Benjamin Wiley

Prof at Duke Chemistry

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

DuPont researcher Julian W. Hill pulled molten 3-16 polyester, a plastic with repeating ester links in its molecular chains, into filaments in the laboratory in April 1930. He had been trying to make longer molecular chains than anyone had prepared before. Now he had a synthetic fiber to investigate.

The experiment followed a frustrating limit. By the end of 1929, DuPont's researchers had made polyesters with molecular weights of 5,000 to 6,000, but their chains would grow no further. They were joining molecules that could react at both ends. Each new ester link released water, the compound of hydrogen and oxygen, which could then break those links apart again. Chain growth and chain breakdown had reached a balance. To build longer chains, the researchers needed to remove the water.

DuPont researchers built a modified molecular still, an apparatus that removed the water produced during the reaction. With that obstacle removed, Hill could make the material he pulled into filaments. He then stretched the cooled filaments, a process called cold drawing, and obtained strong fibers with a molecular weight above 12,000. DuPont made enough of the polyester and related materials to evaluate them for textiles.

The fibers had promising strength when wet and elasticity like silk, which gave the researchers a reason to keep looking for a usable textile material. They investigated polyamides, polymers whose chains contain repeating amide links, because these melted at higher temperatures. Follow-on experiments included materials combining polyester and polyamide structures. The two men assigned to that work could test only a few combinations using readily accessible starting compounds, and those experiments yielded weak fibers.

The search slowed because the researchers could neither reproduce nor predict their results reliably. The molecular still also proved difficult to use.

DuPont's 3-16 polyester fiber remained an experimental material and failed as a textile product. Its fibers melted below 100 degrees centigrade, partially dissolved in dry-cleaning solvents, and were sensitive to water. Removing water during manufacture had solved the chain-length problem, but the resulting fibers lacked the heat and chemical resistance that textiles required.

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

https://t.co/GDgX2VI99J

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

The metal that produces sparks in disposable lighters predates the lighters themselves. Its inventor, the Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach, had introduced gaslight to Europe's streets. He noticed that scratching a small bar of cerium alloy produced burning sparks. He hardened the alloy with iron and patented it in 1903. The factory he founded in Austria still sells lighter flints made the same way.

The raw alloy is mischmetal, German for mixed metal. Foundries add it to steel and ductile iron to control impurities and toughen the finished metal. The US imports about 145,000 pounds of it a year for that work, and no US plant makes it.

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

https://t.co/62OiKEnFqa

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

A chemical that gives flavor and fragrance formulas a citrus peel note sells for $417.45 per gram, 4.4 times the price of gold.

9-Decenal is an aldehyde with a fresh citrus peel scent. Flavor and fragrance makers use it to keep that bright note consistent across batches, while natural oils vary by crop, season, and supplier.

Aldlab in the US lists 2.5 grams for $1,043.63. A2B Chem LLC in the US lists 5 grams for $2,789.

This is one of 920 molecules selling today for more than gold per gram. Here's the list:

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

DuPont engineers built a plant in 1951 to make titanium dioxide, a white pigment composed of titanium and oxygen, without first testing the process in a pilot plant. Inside the new plant, they faced hot, corrosive gases and severe equipment problems.

DuPont had first examined the pigment in 1916, but making it cost too much compared with lithopone, a white pigment made of zinc sulfide and barium sulfate. Those compounds contain zinc and sulfur, and barium, sulfur and oxygen, respectively. By the late 1920s, titanium dioxide had improved in quality and fallen in price, threatening DuPont's large business in lithopone for indoor use. DuPont needed a way to manufacture the competing pigment.

Its researchers tried to develop a process that would avoid existing patents, which blocked direct entry. By September 1930, DuPont had spent $1.5 million in 2026 dollars on that work and estimated it needed at least another $5.9 million before it could even start building a commercial plant. In 1931, the estimate for finishing internal development and getting a plant into operation stood at $54 million, with at least two more years of work ahead. The business was developing too fast for DuPont to wait.

So DuPont bought access to working technology. It formed the Krebs Pigment and Color Corporation with CPC in 1931, gaining immediate access to manufacturing. A patent and process exchange with National Lead followed in 1933, removing the legal obstacle to broader development. In July 1934, Krebs requested money for a plant making extended titanium dioxide pigments, mixtures containing the white pigment. DuPont approved $120 million for that construction, and the expansion made it a major producer of all types of titanium dioxide pigments. Rutile, a crystalline form of titanium dioxide, reached commercial sale in 1941.

