The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  This tremendous affair, addressed by representatives of all factions, lasted for three and a half days and ended at four in the morning with a great personal triumph for Weizmann –118 new members – and a trembling confrontation with Plekhanov.

  ‘What do you mean by bringing dissension into our ranks?’ the offended Marxist demanded.

  ‘Monsieur Plekhanov,’ Weizmann grandly informed him, ‘you are not the Czar!’

  Apart from these heated public affairs, the young experimenter was having a couple of private ones. He was living with a young lady, Sophia Getzova, to whom he was engaged, and carrying on with another, Vera Khatzmann, a medical student from Rostov-on-Don. By about 1904, things began to get on top of him, and he decided to narrow his activities to the scientific and try his luck elsewhere.

  His fancy fell on Manchester, center of the British textile industry, which had an excellent university department of organic chemistry presided over by the distinguished Professor Perkin. Perkin’s father, many years before, had made his name in the field of dyestuff chemistry by synthesizing aniline blue (thus heralding in the ‘mauve decade’) – a fact that Weizmann thought might dispose him in favor of another dyestuff chemist. But Perkin greatly took to the animated young Russian anyway. In an affable conversation in German (Weizmann as yet had no English), he pointed out that while no staff jobs were open at the moment, he could offer him the use of a little basement laboratory at a nominal sum of six pounds, with the services of a lab boy thrown in. Weizmann accepted, and while Perkin’ went off on vacation – it was the summer of 1904– installed himself in the empty university.

  By the time Perkin returned, he had quite a lot of English. He had learned it from the chemistry department stores book, the Bible, and the purchased works of Macaulay and Gladstone; and also – as he wrote to his sweet darling, the joy from Rostov-on-Don – from conversations with a young demonstrator of Perkin’s who had arrived back from vacation. With this young man he instituted a series of experiments, so that when Perkin took up his chair again, much refreshed by his holiday, Weizmann was able to show him quite a lot. By the winter he was on the staff, with students of his own.

  He couldn’t, however, stay away from Zionism. Progroms in Russia brought a mass protest rally in Manchester, which the young Russian was asked to address. At the rally was the prospective Liberal candidate for the constituency, a Mr W. S. Churchill, keeping his eye on the electorate. He couldn’t understand a word of Weizmann’s fiery oration in Yiddish, but was much impressed by the effect on the audience, and made haste to wring the orator’s hand and to hint that he could be of great service in swaying the Jewish vote. Weizmann declined: he said he was interested only in Zionist issues. Anyway, the January, 1906, elections were at hand, with other politicians astir. Contesting them was the Prime Minister himself, Mr Balfour, also with a Manchester constituency. Came January and Mr Balfour, and Mr Balfour’s agent, who thought he ought to have fifteen minutes with the intriguing young man who knew so much about Russia and the state of the Jews there. The fifteen minutes stretched to an hour and a quarter, and ended with both men knowing rather more about the state of everything.

  He was determined to stick to science, however, and he did. He brought over Miss Vera Khatzmann, his Verochka, married her, and slogged on with his chemistry. An interesting new problem had appeared. The world’s supply of rubber was unequal to the demand: a task for the synthetic chemist. Perkin interested himself, and put teams on it, including Weizmann’s.

  Chaimchik’s approach was novel. He had become interested in fermentation. Verochka’s sister had married a scientist who lived in Paris on the Left Bank. The Weizmanns visited from time to time, and Chaimchik picked up a free-lance assignment that involved work at the Pasteur Institute, kingdom of the great fermenter himself.

  The basis of fermentation was that microorganisms, bacteria, could by creating a ferment in one substance change it into another. He looked up the literature and found that the essential substance of rubber was the five-carbon compound isoprene. Further study showed that a Russian called Winogradsky had recently observed a five-carbon compound in nature. It could be isolated by fermenting sugar with certain bacteria to produce a volatile compound exhibiting the odor of fusel oil.

