The Romance of Modern Chemistry

HOW MAN COMPETES WITH NATURE more immediately practical, and we must recognise that it has been very productive in results. Synthetic chemistry may be said to date from a certain red-letter day in 1828, when Wöhler succeeded in pro- ducing carbamide (urea) artificially. This bald statement does not sound very stirring, but Wohler’s achievement was big with meaning for the years to come. It must be admitted that if the general reader were to listen to the long tale of Wohler’s discoveries, he would probably not select the artificial production of carbamide as the most useful or the most interesting. A boy would be interested in Wöhler as the first who described the curious behaviour of mercury thiocyanate, which swells up into a worm-like shape when heated—a scene familiar to all who have looked at “Pharaoh’s Serpent” But Wohler's fame does not rest on the discovery of Pharaoh’s Serpent, or even on the preparation of aluminium, which he was the first to accomplish, but mainly on the production of carbamide from inorganic materials. Now carbamide is essentially an animal product The cast-off nitrogen of the human body is thrown out in the form of carbamide, and the average adult produces about 1 ounce of this substance every day. It is got rid of in the urine, which contains 1 to 2 per cent, of carbamide in the dissolved condition. At the time of Wohler’s discovery the view was every- where held that the complex substances occurring in plants and animals were produced only by the action of a special vital force; it was therefore vain to hope that these products of the organism—organic substances, as they were called—could possibly be obtained from the dry bones of inorganic material. Wohler’s success in producing carbamide in the laboratory from purely inorganic sub- 250