Word: nitrogen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...crystalline substance, Vitamine D, which he prefers to call by the name of "bios" first used by Professor Wildiers, of the University of Louvain, Belgium, in 1900. It was extracted from a solution of autolyzed (self-digested) yeast. It is an organic chemical structure composed of 43% carbon, 25% nitrogen, 8% hydrogen and 24% not yet completely analyzed...
...complaint that things can't be run on air is thoroughly exploded. Chemists have for years been making some most important compounds out of the raw material of air. "Free" oxygen and nitrogen in the air, for instance, can be "fixed" by a gigantic electric arc into nitric oxide, from which nitric acid and nitrates (valuable fertilizers) are made...
Then in 1914 Fritz Haber, clever German necromancer, found that nitrogen gas can be captured in another way-by combining it with hydrogen to form ammonia. Instead of electricity, the Haber process makes use of an agent called a "catalyst," which is a substance that by its mere presence causes the union of two other elements. Efficient catalysts, or as Dr. E. E. Slosson calls them, the "good mixers" of chemical society, are expensive. Haber used uranium, platinum or some other rare and finely divided metal. When the nitrogen and hydrogen, after being elaborately purified, mixed in proper proportions, compressed...
Chemists of all nations have been seeking to improve the existing methods of nitrogen fixation. Last week the most important discovery since Haber's was announced from the fixed nitrogen research laboratory of the Chemical Warfare Service of the U. S. Army, at Washington, by Dr. Arthur B. Lamb, director of the laboratory, and professor of chemistry at Harvard University. A new catalyst has been found to unite the atoms of nitrogen and hydrogen into the molecule of ammonia. It yields 14% of ammonia, twice the amount given by the Haber process. The nature of the catalyst...
...Professor Vigard, of the University of Christiania, Norway, claims he has discovered another and better reason. Just outside the earth's atmosphere, he says, is a wall of crystalline particles of nitrogen. This is what makes the sky blue. It also explains, he thinks, why radio waves follow the contour of the earth, instead of flying off from it at a tangent. This would seem to indicate that radio communication with other planets will always be impossible...