2013-05-23T01:31:07-04:00 Michael Freemantle http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=michael-freemantle Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Michael Freemantle Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2238824 2012-12-04T15:13:02-05:00 2013-02-03T05:12:01-05:00

Michael Freemantle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-freemantle/
On Monday, 3 December, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson reported on the continuing legacy of the attack on the town and its residents. In his report, shown on the BBC News at Ten, he interviewed Nasrin Abdul Qadir who had lost 17 of her relatives, including her mother, her two brothers, and her sister in the attack. Simpson then entered the cellar of the family house where they had been gassed.

"Even 25 years later, the stench of mustard gas is still strong" observed BBC Simpson while standing in the cellar. The gas "makes our eyes weep and our heads ache," he said, before making a hasty exit. The report noted that not only cats, rats and other animals who had found their way into these contaminated cellars had died but also people who had entered them recently had died.

Mustard gas is actually not a gas but a thick viscous liquid that can remain on the ground for years when conditions are right. The chemical releases a vapour that is either odourless or smells of mustard depending on the purity of the liquid.

What struck me about Simpson's report was that he did not have a gas mask and was not wearing any form of protective clothing. As he could smell the gas, it seemed to me at first that he was putting himself and the cameraman at some considerable risk. They were either being very brave or foolhardy.

Mustard gas was first synthesized in various ways from chlorine- and sulfur-containing compounds by French, British and German chemists during the latter half ot he 19th century. It was introduced as a chemical weapon during the First World War when the Germans bombarded British frontlines on the Western Front with some 50,000 mustard shells.

Mustard gas is a most dreadful chemical warfare agent. Depending on the level of exposure, it can cause blistering of the skin, inflammation of the lungs if the vapour is inhaled, loss of eyesight, and internal and external bleeding. Death of victims exposed to high concentrations of the poison can be slow and painful. In World War I soldiers sometimes took four to five weeks to die from the poison and the pain was often so bad they had to be strapped to their beds.

After it was first used in the Great War, Fritz Haber, the German chemist who became known as the father of modern chemical warfare, considered mustard gas to be "a fabulous success." As I mention in my book, Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War, the chemical became known as the "king of the battle gases." Between July 1917, when it was first used, and the end of the war German mustard gas accounted for around 125,000 British casualties, that is some 70% of all British gas casualties in the war. It should be noted, however, that only 1.5% of the mustard gas casualties proved fatal.

Fortunately for Simpson and the cameraman, they had British chemical warfare expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon with them. He carried a hand-held chemical agent monitor that can reliably detect even trace concentrations of mustard gas. So, when Simpson and the cameraman entered the cellar, I presume the atmosphere had already been tested and deemed safe. Even so, I would not like to have been in Simpson's shoes.

Michael Freemantle's latest book, Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War is available to purchase here:
His previous book, An Introduction to Ionic Liquids is available here:]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2199903 2012-11-27T15:44:30-05:00 2013-01-27T05:12:01-05:00

Michael Freemantle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-freemantle/
Polonium is a silver-grey metallic chemical element that can exist as 33 different species known as isotopes. All 33 isotopes are radioactive. The one that is suspected of killing Arafat is polonium-210, the same isotope that killed the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. The 43-year-old ex-KGB officer died in a London hospital on 23 November 2006. The poison had most likely been administered three weeks earlier by dissolving polonium chloride in water and adding the solution to a cup of tea, according to science writer John Emsley.

Polonium poisoning also led to the death of Iréne Joliot-Curie from leukemia at the age of 58 some 50 years earlier on 17 March 1956. The French scientist won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, "in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements." In his book Molecules of Murder, Emsley observes that Iréne's leukemia was caused by exposure to polonium-209 after a sealed capsule containing the element burst on her laboratory bench. Whereas the half-life of polonium-210 is measured in days, that of polonium-209 is measured in years. The half-life of an isotope is the time taken for its radioactivity to drop to half of its initial value. Polonium-209 "took more than ten years to do its deadly work" on Iréne, Emsley writes.

Iréne's mother was Polish-born French physicist Marie Curie. In 1903, Marie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with two other French physicists, her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity. In 1896, Becquerel had discovered radioactivity in a uranium-containing ore known as pitchblende. In 1898, the two Curies showed that pitchblende and chalcolite, another uranium-rich mineral, contained two other radioactive metals. They named them radium and polonium, the latter after Marie's native land, Poland.

