Word: glycolized
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Philip Morris sales boomed from the start. But to give them added impetus, President McKitterick speeded up research on a hygroscopic agent called diethylene glycol. A hygroscopic agent is what attracts and retains moisture in tobacco. Most cigarets use glycerin. Chemists discovered, however, that when diethylene glycol is burned, unlike glycerin, it does not give off an irritant called acrolein. That was a neat find indeed, and it promptly went into Philip Morris advertising, though Philip Morris claimed that it had been using the agent all along...
President McKitterick then took his diethylene glycol to Columbia University pharmacologists, had them experiment. They put a solution of smoke from cigarets containing the new hygroscopic agent under the eyelid of a rabbit. To President McKitterick's delight, it produced less swelling than a solution from cigarets using glycerin and, curiously, less than a solution from cigarets using no hygroscopic agent at all. How much this test really proved is still a matter of debate. A solution of smoke is not smoke, a rabbit's eye is not a human throat and almost nothing is known about...
Great was the relief of pharmacologists, therefore, when President McKitterick withdrew the acrolein advertising story pending further experiments, which are still going on. Sole use now of the diethylene glycol angle is among doctors. In some 40 medical journals, and there only, Philip Morris runs quiet advertising about its hygroscopic agent. At every big medical convention Philip Morris salesmen pass out packs to the delegates, discuss cigaret pharmacology with them in learned language...
...than mercury injections. Reasoning by analogy, they ask pharmacologists to produce a potable bismuth like the drink Professor Hanzlik announced. In his potion, which 200 San Franciscans have found harmless, which 40 San Francisco syphilitics have found beneficial, the solution is sodium bismuthate; the solvent, a mixture of propylene glycol and a new substance called tri-iso-propanolamine...
...arranged like links in an open chain.* Ethane, with two linked carbon atoms, is a simple aliphatic; ethyl alcohol a simple aliphatic derivative. Three years ago Dr. Curme began to manufacture ethyl alcohol synthetically on a large scale. Other profitable work has been with acetylene (for welding, lighting), ethylene glycol (for anti-freeze mixtures), ethylene oxide (insecticide, fumigant). Should he have to, Dr. Curme could probably make a living from the hydrocarbons blowing away in almost any large factory's smoke...