Tales of Militant Chemistry
Alice Lovejoy
Univ. of California Press, $27.95
Regardless of the digitalization of images and flicks, some cinephiles and moviemakers nonetheless favor movie. As an example, Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer, a thriller concerning the theoretical physicist who oversaw the Manhattan Undertaking to develop the primary atomic bomb, was shot on Kodak’s 70 millimeter movie. However few of that film’s followers know what a big position Kodak itself performed within the Manhattan Undertaking.
In Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Movie Manufacturing facility in a Century of Struggle, media and cultural historian Alice Lovejoy unveils how a few of the largest gamers within the photographic movie business moonlighted in arms manufacturing within the twentieth century and supported the creation of historical past’s most devastating weapon.
Lovejoy begins her story with Kodak’s sprawling journey from a Rochester, N.Y.–based mostly start-up producing cameras and glass plates in 1883 into a world chemical large by the Twenties. Enjoying a robust supporting position within the guide’s narrative is Agfa, a movie manufacturing firm centered in Wolfen, Germany, and Kodak’s primary competitor. The 2 corporations manufactured supplies for a breadth of merchandise, together with artificial fibers, plastic toys, pesticides, synthetic flavors and painkillers. However their most well-known product was photographic movie.
Within the early 1900s, movie was usually made from cellulose nitrate, a extremely flammable materials created by soaking cotton in nitric acid. The deadly hazards of nitrate movie have been compounded by the noxious fumes that have been launched ought to it catch fireplace. Certainly, these fumes have been much like the poison fuel utilized in World Struggle I — a lot in order that Agfa’s filmmaking factories have been well-placed to supply poison fuel in abundance for Germany within the Nice Struggle.
By the Twenties, Kodak had begun promoting security movie, a nonflammable movie constituted of cellulose acetate. However nitrate movie remained broadly utilized by customers as a result of, till Kodak had refined and optimised the method, acetate movie was dearer and troublesome to supply. Thankfully for Kodak, cellulose acetate turned worthwhile as demand for the fabric, which was helpful as a weatherproof coating for airplanes, skyrocketed throughout WWI.
Kodak’s experience on and capability for producing acetate en masse led to a profitable aspect hustle for its subsidiary Tennessee Eastman — producing a special analysis division explosive, or RDX, in WWII. The manufacturing of the extremely potent explosive, used broadly by each the Allied and Axis warring powers, required acetic acid, additionally concerned within the manufacturing of cellulose acetate. The corporate churned out 570 tons of RDX a day by the top of the warfare and remained the USA’ sole producer of the explosive till 1999.
Tennessee Eastman’s chemical engineering experience additionally made within the U.S. authorities’s prime selection to supply a completely totally different substance — fissionable uranium for the Manhattan Undertaking. The corporate arrange the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., which used large electromagnets to separate fissionable uranium from its heavier counterpart, nonfissionable uranium. The fissionable uranium was then despatched to Los Alamos, N.M., to supply atomic bombs.
Chemistry fans could really feel left wanting of particulars on the chemical and nuclear reactions talked about within the guide. However what Lovejoy does ship with aplomb is tales rife with intrigue, twists and surprises worthy of the silver display screen. Alongside the best way, we meet Kodak cofounder George Eastman, who set his sights “on work as an alternative of faculty” at 8 years outdated after his father’s demise. We’re additionally launched to Aleksandra Lawrik, a sufferer of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union throughout World Struggle II. She was displaced from Dnipro, Ukraine, to one among Agfa’s factories in Wolfen, Germany, the place she was a compelled laborer pouring caustic soda over wooden cellulose to create artificial textile fibers — poisonous work that ruined her lungs.
All through the narrative, Lovejoy deftly weaves a cornucopia of strands and recurring threads in politics, economics, historical past, biography and expertise. The result’s a compelling illustration of how fascinating and horrifying the world of commercial chemistry might be.
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