Marie received the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her research on radium and polonium. As I point out in my book, Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War, Curie was a keen advocate of the use of radiography during the First World War. Assisted by her teenage daughter Iréne, she began to organize X-ray services to help medical staff to locate shrapnel, bullets and broken bones in wounded soldiers. Marie set up some 20 mobile vans, known as "petite Curies," that carried portable but primitive X-ray machines. The machines used radon, a radioactive gas produced by the radioactive decay of radium, as a source of radiation. Curie also arranged for X-ray units to be established in battlefields.

Marie died from leukemia in 1934 caused by the prolonged exposure to radiation. Little did she know that one of the elements she discovered would cause the death of her daughter, kill a Russian spy, and lead to an enquiry into the possible murder of a key figure in the Middle East.

Michael Freemantle's latest book, Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War is available to purchase here:
His previous book, An Introduction to Ionic Liquids is available here:]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2117839 2012-11-12T13:14:22-05:00 2013-01-12T05:12:01-05:00

Michael Freemantle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-freemantle/
The Monday edition of our local paper - the Basingstoke Gazette - is lying on my desk at the moment. It arrived with a predominantly purple flier advertising all sorts of Premier Stores' products: Heinz Beanz "ONLY 60p," new Cadbury Crispello "ONLY 50p," Original Nescafé "ONLY £2.50" and other "exclusive deals" shout out in white against purple backgrounds. The Quality Street tin from last Christmas that now contains paper clips, ballpoint pens, pencils, a pencil sharpener and a miscellany of other office items is purple. The box file where I keep receipts and tax papers is purple.

And my wife, Mary, who has just popped in with a cup of coffee, is wearing her favourite cardigan. It is purple. She points out that purple is featured in the "Focus on fashion" section of the woman's page of the local paper: "MAKE a play for purple in your wardrobe this season ... how to work the Quality Street shade."

Purple, and variations thereof - mauve, indigo, violet, magenta, crimson and claret - are ubiquitous nowadays. But it was not always so.

For many centuries, purple was the colour not of the populace but of royalty, popes, bishops, the high, the mighty, and the rich. That was because purple pigments and dyes were scarce and therefore highly prized. Han purple, a rare synthetic pigment containing the chemical elements barium, copper, silicon, and oxygen, was one of the pigments used in paints to decorate the Terracotta Warriors buried with the first Emperor of China some 2,200 years ago. The natural dye Tyrian purple, also called Imperial purple, was extracted from small molluscs in the Mediterranean Sea. These creatures were difficult to collect and several thousand were required to produce one gram of the dye.

That all changed in 1856 when an 18-year old English chemist made a discovery of immense significance not only for fashion and the textile industry but also for the pharmaceutical industry. While working in a laboratory in his family home in London, William Henry Perkin (1838-1907) serendipitously prepared a dye that became known variously as mauveine, Perkin's mauve, or aniline purple. The chance discovery using extracts from coal tar gave birth to the synthetic dyes industry and the production of colours that revolutionized fashion. It also led to the mass production of other organic chemicals, notably pharmaceuticals such as aspirin.

Perkin made a fortune from his discovery. He retired as a dyemaker at the age of 36, sold his business, and spent much of the rest of life carrying out research in organic chemistry. It is highly unlikely that he realised his discovery was to have catastrophic consequences. As I note in my book Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War, the industrial carnage and destruction of the First World War would not have been possible without his discovery of synthetic purple and the resulting industrial-scale production of explosive chemicals derived from coal tar such as trinitrotoluene (TNT).

Michael Freemantle's latest book, Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War is available to purchase here.
His previous book, An Introduction to Ionic Liquids, is available here.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2055831 2012-11-04T19:00:00-05:00 2013-01-04T05:12:01-05:00

Michael Freemantle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-freemantle/
It is therefore fitting that red poppies, or at least the artificial paper ones, are used to commemorate those in the armed forces who have sacrificed their lives during conflicts past and present. In Britain, the poppies are sold by the Royal British Legion to raise funds to provide assistance for service personnel and veterans who need help. The charity's 2012 Poppy Appeal, launched nationally on Wednesday 24 October, aims to raise £42million for this purpose.

We can hardly have failed to notice that every year between the launch of the appeal and Remembrance Sunday it has become de rigueur for every British politician and TV presenter to be seen wearing a poppy when in public or on TV. The poppies not only symbolise our gratitude for the sacrifice of service men and women and but also identify us as supporters of the charity and its aims.

The red poppies that McCrae saw in Flanders fields and the ones we see today in England and throughout Europe are a species known as Papaver rhoeus. They are generally regarded as agricultural weeds and serve little useful purpose apart from beautifying the countryside. However, they are related to another species of poppy that is not only valuable as an agricultural crop but has also played and still does play a significant role in war. That poppy is Papaver somniferum, better known as the opium poppy.