  Weizmann repeated the experiment in Manchester, and found that Winogradsky had got it wrong. The substance produced, though smelling of fusel oil, was something else. It was not a five-carbon molecule, either. It was a four-carbon one, and it was butyl alcohol. He was a very dogged experimenter, and he tried it many times with a variety of bacteria. It always turned out the same, but in the end he got more butyl alcohol.

  Professor Perkin, to whom he showed the results, permitted himself one of his rare puns. He said, ‘Your butyl alcohol is a very futile alcohol,’ and advised him to pour it down the sink. Chaimchik didn’t do this. He kept on refining the product with a variety of treatments. He got a very large yield of butyl alcohol and smaller quantities of other substances, including methyl alcohol and acetone, the latter about 30 percent of the total.

  He kept on doing this, and the First World War broke out, and a new problem asserted itself. It impinged on Manchester in the form of a Dr Rintoul, from the Scottish branch of the Nobel explosives firm, whose problem was most acute. His firm was supplying the British fleet with cordite for its large naval guns. Strategic considerations made it imperative that the location of these guns should be concealed from the enemy. The solution was to propel the shells by smokeless gunpowder, made possible by the chemical solvent acetone, previously, but no longer, obtainable in generous supply from the forests of Europe as a by-product of charcoal. Not all the forests of Britain could supply the present need for acetone. Was there some other method of producing it?

  ‘Walk this way, Dr Rintoul,’ said Dr Weizmann, and showed him a method.

  Dr Rintoul made haste to the telephone, and the night train from Scotland brought the managing director of Nobel’s, together with several of the senior scientific staff. They went carefully through Chaimchik’s lab books and repeated his experiments: acetone in abundance. Terms were stated for this valuable patent, to which Chaimchik and the university readily agreed. And then occurred a strange accident. The Nobel works blew up. They were unable to take up the patent. The problem was no less urgent for the accident, and Chaimchik, placed in charge of it, was sent by express train to London and ushered into the office of the First Lord of the Admiralty. He found the First Lord of the Admiralty was Mr W. S. Churchill, last encountered wringing his hand while trying to get him to nobble the Jewish vote in Manchester.

  The two men got on famously, and Churchill asked him what he required. Weizmann replied that existing fermentation plants were largely operated by distillers of whisky and gin. Churchill told him to take his pick, and he picked the Nicolson gin distillery in Bow, which was immediately sequestered for his use.

  For the next two years he took on a most daunting, almost mind-boggling task, the one-man creation of a completely new industry: industrial fermentation. The government built him a factory and took over the largest distilleries in the country. He himself took over the laboratory of the Lister Institute in Chelsea, to train teams of chemists to go out and operate the plants.

  The process depended on a bacterium that he had isolated and in countless experiments improved, Clostridium acetobutylicum weizmann. It worked on starch-containing products, and the method he had perfected demanded large quantities of maize. When U-boat warfare interrupted overseas supplies, he switched to horse chestnuts in Britain, and the process crossed the Atlantic to be employed on Canadian maize. A plant was taken over in Toronto, and soon turning out acetone; and when the United States entered the war, the process was also adopted there, at two big distilleries in Terre Haute, Indiana. His operations had spread to Asia before the war ended; but by that time he had transferred his energies.

  While he had been keeping the Navy’s guns firing, the Army’s were blowing the Turks out
of their old Ottoman Empire, which included Palestine. The wartime coalition government was headed by Lloyd George, very keen on his Old Testament, and the Foreign Secretary was Mr A. J. Balfour, whose mind had been so enlarged on the Jewish question in 1906. Weizmann became most tremendously busy. He had never ceased to be active in Zionism, had attended all the big prewar European conferences. But now the war had cut off the European societies, and from being a well-fancied middleweight in the movement he had become its senior statesman. Much negotiation brought about the Balfour Declaration, which declared: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine’; and while his ancient sparring partners Lenin and Trotsky were raising hell making their incredible dream come true in Russia, Chaimchik sped off to Palestine to attend to his.

  He found fighting still going on, but lost no time in getting down to his first scheme, a project planned more than half his life, the laying of a cornerstone for a Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He invited the victorious General Allenby to the ceremony, and, recalling the prophetic utterance that the Word should go forth from Jerusalem, Allenby was both happy and moved. Gunfire could still be heard rolling in the Jerusalem hills while the future center of learning was founded, and everybody was very moved.

