Abstract
THOSE who have read Goethe's episodes from his life, known as “Wahrheit undDichtung” willrememberhisdescription of his visit in 1741 to the burning hill near Dutweiler, a village in the Palatinate. Here he met old Stauf, a coal philosopher, philosophus fer ignem, whose peculiar appearance and more peculiar mode of life, Goethe remarks upon. He was engaged in an unsavoury process of collecting the oils, resin, and tar obtained in the destructive distillation of coal carried on in a rude form of coke oven. Nor were his labours crowned with pecuniary success, for he complained that he wished to turn the oil and resin to account, and save the soot, on which Goethe adds that, in attempting to do too much, the enterprise altogether failed. We can scarcely imagine, however, what Goethe's feelings would have been could he have foreseen the beautiful and useful products which the development of the science of a century and a half has been able to extract from Stauf s evil-smelling oils. With what wonder would he have regarded the synthetic power of modern chemistry, if he could have learnt that not only the brighte-t, the most varied colours of every tone and shade can be obtained from this coal-tar, but that some of the finest perfumes can, by the skill of the chemist, be extracted from it. Nay, that from these apparently useless oils, medicines which vie in potency with the rare vegeto-alkaloids can be obtained, and lastly, perhaps most remarkable of all, that the same raw material may be made to yield an innocuous principle, termed saccharine, possessed of far greater sweetness than sugar itself. The attainment of such results might well be regarded as savouring of the chimerical dreams of the alchemist, rather than expressions of sober truth, and the modern chemist may ask a riddle more paradoxical than that of Samson, “Out of the burning came forth coolness, and out of the strong came forth sweetness”; and by no one could the answer be given who had not ploughed with the heifer of science, “What smells stronger than tar, and what tastes sweeter than saccharine?” That these are matters of fact we may assure ourselves by the most convincing of all proofs their money value, and we learn that the annual value of the products now extracted from an unsightly and apparently worthless material amounts to several millions sterling, whilst the industries based upon these results give employment to thousands of men.
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On Recent Progress in the Coal-Tar Industry 1 . Nature 34, 111–114 (1886). https://doi.org/10.1038/034111b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/034111b0