It was this species of poppy and the opium extracted from it that led to the two Opium Wars fought between Britain and China (1839-1842) and Britain and France against China (1856-1860). The wars were fought over the commercial rights to the Chinese opium trade. China was defeated in both wars.

Yet although the opium poppy was the cause of these two wars, it has also had a highly beneficial impact on war over the past hundred years or so. This is because the poppy contains eighty or so organic chemicals known as alkaloids, two of which are morphine and codeine. The compounds are extracted from opium resin or poppy straw using a series of extraction and purification steps involving water and organic solvents.

As I point out in the chapter 'Killing the Pain' in my book Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War, morphine was the analgesic of choice for relieving severe and persistant pain during the Great War in which McCrae fought. There are numerous references in medical reports published during the war of the use of the drug to relieve the suffering of soldiers, sailors and airmen in the war.

As well as morphine, opium, that is the dried resin of the opium poppy, and diamorphine were also commonly used as painkillers in the war. Diamorphine, more widely known as heroin, is prepared by the reaction of morphine with the organic chemical acetic anhydride.

These analgesics, however, have severe adverse side-effects if not used sparingly. These include blurred vision, confusion, loss of appetite, vomiting, respiratory depression, and severe constipation. Moreover, they are highly addictive and require higher and higher doses to maintain the same effect.

Even so, opium poppy extracts and their chemical derivatives were and still are invaluable in relieving the suffering of the wounded. It is therefore safe to say that both the opium poppy and the red poppy, or least the artificial variety, have been employed to bring immense relief to members of the armed forces, albeit in totally different ways.

Michael Freemantle's latest book, Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War, is available to purchase here.

His previous book, An Introduction to Ionic Liquids, is available here.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1988824 2012-10-19T15:09:15-04:00 2012-12-19T05:12:01-05:00

Michael Freemantle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-freemantle/
"Almost 900 million people worldwide do not have access to clean drinking water and more than 1.5 million children under the age of five die each year as a result of water and sanitation-related diseases," notes a report in the current issue of ISO Focus+, the magazine of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) which is based in Geneva.

The report focuses on an ISO international workshop on water access and use, held recently in Kobe, Japan. It points out that improved water, sanitation, and hygiene could prevent at least 9% of the global disease burden and 6% of all deaths. In another article in the same issue, we read that the World Health Organization estimates that as many as 2.2 million people die annually from foodborne and waterborne diseases.


After reading the issue, I turned to the Autumn issue of Liquid, a glossy HSBC customer magazine. A news item reveals that research commissioned by the bank found that universal access to water supply and sanitation could lead to a $220 billion economic gain. The bank, in partnership with three non-governmental organisations: Earthwatch, WaterAid, and WWF, has launched a five-year $100 million Water Programme that aims to improve access to safe water and sanitation.

Next, I flipped through the pages of the October issue of Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of Britain's Society of Chemical Industry only to find a three-page article on water technology. The first paragraph refers to a United Nations' World Water Development Report on freshwater resources. The report estimates that three to four billion people worldwide do not have access to safe and reliable tap water.

Finally, I looked at the 8th October issue of Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society which is based in Washington D.C. It includes an announcement that the society has launched a campaign called "Coins for Cleaner Water" to raise funds from its members and employees to help people in developing nations purify household drinking water. The society will work in partnership with Procter & Gamble to support its Children's Safe Drinking Water programme. The funds will be used to purchase "P&G Purifier of Water" packets. When dissolved in water, the powder in these packets releases a chlorine disinfectant that kills bacteria and viruses. The powder also releases iron sulfate, a chemical that coagulates pollutants in the water such as parasites, dirt, worms, and toxic heavy metals. The pollutants can then be removed by filtering the water through a cloth.

The provision of safe water is a global challenge today and has been so throughout history, not least during periods of war. And that applies to both civilians and armed forces.

The lack of clean drinking water in hospitals during the Crimean War is just one example. The war was fought between Russia and Turkey from 1861 to 1865. Britain and France entered the war on the side of Turkey in 1854. When English nursing pioneer and hospital reformer Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) arrived in Turkey during the war, she found conditions at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari, a suburb of Instanbul, dire and insanitary. The water supply for much of the hospital at the time passed through the decaying carcass of a horse and was stored in tanks in a filthy courtyard next to open privies designed to cope with men suffering from diarrhoea.

Similar experiences were reported during the First World War. In his book Old Soldiers Never Die, Frank Richards, a private in the British Army, describes drawing water "for drinking and cooking purposes" from a ditch which he subsequently discovered contained dead bodies of soldiers.