  But things were moving everywhere, and in a variety of directions. On the scientific front, acetone was phasing out, and was anyway being produced as a by-product of the rising petroleum industry. Keeping pace with the petroleum industry was the rising automobile industry. The automobiles needed painting, and mass-production methods required fast-drying varnishes. The best solvent was found to come from Chaimchik’s butyl alcohol, which Professor Perkin had advised him to pour down the sink – still obtainable and in large quantities, by his patent method.

  He let his patent agents attend to that one, together with Commercial Solvents, and threw himself into politics.

  He was the leader of world Zionism, the builder-up of the national home, the settler of the people in it, the raiser of the money to do the job. The university was his pet project and he raised that. For the next thirteen years, almost every minute was accounted for. He traveled, exhorted, pleaded, presided; and in 1931, thoroughly exhausted, found himself kicked out of the job owing to factional differences.

  I was sitting in his chair and staring out at his grave as I pondered this, his presence strong in the room, so that when the hand fell on my shoulder I silently rose and almost went through the ceiling.

  ‘Igor, we are going down to lunch now,’ Connie said. ‘And Meyer wants you to call him afterwards. He didn’t want you disturbed while you were reading.’

  4

  ‘Mashed potato – wonderful!’ Dan said.

  Mealtimes were rather Old World at the House; time had stood still since Verochka’s death. Luncheon was served (although served now in the morning room behind the kitchen), and it was served by Verochka’s old housekeeper, Batya, still part of the establishment.

  It was served to the archival staff, Julian magisterially at the head of the table. He sat with so grave a mien I’d half expected him, when I’d first eaten here, to break into grace. He didn’t quite do that. He robustly dealt with what was before him.

  ‘It is nice,’ he said judicially.

  ‘It’s delicious,’ Dan said. ‘Well, you live in style here. Very high off the hog, if the allusion gives no offense to the lady in the kosher kitchen.’

  His name was Dan Navon, and he’d published a best-selling book about Israel the year before. We’d overlapped for a few weeks on the American newspaper lists. He was now doing some work on the connections between Herzl – Weizmann – Ben-Gurion, counterpart of the Abraham – Moses – Joshua triumvirate of earlier history, and he was doing it in Connie’s room, which was why I was in Chaimchik’s.

  ‘Mashed potato is the stuff,’ he said decisively. ‘That’s right, Igor?’

  ‘Quite right,’ I said absently.

  ‘You will give us salvation through mashed potato.’

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘So Vava will.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Mashed potato. His stuff. He made the petrol from it.’

  ‘What’s the joke?’ Julian said.

  ‘Not mine. Michael Sassoon’s. I had dinner with him yesterday,’ Dan said. ‘He’d got it from Bergmann. The Vava papers revolve around mashed potato.’

  He had a long bony face and an engaging smile; also, behind his glasses, a very intelligent pair of eyes that missed little. His corn-crake voice quite often came out with peculiar deadpan jokes, though.

  ‘They do, eh? Well for your information, old friend,’ Julian said, ‘there aren’t any Vava papers. There’s just a single letter mentioning Vava, in 1933.’

  ‘From the single letter mentioning Vava in 1933, Professor Bergmann has made a deduction. He is an investigator with the brain of one of the great detectives. From this one mention it was at once obvious to him that Vava had made a super petrol with an octane number of 150, and he made it from mashed potato.’

  ‘Why mashed?’ Julian said humorously.

  ‘Vava mashed it. I don’t know why,’ Dan said simply. ‘Perhaps you have to.’

  The conversation moved on from mashed potato, but not very far, and when the meal was over and Dan announced he wouldn’t be coming back in the afternoon, I followed Connie ruminatively up to her room.

  ‘Was that serious about mashed potato?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know what’s serious today, Connie,’ I said, and had a look at my watch. Two o’clock. Twelve in England. Worth a try. I picked up the phone and in about half a minute Caroline said breathlessly, ‘Hello.’

