Month: February 2019

Every year, the second Friday in February is International Winter Bike to Work Day. Cycling on snow and ice is, of course, a wee bit more treacherous than on dry roads, but it can be done—and many people do it. If you commute by bike only in the summer, today’s the perfect day to challenge yourself and find the best way to bike in winter, too (assuming the temperature is somewhere north of –40°). Of course, here in San Diego, commuting by bike is a year-round activity since there’s never any snow or ice…and for those of us who work at home the whole notion of commuting is moot anyway. But I’ll cheer on the rest of you!

Image credit: Bike Calgary [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr

The Plastic Age

In the autumn of 2000 I went on honeymoon to Somerset—a beautiful rural region in the south-west of Britain. Unfortunately, our trip coincided with widespread fuel blockades, and many petrol stations had run dry. We had enough fuel to drive to Somerset, and enough to get back, but very little to spare for travelling around during our stay. This didn’t bother us too much (we were planning to do a lot of walking anyway), but when the weather was bad it presented a bit of a challenge. On one particularly drizzly day, we found a flyer for the Bakelite Museum. I think that the unspoken thought in both of our minds was, “It will probably be a bit boring, but at least it will be dry.” As it turned out, we were utterly wrong about the appeal of Bakelite: it’s fascinating stuff.

Great Balls of Fire

Around the turn of the 19th century, some plastics were already in use. Early plastics were not wholly synthetic, even though that’s how we think of plastics today. Instead, they were formed from a mixture of synthetic and organic compounds. The realisation that natural materials like ivory, horn, and tortoiseshell were becoming scarce because of over-exploitation prompted chemists to search for synthetic alternatives. Cellulose nitrate (more commonly known as celluloid) was the first commercially successful product, and was developed by the British inventor Alexander Parkes. Produced by reacting cellulose (the organic part derived from plant cell walls) with nitric acid (the synthetic component), celluloid was a very adaptable material. It was thermoplastic, meaning that it could be moulded into almost any shape with the application of heat and pressure. It could also be coloured with dyes and pigments so that the products did not need to be painted, and had a tough, durable finish. Celluloid was soon being used to replace ivory in objects like billiard balls, but there was one big drawback; celluloid is highly flammable and sometimes explosive. An enthusiastic break in billiards sometimes resulted in exploding balls—something that in my opinion would considerably improve its appeal as a spectator sport today. Early celluloid cinematographic film also had the tendency to burst into flames, burning down cinemas and causing problems even today for the conservation of early films. This also meant that celluloid was useless as an electrical insulator, something that was becoming increasingly sought after as the early electrical industries flourished.

The compound used for electrical insulation at the time was shellac. This was a lacquer manufactured from the resin secreted by a small south-east Asian insect, Laccifer lacca. It was a labour-intensive and expensive process, requiring around 300,000 insects to produce 1 kg (about 2.2 lb) of shellac. With the new electrical industries booming, supply was not keeping up with demand. Chemists around the world began to see that anyone who developed a synthetic substitute for shellac would become very rich.

Promising Goo

Leo Baekeland (1863–1944) was a Belgian inventor who emigrated to the United States in 1889. He had developed (pardon the pun) a photographic paper called Velox which could be exposed using artificial light rather than sunlight, giving photographers much greater control over the process. He sold the full rights to Velox to George Eastman of the Kodak corporation in 1899 for a staggering US$1 million, and used the money to set up a laboratory in Yonkers, New York. There, he worked on the “synthetic shellac” problem. He had an idea that the reaction between phenol (derived from coal tar) and formaldehyde might be promising. The German chemist Adolf von Baeyer had already noted that such reactions resulted in a sticky substance that he dismissively called Schmiere (“goo”). Von Baeyer’s interest was in dyes rather than insulators (he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1905 for his synthesis of indigo), but Baekeland saw the potential of the “goo.” He experimented with different combinations of the raw products subjected to heat and pressure in an iron pressure cooker he invented called a ‘bakelizer,’ and finally found the magic combination in 1907.

