- Gergel, Max G.
Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like
to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?
Rockford, IL: Pierce Chemical Company, 1979.
OCLC 4703212.
-
Throughout Max Gergel's long career he has been an
unforgettable character for all who encountered
him in the many rôles he has played: student, bench
chemist, instructor of aviation cadets, entrepreneur,
supplier to the Manhattan Project, buyer and seller of
obscure reagents to a global clientele, consultant to
industry, travelling salesman peddling products ranging
from exotic
halocarbons
to roach killer and toilet bowl cleaner, and evangelist
persuading young people to pursue careers in chemistry.
With family and friends (and no outside capital) he founded
Columbia Organic Chemicals, a specialty chemical supplier
specialising in halocarbons but, operating on a shoestring,
willing to make almost anything a customer was ready to
purchase (even Max drew the line, however, when the
silver-tongued director of the Naval Research Laboratory
tried to persuade him to make
pentaborane).
The narrative is as rambling and entertaining as one imagines
sharing a couple (or a couple dozen) drinks with Max at
an American Chemical Society meeting would have been. He
jumps from family to friends to finances to business to
professional colleagues to suppliers to customers to
nuggets of wisdom for starting and building a business to
eccentric characters he has met and worked with to his
love life to the exotic and sometimes bone-chilling chemical
syntheses he did in his company's rough and ready facilities.
Many of Columbia's contracts involved production of moderate
quantities (between a kilogram and several 55 gallon drums) of
substances previously made only in test tube batches. This
“medium scale chemistry”—situated between
the laboratory bench and an industrial facility making
tank car loads of the stuff—involves as much art
(or, failing that, brute force and cunning) as it does
science and engineering, and this leads to many of the
adventures and misadventures chronicled here. For example,
an exothermic reaction may be simple to manage when you're
making a few grams of something—the liberated heat is simply
conducted to the walls to the test tube and dissipated: at
worst you may only need to add the reagent slowly, stir well,
and/or place the reaction vessel in a water bath. But when
DuPont placed an order for
allene
in gallon quantities, this posed a problem which Max resolved as
follows.
When one treats
1,2,3-Trichloropropane
with alkali and a little water the reaction is violent; there
is a tendency to deposit the reaction product, the raw
materials and the apparatus on the ceiling and the attending
chemist. I solved this by setting up duplicate 12 liter flasks,
each equipped with double reflux condensers and surrounding
each with half a dozen large tubs. In practice, when the
reaction “took off” I would flee through the door
or window and battle the eruption with water from a garden hose.
The contents flying from the flasks were deflected by the ceiling
and collected under water in the tubs. I used towels to wring
out the contents which separated, shipping the lower level to
DuPont. They complained of solids suspended in the
liquid, but accepted the product and ordered more. I increased
the number of flasks to four, doubled the number of wash tubs
and completed the new order.
They ordered a 55 gallon drum. … (p. 127)
All of this was in the days before the EPA, OSHA, and the rest
of the suffocating blanket of soft despotism descended upon
entrepreneurial ventures in the United States that actually
did things and made stuff. In the 1940s and '50s, when Gergel
was building his business in South Carolina, he was free to
adopt the “whatever it takes” attitude which is
the quintessential ingredient for success in start-ups and
small business. The
flexibility and ingenuity which allowed Gergel not only
to compete with the titans of the chemical industry but
become a valued supplier to them is precisely what is
extinguished by intrusive regulation, which accounts for why
sclerotic dinosaurs are so comfortable with it. On the
other hand, Max's experience with
methyl iodide
illustrates why some of these regulations were imposed:
There is no description adequate for the revulsion I felt
over handling this musky smelling, high density, deadly
liquid. As residue of the toxicity I had chronic insomnia
for years, and stayed quite slim. The government had me
questioned by Dr. Rotariu of Loyola University for there
had been a number of cases of methyl bromide poisoning and the
victims were either too befuddled or too dead to be
questioned. He asked me why I had not committed suicide
which had been the final solution for some of the afflicted
and I had to thank again the patience and wisdom of Dr. Screiber.
It is to be noted that another factor was our lack of a
replacement worker. (p. 130)
Whatever it takes.
This book was published by Pierce Chemical Company and
was never, as best I can determine, assigned either an ISBN
or Library of Congress catalogue number. I cite it above by
its OCLC
Control Number. The book is hopelessly out of print, and used
copies, when available, sell for forbidding prices. Your
only alternative to lay hands on a print copy is an inter-library
loan, for which the OCLC number is a useful reference. (I hear
members of the write-off generation asking, “What is
this ‘library’ of which you speak?”) I found
a scanned PDF edition in the
library section
of the
Sciencemadness.org Web
site; the scanned pages are sometimes a little gnarly around the
bottom, but readable. You will also find the second volume
of Gergel's memoirs, The Ageless Gergel, among
the works in this collection.
May 2012 