Plastics!! (and coal tar)

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

Paul DiFi writes:

> book is entitled _Plastic The Making of a Synthetic Century_ and
> is written by Stephen Fenichell, publisher HarperBusiness, cost $25 US.  
> Don tha-that imipolex-G underwear, kiddies!

Looking up random stuff in encyclopedias while reading GR can have 
surprising results:

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COAL-TAR PRODUCTS. 
     Coal tar, a black, sticky liquid thicker than water, is produced when coal 
is heated in the absence of air, a process called destructive distillation. 
Much coal tar is produced by the steel industry as it produces millions of 
tons of coke each year to fuel the furnaces used in separating iron from its 
ores. A modern coke oven makes about 22 metric tons of coke from 30 tons 
of coal in less than a day. About one fourth of the coal is converted into gases 
that are piped out of the oven. Cooling them produces about 82 pounds (37 
kilograms) of coal tar for each ton of coal. The remaining gases then rise 
through a tower called a scrubber. Oil with a high boiling point, called wash 
oil, is sprayed into the top of this tower, and the falling drops of oil absorb 
vapors of light oil from the gas. Light oil is a mixture of chemical compounds 
that does not completely liquefy upon cooling. The gas leaving the top of the 
scrubber is used as fuel. The oil leaving the bottom is distilled to remove the 
light oil from the wash oil. 
     Crude coal tar is a mixture of hundreds of organic chemical compounds (see 
Organic Chemistry). Most of these are aromatic compounds, the molecules 
of which have one or more rings of carbon atoms. Most of the compounds in 
coal tar contain only the elements carbon and hydrogen, but a few of them 
also contain oxygen, nitrogen, or sulfur. 
     From about 1860 until the 1940s, coal-tar products became the main raw 
materials of a large branch of the chemical industry. They were converted 
into dyes, drugs, explosives, plastics, fibers, films, pesticides, paints, rubber, 
and other useful substances. When the demand for these products grew too 
great for the coke producers to meet, petroleum became the main source of 
aromatic compounds.
[snip]   

h(roll-on,-paranoia)g
hag at iafrica.com