Word: chemisters
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Plastics Bakelite is not sexy. But when New York chemist Leo Baekeland invented it in 1907 by tightly controlling the heat and pressure of volatile chemical reactions, he created the first completely synthetic substance. Hardened and shaped, Bakelite--or phenol formaldehyde--was impervious to heat, acids and electricity, allowing its use in everything from cookware to adhesives to car electrical systems. Chemists were soon making all sorts of polymers, launching a plastic century...
...improbability of flying a kite weighted down by a heavy key, ignoring Franklin's long history of kite flying, and of his delay in publicizing the experiment, though only three months elapsed. More to the point, scientific fraud seems wildly out of character for Franklin. As Harvard chemist and Franklin buff Dudley Herschbach, a Nobel laureate, notes, "It would have been utterly inconsistent with all of his other work in [science] for him to claim he'd done something...
...with a special wrinkle. The steeple he had hoped to use was unfinished, and he decided he could prove his case just as easily with a wired kite. It would rise even higher in the sky. So why did he do it on the sly? Joseph Priestley, the British chemist and a Franklin crony, later explained, "... dreading the ridicule which too commonly attends unsuccessful attempts in science, he communicated his intended experiment to nobody but his son, who assisted him in raising the kite...
...them to an oil-palm plantation where a cache of chemicals was buried, including an unspecified amount of sodium azide, a powder that can be used to make poison gas. "When mixed with water, acid or metal, it changes rapidly to a highly toxic gas," says a Malaysian-government chemist. "The gas can be fatal...
Hyman cites the example of the University pursuing a chemist and a historian...