Word: lignin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Lignin, a waste product in paper making, is now known to be useful in all but one of the following ways...
...Plastics in both common forms: 1) molding powders from which odd-shaped objects are pressed; 2) laminated sheets-i.e., layers of paper or cloth bound together and coated with lignin derivatives-which are used in such simple large-surface products as tabletops, refrigerator and airplane doors. Laminated lignin plastics are one-half the weight of aluminum, one-fifth the weight of steel. Pound for pound they are as strong as steel. The expanding U.S. output of lignin plastics can be used almost entirely for military purposes, e.g., parts for ships, tanks, planes, bomb fuses, cases for shipping shells, insulators...
...Lignin plastics are the cheapest plastics yet devised; at 5? per lb. for the powder they cost only one-third to one-fourth the cost of most synthetic resins. But today they have a still greater advantage-they require as little as 2 or 3% phenol (carbolic acid), a chief component of the commonest plastics and now a badly needed, priorities-listed ingredient. Furthermore, lignin molding powders can be mixed to "extend" phenol plastics by 100%, synthetic rubber for many uses by 100 to 500%. This aspect of lignin was last week under intensive study by the U.S. Army & Navy...
...road-binding material, lignin is widely used in New Jersey and Washington instead of tarry binders. This use was developed in the U.S. about 1905 by Jacob Robeson, pioneer industrial student of lignin. Robeson Process Co., unlike Marathon, removes lignin from pulp wastes by evaporation rather than by precipitation...
Theory Needed. All these applications still absorb only bucketfuls of the oceans of waste lignin pouring out of U.S. paper mills every day. Big reason for the slowness of lignin utilization is that, in spite of more than 60 years of research by scores of chemists, nobody has yet precisely determined its structure-what atoms in what pattern form its molecule. But when the theory is cleared up, useful applications will follow thick & fast. Reason: chemists will know what they are working with and can abandon the essentially trial-&-error methods now forced upon them. Chief center of molecular lignin...