  I suddenly understood how Connie had felt the other day. ‘Hello, Caroline.’

  ‘Igor?’

  ‘Yes, darling. Have you been ringing Olga?’

  ‘I gave her a buzz earlier. There was no answer. I came back to start again. What’s up?’

  ‘Well, when you get her,’ I said, ‘tell her to leave the letters there.’

  ‘You don’t want them copied?’

  ‘I don’t want her to do anything with them. She can leave them, for the time being.’

  ‘I see. I think,’ she said. ‘Igor, is everything all right?’

  ‘Well, it isn’t bad, really. It’s quite nice,’ I said.

  There was a slightly breathy pause. ‘I just got in,’ she said. ‘I could hear the damned thing. What are you talking about – you don’t want the letters copied and you don’t want them sent?’

  ‘That’s right. How’s everything there?’

  ‘Well, how do you expect it is? It’s pissing. How’s orange-blossom land?’

  ‘It’s turned a bit gray and chilly now,’ I said, staring out at the marvelous day. ‘Well, then.’

  ‘Just a minute, for heaven’s sake. You do realize, don’t you, that she might easily have popped down this morning?’

  ‘I did realize that.’

  ‘Or that if she’s there this very minute she might not answer the phone, because she knows nobody will be ringing her at Wimbledon.’

  ‘That crossed my mind, too.’

  ‘Has anything cropped up?’

  ‘It isn’t really as urgent as it was.’

  ‘I see. That’s why you’re ringing me, is it?’

  ‘What would you like me to bring you?’

  ‘I’ve just been seeing Hopcroft,’ she said. ‘He’s yarning away, perfectly all right, only his eyes keep crossing. Would you like me to go to Wimbledon and tell her all this – I mean, on the off chance of her being there?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. Don’t do that, Caroline.’

  ‘Igor, are the Russian secret police after you or something?’

  ‘That’s it, darling. Connie says there are some stunning caftans around. Would you like one?’

  ‘Well, I’d love one … When are you coming back?’

  ‘The twenty-ninth or thirtieth. If you do manage to cont
act Olga, could you call me?’

  ‘Because it is so unurgent. I do see,’ she said.

  ‘Reverse the charge, of course. If not, Happy Christmas.’

  ‘Quite.’ She hung up right away.

  I pondered this a moment, and jiggled the phone rest and got Meyer.

  ‘You didn’t bring it,’ was his gloomy greeting.

  ‘No, well –’

  ‘Okay, I heard. It’s serious. You’ll have dinner with me tonight. Today you will be busy. There are many things to find out.’

  ‘Chemical things?’ I said.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘But I’m no chemist. I haven’t the faintest –’

  ‘Persevere. They’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. Waste no time,’ he said, and clicked off.

  ‘Yes, well, our friend got it nearly right,’ Julian said with satisfaction, coming in at that moment. ‘I’ve just been speaking to Finster, who is handling the thing here. Mashed potato! It is a botanical species called Ipomoea batatas.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Finster says it is in fact a kind of sweet potato.’

  ‘Is he mashing it?’

  ‘To tell the truth, I’m not absolutely on top line what he is doing with it. You’re finding out, I understand.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Meyer said so. Finster works for Beylis at the Daniel Sieff. Ze’ev will take you. Ze’ev!’ he yelled from the doorway.

  A response came from below.

  Chapter Three

  ‘It is really a very simple problem of carbon chemistry,’ Dr Finster said. ‘There’s little of what you would call higher interest any more. It’s work, after all, from fifty years.’

  He didn’t look very pleased with it himself; he was wearing a pullover instead of a lab coat, perhaps as a mark of displeasure. Some hint of the reason for it had been given me by Professor Beylis, on whom I’d looked in first. The Weizmann Institute is a very high-class institute, and like its peers, the Rockefeller, Princeton, M.I.T., and so forth, is interested in distant advance on the frontiers of knowledge. The hall of fame and the name of Nobel hang in the air. In this climate, teasing out some further application of an ancient process long chewed over by commercial chemists was like asking for improvements to soap powder: very small potatoes.