Word: esso
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There is an obvious solution: cook up synthetic detergents that even choosy bacteria will consider delicious. And last week Esso Research and Engineering Co. of Linden, N.J., announced that it has finally found a recipe with the proper ingredients: pleasing to the bugs and cheap enough to fit the household budget. The concoction, however, was easier to dream up than to prepare...
...most popular detergent now in use, say Esso chemists, is TBS (tetra propylbenzene sulfonate). It forms the basis of just about every washday product on supermarket shelves-including Tide, Fab and Rinso Blue. Its complex molecule has many branches, and it contains a benzene ring of six closely bonded carbon atoms. This sort of thing is uncommon in nature, and bacteria find it unpalatable. So Esso chemists set out to make a molecule of a long, unbranched chain of carbon atoms, rather like a natural fat. That, they figured, would be something bacteria could get their teeth into, destroying...
...Next the Esso chemists dissolved their SAS in water and added bacteria from soil and sewage plants. The bugs went for the stuff like kids for peanut-butter sandwiches, gobbling most of it in a few days. Once their new detergent gets drained out of washing machines, say the ESSO men, it will not last long enough to make one horrid bubble...
...long after he took over Italy's giant state-owned petroleum monopoly E.N.I, last fall, scholarly Marcello Boldrini, 73, closed a deal to buy crude oil from Esso. His move spurred speculation that E.N.I, might be turning away from its Russian oil suppliers to resume a romance with the "seven sisters"-the name that his predecessor, the late Enrico Mattei, used to describe the big Western-owned oil companies. Last week, after Boldrini returned home from a week's visit in Moscow, it was clear that E.N.I, intends to keep right on doing business with the Russians...
Actually, Boldrini and E.N.I, have the Russians over something of an oil barrel. With the Esso deal behind him, Boldrini bluntly warned the Russians not to raise the price of their crude, which costs him $1.15 per barrel v. $1.50 for oil from most Western companies. But Boldrini got at least a 20% discount from Esso, and there are signs that Shell and British Petroleum may be ready to do business with him. Obviously Boldrini is applying the tactic, used so masterfully by Mattei, of playing off the West and East to the advantage of E.N.I...