Word: duisberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With the Southwest facing one of the worst droughts in its history, the hunt was on for new ways to get around the perennial shortage of rain. Last week in El Paso, young (30) Dr. Peter Duisberg, agricultural chemist from New Mexico A. & M., reported to the Southwestern Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that desert research might well be "opening up a new agricultural frontier." He was ready to name scores of plants that need almost no water and might be converted into products varying all the way from varnish to broomstraws...
...Chemist Duisberg had begun his own experiments with the creosote bush (Larrea divaricata), an acrid, sticky evergreen that thrives in millions of acres of drought-stricken wasteland. Last winter, using a distilling apparatus made from junkheap parts, Duisberg showed how to turn the hardy bush into a palatable stock feed.* With one byproduct already available to increase the margin of profit (nordihydroguaiaretic acid, a fat preservative that brings $35 a lb.), he managed to develop another: a quick-drying varnish that is almost certain to be salable. Other promising plants on Duisberg's list...
...Duisberg's catalogue includes dozens of other products of desert plants-liquid wax, carbon paper, steroids, burlap, even fire sticks for Boy Scouts. But New Mexico A. & M. has decided that Duisberg's work, despite possible future rewards, is "too fundamental," and is dropping the project. Chemist Duisberg, however, is not worried about having to shut up shop. With an eye to the thirsty future, half a dozen other colleges are.already clamoring for his services...
Some of the loss from these raids is only temporary. But at Wuppertal, Duisberg, Dortmund and many another Ruhr city, the damage has probably gone beyond any possibility of salvage...
Died. Carl Duisberg, 73, organizer in 1925 and chairman of Germany's great dye trust, the I. G. Farbenindustrie, head of the Reich Federation of German Industry until he resigned in 1931; near Cologne. While employed by Fr. Bayer & Co. (Aspirin and other chemical products), he produced such coal-tar dyes as benzopurpurin (red), azo-blue, benzoazurin, sulfonazurin...