The Magic Plastic Bullet

Bakelite turned out to be extraordinarily versatile. It was a thermosetting plastic, which meant that once heat and pressure had been applied to mould the material into a particular form, it could not be reversed. It would not burn or melt (which made it a great insulator), nor could it be readily dissolved with the common solvents or acids of the time. If ‘fillers’ like fine sawdust or other fibres were mixed in before the mixture was set, the resulting Bakelite could be as strong as wood or even steel. It could be moulded or carved into almost any shape. Early Bakelite made with phenol tended to be dark brown or black, but a later process combining urea and formaldehyde produced a colourless resin which could be dyed with bright colours. The colourful age of plastics had begun.

The Age of Design

Bakelite enabled a new era of mass production. The moulding process meant that—while the initial investment in making the mould was very high—each item produced in the mould could be made relatively cheaply. The maximum return on the investment could be gained by producing as many items from the same mould as possible. At the same time, design became an important element in the marketing of products. The products were cheaper and the appearance of an item became as important in convincing customers to part with their money as its function. The Art Deco style of the 1920s and 1930s, with its sweeping curves and bold, geometric designs, was perfect for Bakelite. Almost anything that you can imagine being made of plastic today would have been available in Bakelite, but radios, telephones, clocks, jewellery, kitchen utensils, cameras, combs, and brushes were particularly popular. The new, colourful, glossy materials developed in symbiosis with the Art Deco style to form a confidently modern style, quite different from anything that had been seen before.

Bakelite was eventually superseded by newer plastics which were less brittle and cheaper to produce, but you can still find Bakelite items in many places today. Wandering around the Bakelite Museum was like seeing the distilled essence of five decades. The museum was packed with household objects of every kind from Bakelite condiment sets to an extraordinary Bakelite coffin, and I kept recognising things from my grandmother’s house. In particular, a set of fluted egg cups in 1950s pastel colours took me right back to having breakfast at my grandmother’s when I visited for the weekend as a child. All that nostalgia from something that starts off as sticky goo.

Editor’s note: As of early 2019, the Bakelite Museum is temporarily closed for relocation.

Guest author Jackie Chappell is a biologist at the University of Birmingham (UK).

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on May 2, 2005.

Image credit: Pixabay

The periodic table of elements has undergone numerous expansions and revisions over the years. Today, we celebrate the day in 1863 when J.A.R. Newlands published an early version of the table, featuring 56 elements in 11 groups based on what he called the “Law of Octaves.” We’re now up to 118 elements, and although there are various versions of the table in circulation, they’re all ways to group elements by shared characteristics, and they make the study of chemistry a great deal easier than a simple list would. I’ll award 5 bonus points to the first person who memorizes the entire table today and can reproduce it from memory.

Image credit: Dmarcus100 [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons

Breaking the ice rules

When I travel, I usually make a conscious effort to avoid having specific expectations. I plan out an itinerary, but I try to maintain a sense of equanimity about the experiences ahead. I like to be surprised—and I like to be able to experience new things in my own way, on my own terms. This sort of attitude has not only saved me some disappointment, it’s also helped me to approach fairly commonplace sights and events with a sense of wonder and delight. As a result—and frankly, without much effort—I found myself feeling neutral, perhaps even a bit blasé, about the prospect of visiting a glacier in Patagonia when we went there back in 2004. I’ve seen ice; what could this be other than a great quantity of it? I expected to be cold, so I packed appropriate clothing. I expected scenic vistas, so I packed my camera. And that was about as far as I thought about it.

Size Matters

The trip to the Perito Moreno glacier took us more than an hour by bus from the town of El Calafate, Argentina. When we rounded a corner on a mountain road and I got my first glimpse of the glacier, I thought, “Wow. That’s really big.” Later, from a much different angle, I realized what a tiny slice of one corner of one end of this glacier I’d seen earlier, and I was overwhelmed at the scale of what I was seeing. As glaciers go, I am told, this is not even one of the larger ones. Yowza. Even though I took dozens of pictures, including some panoramic shots, there is simply no way to capture how big this thing looks in person. No wide-angle lens could do it justice, because it’s not only impossibly wide but tall and long as well. Short of climbing a mountain or flying high overhead, you can’t take in the whole thing at once. So, yes: a lot of ice…but that doesn’t begin to tell the story.

