Word: resins
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Since then the "chemurgic movement" has gathered headway with soybeans for plastics and automobile enamels; casein (from milk) for fabrics and plastics; tung oil for paints; Southern slash pine and yellow pine for newsprint; furfural (for plastics, oil refining, wood resin processing) from oat hulls; anti-freeze fluids and fuel alcohol from cull potatoes; cotton for binding material in roads, pecan shells for charcoal. So far, however, chemurgy has not much helped the mass of U. S. farmers, as Congress' election-year fondling of bedeviled agriculture well shows...
...succession. One evening last week he had three. But it was quite an occasion. Philadelphia's Franklin Institute had opened the first big public showing of Dr. Sando's neat method of preserving biological specimens (and almost anything else, for that matter) in blocks of transparent, synthetic resin...
Entomologists have occasionally found ancient insects beautifully preserved in hunks of amber, which is fossilized natural resin. It occurred to Dr. Sando that if a suitable substance could be found, the same sort of thing could be done deliberately. After much experiment he chose Plexiglas, a mixture of monomers (methyl methacrylate, ethyl methacrylate, etc.) which hardens into a glassy plastic. In blocks of this stuff he immured small dead frogs, a tarantula, the bones of a human hand (see cuts); a rattlesnake's head, complete with fangs, a peacock feather, an iridescent butterfly, a garter snake, flowers, ears...
Better glues were made from casein, a protein ingredient of milk, and from soybeans. In 1912 Dr. Leo Hendrik Baekeland, father of plastics, took out a patent on a synthetic resin for plywood filler, but did not start to exploit it until 1932. In 1926 a German chemist, Dr. T. E. Goldschmidt, developed a filler made of tissue paper impregnated with phenolic resin. This made a bond so firm that the sandwich was stronger weight for weight than steel. It was also waterproof and bacteria-proof...