ materials, plastics, production methods etc.
These are pages carefully removed from an actual 1939 magazine.
39K2
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