We took a boat across the lake into which the glacier drains, then hiked along the shore to a point near the face of the glacier. There, we were outfitted with crampons for a 90-minute hike on the glacier itself. After about five minutes of climbing on the steep ice, our guides mentioned that it would become much more strenuous from here on, and two members of our group decided to turn back. The rest of us got a good workout, some extraordinary views, and a few surprises.

Like all glaciers, this one begins high in the mountains—in this case, the Andes, which separate Argentina from Chile. At the source, snowfall is nearly constant, and the weight of all this snow compresses the lower layers into virtually solid ice. As the snowfall continues, gravity pushes the thick mass of ice outward—downhill in this case. So a glacier is basically the same as a river, except that the water is frozen. This river moves quite slowly—about one meter per day—from its source roughly 30km (19 miles) away. As it descends, it encounters higher air temperatures and begins to melt. Some glaciers melt into the ocean; this one melts into a lake. The end of the glacier is a sheer wall of ice about 5km (3 miles) long and standing 60m (200 feet) above the water’s surface. When pieces fall off—a process known as calving—they make a tremendous roar and splash.

Stand and Deliver

The Perito Moreno glacier also has several unique features. For one thing, it is, at the moment (according to some experts, at least) the only glacier in the world in a state of equilibrium—neither advancing nor retreating. Retreating is the norm, due to global warming—numerous glaciers have disappeared in recent decades, and many others are shrinking rapidly. The Perito Moreno glacier, however, advances at the same rate ice breaks off, and has done so for many years.

Another unusual characteristic is that this glacier empties into a lake right at the point where two branches connect through a fairly narrow channel. From time to time, the glacier’s face reaches all the way to the outcropping of land on the other side of the channel—sealing it off to create, in effect, two separate lakes. As the glacier continues to melt, the water level in one of the lakes rises at a faster rate than the other, causing significant flooding. Eventually, the warm water melts enough of the ice that an underwater tunnel forms between the lakes; as the tunnel expands, the water levels equalize. Before long, the tunnel becomes more of an underpass for a giant ice bridge; when this inevitably collapses, it’s a spectacular sight. (The last such collapse occurred on March 13, 2018, and the previous several were in 2016, 2012, 2008, 2006, and 2004.) The glacier then advances to block the channel again, and when we visited in December 2004, a small tunnel had recently formed and the water from the higher lake was still rushing into the lower one.

It’s a Floor That’s Also a Dessert

Hiking on a glacier is like hiking on a giant snow cone—the surface is rough, and gloves are mandatory, as you could seriously lacerate your hand if you fell. Although we were not hiking close to the face of the glacier, our guides were careful to point out that the structure was not reliably stable. We had to steer clear of numerous fissures and holes, some of them filled with water and shining with a beautiful but eerie blue glow. We noticed a thin layer of dark sediment on the ice; the guide said this was sand and dust carried by the wind, and that the water itself was the purest you’d find anywhere. This made sense; after all, the ice came from snow that fell many years ago and would not have contained any airborne pollutants—and the ice would have been an inhospitable environment for most microorganisms. “You can drink it,” the guide said. We exchanged puzzled looks at the notion that we could actually drink the glacier on which we were currently standing. I took off my gloves and tried a few sips—incredibly delicious. They should bottle this stuff, eh? Then I noticed that the picture on the bottle of water in my hand looked suspiciously like the mountains directly in front of us. Ah.

Just before we went around the last wall of ice on our way off the glacier, the guide said there was a special treat waiting for us. They’d set up a little table on the ice with complimentary glasses of Scotch for everyone—on the rocks, of course. Yes, those rocks. We didn’t even mind the blatant product placement—it was a delightful treat. We left tired, sweaty, sunburned, and satisfied. And to think: all I had been expecting was a lot of ice!

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on February 21, 2005.