According to a report in the British Medical Journal in 1915, a soldier in bivouac required one gallon of water for drinking and cooking each day. In barracks, the daily water requirement was 20 gallons per man. A horse required 8 gallons each day.

During the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the British laid more than 120 miles of pumping mains to ensure an adequate supply of water to the troops. A variety of methods were employed to purify the water. Typically solid impurities were removed using a coagulant chemical and the water sterilised with a chlorine-releasing disinfectant such as bleaching powder. Even so, as I describe in my book Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War, waterborne infections diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, and cholera played havoc among the troops of the belligerent nations as they did among civilians.


The following two lines come from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834):

Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.


Change the second line to "Nor any drop of clean water to drink," and Coleridge could be speaking not for thirsty sailors but for the hundreds of millions of people today, in the Great War and throughout history who suffer and have suffered from lack of safe drinking water.

Michael Freemantle's latest book, Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War is available to purchase at: http://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/products/Gas-Gas-Quick-Boys-How-Chemistry-Changed-the-First-World-War.aspx]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1960388 2012-10-12T04:33:17-04:00 2012-12-11T05:12:01-05:00

Michael Freemantle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-freemantle/
The war was fought between the Allied Powers and the Central Powers from 1914 and 1918. The Allied Powers consisted of Britain, France, Japan, Russia and Serbia, with Italy joining in 1915, Portugal and Romania in 1916, and Greece and the United States in 1917. The Central Powers consisted of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ottoman Turkey, with Bulgaria joining them in 1915.

Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. Between then and Armistice on 11 November 1918 an estimated 15 million people died as a result of the war. The toll includes not only battlefield fatalities but also military and civilian deaths resulting from starvation, disease, and other causes.

This industrial-scale slaughter would not have been possible without the industrial-scale production of a vast variety of chemicals. They included high explosives such as lyddite and trinitrotoluene (TNT) for shells, cordite and other propellants for firing the shells, and poison gases such as chlorine and phosgene. In one battle alone, the Battle of the Somme (1 July-18 November 1916), the British and Germany armies fired a total of 30 million shells at an average of almost 150 per minute.

In September 1917, Richard B. Pilcher, registrar and secretary of Britain's Institute of Chemistry, noted in a journal article that professional chemists provided "efficient service in the many requirements of the naval, military, and air forces." He explained that such service was essential for the manufacture of munitions, explosives, metals, leather, rubber, oils, gases, food and drugs. His list does not include but might well have included the manufacture of antiseptics, disinfectants, anaesthetics, synthetic khaki dyes, and photographic chemicals.

Pilcher called the war the "Chemists' War." He was right to do so. The Great War, as it is also called, and the military strategies employed in the war relied on chemistry, chemicals, and chemists more so than in any previous war. For example, the German chlorine gas attack at Ypres on 22 April 1915 was directed by Fritz Haber, a German chemist who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The assault not only marked the beginning of modern chemical warfare but also provided the first example in the history of warfare of the use of a weapon of mass destruction. The trench warfare and artillery bombardments would not have been possible without shells filled with explosives and other chemicals. The tunnelling operations on the Western Front relied on blowing up huge quantities of explosives such as ammonal - a mixture of ammonium nitrate, aluminium, and other chemicals.

Paradoxically, chemicals were used not just to kill, maim and destroy, they were also used to protect and heal the self-same troops. For example, steel, a material that contains the chemical elements iron and carbon, was used to make helmets and armour for tanks and battleships. Another chemical element, chlorine, was employed in the first gas attack and also used to purify water. Nitroglycerine was used not only as an explosive but also as a drug. Anaesthetics such as chloroform and ether, two relatively simple chemicals, and painkillers such as morphine, a chemical that occurs naturally in the opium poppy, were used extensively in the war.

The chemistry of the war therefore proved to be a double-edged sword. It not only killed, maimed, and destroyed, it also helped to protect troops and heal the sick and wounded. My book, Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War explores both aspects of this double-edged sword. The first part of the title is taken from a line in British war poet Wilfred Owen's famous poem about gas poisoning: Dulce et Decorum Est.

In his speech yesterday, Cameron anticipated that the centenary of the war would "provide the foundation upon which to build an enduring cultural and education legacy" for young people. Hopefully, that legacy will include an increased awareness of the futility of The Chemists' War and at the same time inspire students to study chemistry and its peaceful benefits.

Michael Freemantle's latest book Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! How Chemistry Changed the First World War is available to purchase here.]]>