The next major manufacturing step was the chloride process, the method using hot, corrosive gases at the plant where this story began. Without experience from a smaller trial plant, the engineers had to work out its problems at full scale. DuPont ran the new facility as a pilot plant for the next three years, changing equipment and revising how the process worked.

Once engineers straightened it out, the chloride process lowered both the investment needed for plants and their operating costs. That advantage helped DuPont raise its titanium dioxide market share from 25 to 39 percent between 1956 and 1976. The venture made money: during the 1960s, the pigment ranked seventh among DuPont products in operative earnings.

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

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[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

In the early 1940s white rats at a Johns Hopkins laboratory developed swollen thyroid glands after eating thiourea, a simple sulfur-containing compound related to urea. Edwin Astwood reasoned that a compound that stops a rat's thyroid from working might also slow the overactive thyroid of Graves' disease. Doctors then treated Graves' disease mainly by cutting part of the thyroid gland out of the neck. Astwood's 1943 trial worked, and chemists developed today's pills for overactive thyroids from thiourea.

Miners also use thiourea to dissolve gold and silver out of crushed ore. It is the active ingredient in the silver dip that removes tarnish from a spoon in seconds. The US imports around 230,000 pounds of it a year, and no US plant makes it.

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

https://t.co/62OiKEn7AC

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

A treatment for hormone tumors and severe diarrhea sells for $885 per gram, 9.3 times the price of gold.

Octreotide tells the body to release fewer hormones and send less fluid into the gut. That makes it useful when tumors push the body to release too much hormone or when diarrhea becomes dangerous.

Molnova in China sells 200 milligrams for $177. Molekula Americas in Lewisville, Texas, United States sells 1 milligram for $654.80.

This is one of 838 molecules selling today for more than gold per gram. Here's the list:

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

In 1927, Lazote decided to produce much more methanol, the simplest alcohol. A chemical first made while cleaning up gas for another process was about to become a separate operation.

The work had begun with ammonia, a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen. Carbon monoxide, a compound of carbon and oxygen, poisoned the catalyst that made ammonia synthesis possible. Removing it meant using hydrogen, a gas whose molecules contain two hydrogen atoms, to turn it into methane, a molecule with one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. DuPont needed a less wasteful way to clean that gas. Converting the carbon monoxide into methanol instead would reduce hydrogen consumption in this step by one third and yield a more valuable product.

The team developed a catalyst free of patent complications. By the end of 1926, production reached 60,000 gallons a year, about 1 percent of U.S. consumption. That was the starting point for the expansion. But competition increased in the late 1920s, driving down prices for both methanol and ammonia. When projected production capacity exceeded demand, DuPont turned its researchers toward new uses for the chemicals coming out of its plant.

Physical chemist Hans C. Duus, who held a Harvard PhD, investigated methanol as both a motor fuel and an antifreeze to protect automobile radiators from freezing. The antifreeze faced a specific objection. Methanol boiled at 149 degrees Fahrenheit, so conventional wisdom held that it would soon evaporate out of a radiator. Duus examined mixtures with water, a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and compared them with solutions of ethanol, a two-carbon alcohol. Mixtures giving equal protection against freezing had about the same boiling point, and achieving that protection required less than three-fourths as much methanol as ethanol.

Methanol was then tested in several cars to check whether it boiled away. After those tests, DuPont began marketing it in 1930 as Zerone, its methanol antifreeze.

Within a few years, Zerone became very popular with consumers. The broader ammonia venture had lost $14 million in 2026 dollars in 1927 and in 1928 earned no return on an investment of approximately $150 million; diversifying into methanol accounted for a major part of its technical expense. The chemistry had delivered a useful product, but competition depressed its price, and cheap gasoline, a mixture of hydrocarbons used as motor fuel, ended research on methanol as a fuel for engines.

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

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[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

Tylenol replaced a drug first made from factory waste. In the 1880s the German dye maker Bayer accumulated a growing heap of nitrophenol, a leftover from making a blue dye, and its research director challenged the company's chemists to find a use for it. One of them, Oscar Hinsberg, converted the waste into a drug for fever and pain in three chemical steps. Bayer began selling it in 1887 as phenacetin, the company's first pharmaceutical, twelve years before aspirin.

For most of a century manufacturers added phenacetin to headache powders by the ton. Then heavy users began to develop kidney failure, a condition kidney specialists still call analgesic nephropathy, and the FDA withdrew the drug from American use in 1983. Its replacement, acetaminophen, is the gentler drug the body makes from phenacetin and is now known worldwide as Tylenol.

