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Told that he was visionary, when Lake explained, as he did in his effort to enlist capital with which to build his first submarine boat, that he could safely submerge his invention and steer it about on the bed of the ocean as readily as a man can steer an automobile about the streets of a city, that while submerged he could step out of the boat through a trap-door without flooding the boat, by the simple process of maintaining a greater air pressure inside than the pressure of the water outside Simon Lake, discouraged on every hand, finally decided to build a boat himself, and did build one, with his own hands a boat fourteen feet long and constructed of rough pine timbers painted with coal-tar in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey.
Generally, too, with signal success. The discovery of benzene in 1825 by Faraday was followed in the course of a few years by its discovery in coal-tar by Hofmann. Toluene, which was discovered in 1837 by Pelletier, was recognised in the fractional distillation of crude naphtha by Mansfield in 1848.
Most kilns are carefully pointed, and are then painted on the outside with a wash of clay suspended in water, and covered with a coating of coal-tar, which makes them waterproof, and does not require to be renewed for several years.
According to fairly well-known facts, confirmed by the reports of the two American officials mentioned above, the American pre-war organic chemical industry consisted of little more than a series of small assembling plants. Although enormous supplies of coal-tar products were available, yet the dye intermediates derived from them were not made in America, but imported from Germany.
But in the important group of the synthetic drugs derived from coal-tar products, the raw materials were produced in quantity in the United, Kingdom, only to be exported to Germany, thus contributing to her monopoly.
The valuable constituents actually extracted are then these: benzene, toluene, xylene, naphthalene, anthracene, and phenol or carbolic acid. One ton of Lancashire coal, when distilled in gas retorts, yields about 12 gallons of coal-tar. Let us now learn what those 12 gallons of tar will give us in the shape of hydrocarbons and carbolic acid, mentioned as extracted profitably from tar.
Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France.
Accordingly hydrogen is taken up, and we get C H NH formed, which is aniline. Benzene from coal-tar is warmed with nitric acid in a flask. A strong action sets in, and on adding water, the nitrobenzene settles down as a heavy oil, and the acid water can be decanted off. To show you that aniline is formed, I will now produce a violet colour with it, which only aniline will give.
She shrugged her shoulders and opened a door. They were in a chapel with a low ceiling crossed by beams gaudily painted with coal-tar pigment. The windows were hidden by great curtains. The walls were cracked and dingy. Durtal recoiled after a few steps.
All the useful sources of colours and dyes from coal-tar are simply compounds of carbon and hydrogen hydrocarbons, as they are called, with the exception of one, namely, phenol, or carbolic acid. I am not speaking here of those coal-tar constituents useful for making dyes, but of those actually extracted from coal-tar for that purpose, i.e. extracted to profit.
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