Phenacetin's one remaining legitimate use is as a reference standard for chemists to calibrate laboratory instruments. The US imports around 44,000 pounds of it a year for that work and reports no production of its own.

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

https://t.co/62OiKEn7AC

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

A yellow pigment used in paints, plastics, and inks sells for $421.40 per gram, 4.4 times the price of gold.

Pigment Yellow 55 gives manufacturers a stable yellow powder for products that need color to survive processing. Paint, plastic, and ink makers buy pigments when ordinary dyes fade or bleed.

AA BLOCKS in the United States lists Pigment Yellow 55 at $2,107 for 5 grams. A2B Chem in San Diego, United States, lists Pigment Yellow 55 at $545 for 1 gram.

This is one of 838 molecules selling today for more than gold per gram. Here's the list:

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

DuPont committed to tripling its capacity for ammonia, a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, at Belle, West Virginia, in late 1927. Its first plant was only reaching full capacity at the end of that year, and high temperatures, extreme pressures and corrosive chemicals were damaging its equipment.

DuPont needed cheap nitrogen, a chemical element, for explosives. Making ammonia itself offered a way to secure that supply. In 1922, the company turned to the Claude process, a method of synthesizing ammonia that promised lower investment than the competing Haber-Bosch process, another ammonia synthesis method. DuPont began building its first synthesis unit in May 1925.

At the plant, workers had to replace valves frequently, and major process units failed. DuPont recruited specialists from the government's Fixed Nitrogen Research Laboratory to help repair and improve the operation. Commercial operation took nearly a year and a half to begin. Heavy technical expenses consumed the income, leaving a loss of $14 million in 2026 dollars in 1927. The Claude process never delivered its promised advantage, so DuPont used the Casale process, a different ammonia synthesis method, for larger units.

Eight months after approving the expansion, DuPont allocated $140 million in 1928 to raise output to 40,000 tons a year. That year, its existing investment of approximately $150 million earned no return. Further authorizations in 1929 raised projected output to nearly 70,000 tons a year, even as a worldwide ammonia glut developed before the Depression began that fall. Record sales of $150 million brought a small profit in 1929, while research spending exceeded $9.7 million, or 7 percent of departmental sales. DuPont and its competitors had built enormous plants to lower manufacturing costs, but demand could not absorb their output.

During 1930 and 1931, sales fell more than 40 percent and losses reached $8.7 million a year. Layoffs and transfers cut the technical staff from 121 people to fewer than 50. DuPont's researchers sought new uses and products to keep the plant running, but those efforts could not fill its capacity after the economic collapse. They also improved production with the contact hydrogen process, which doubled output of hydrogen, the chemical element, and simplified its purification. Selling rights to that process to the Japanese brought licensing profits in 1932.

In 1933, the ammonia operation earned nearly $25 million in profit, its best year yet. The large plant needed to run almost full to make money, so overcapacity had left DuPont dependent on process improvements, licensing and new products to recover its investment. Only with the development of nylon, a synthetic polymer in the polyamide family, did DuPont collect a full return on the high-pressure technology it had built for ammonia.

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

https://t.co/9D6fnVc2dE

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

For years diacetyl supplied much of the smell of movie-night popcorn. In 2000 doctors diagnosed eight former workers at a Missouri microwave popcorn plant with bronchiolitis obliterans, a disease that scars the small airways shut. Workers at the plant mixed butter flavoring into tanks of heated oil. Flavor manufacturers needed a replacement and chose 2,3-pentanedione, the most similar compound available, which has one more carbon atom and the same creamy caramel smell. The compound was already familiar and forms naturally in butter and in every batch of roasting coffee.

NIOSH then tested the replacement on laboratory rats and found that it damaged their airways much as diacetyl had. By 2016 the agency had recommended workplace exposure limits for both chemicals. The butter smell remains in popcorn and baked goods, as well as coffee flavorings, and the people handling the flavorings now know the risks of the vapor. The US imports its supply of 2,3-pentanedione and reports no production.

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

https://t.co/62OiKEnFqa

[Benjamin Wiley @prof_wiley]

A drug ingredient used to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis sells for $928 per gram, 10 times the price of gold.

Bedaquiline fumarate blocks the energy pump tuberculosis bacteria need to survive. That matters because drug-resistant tuberculosis leaves doctors with fewer working antibiotics.

Molnova in China lists bedaquiline fumarate at $464 for 500 milligrams. TargetMol in Wellesley Hills, MA, US, sells 500 milligrams for $516.

This is one of 838 molecules selling today for more than gold per gram. Here's the list: