I feel that if I can help people to find a better way of life God will forgive me for what I did in wartime. As a chemical engineer it was my lot to make the first diphenylamine that was ever made in this country. It was used in making smokeless powder, and before the First World War the entire supply was coming from Germany, All during the first world war we manufactured five thousand pounds a day, which made a million pounds of smokeless powder. In the course of my next experiments in chemistry I worked out the manufacturing process for making anhydrous hydrofluoric acid used in making Freon for refrigeration. I never dreamed at that time that this acid would come into commercial use in tank car lots for making one hundred octane gas and for making the atomic bomb. So you see, I have been connected with the forces of destruction, and now I'm trying to align myself with the forces of construction.
I look upon you folks as those who are going to help to change this world, and make it a new and better place. And everybody needs to know something about chemistry in order to do this. In the course of my work as a chemical engineer and operating a chemical plant, I traveled 125 miles a day by automobile between my home in Summit, New Jersey, and my factory in Easton, Pennsylvania, and I did that for eight years. During that time I picked up more than twelve hundred hitchhikers.
As I talked to these boys day after day, I began to ponder how people were made up of chemical compounds. We are all made up of seven teen chemical elements; and I thought, if you can go into the factory and change stone into gas—and that is what we were doing in making hydrofluoric acid—why can't we do something to change people ? With that thought in mind I started to work on the hitchhikers. And when I found that I could change one of these boys and make a new man out of him, then I decided that I would try it at the factory. I had 125 people working with me, and I started on January 8, 1938. I called in our office manager and found that he reacted just as favorably as the hitchhikers. That gave me great encouragement, and I went on talking to a few each day, individually, and at the end of the year I had changed 125 people, and made new people out of them.
I have come here tonight to show you how simple this is, and to have each of you become a human engineer in demonstrating this process and helping other people to be free from the weights that are holding them down. In analyzing the picture I found that there are a number of habits that are creating a great loss in our country—ordinary things, such as tea, coffee, liquor, and cola drinks, as well as tobacco. The property that is objectionable in some of these is caffeine. This is a crystalline compound found in coffee, tea, and chocolate, and which is also put in the cola drinks, so that people will get the habit and come back and order more.
The manufacturers of Sanka coffee have found that they can take the caffeine out of coffee and profitably sell the caffeine they take out to the cola manufacturers to put in the cola drinks. The caffeine business has grown to such proportions that the Monsanto Chemical Company in Saint Louis, Missouri, has built a million-and-a-half dollar plant to make this chemical synthetically from the nitrogen of the air. It is being made now in carload lots.
We find that when people take this drug it puts their nerves on edge, and makes them restless and irritable; then someone conies along and says, "Come on and have a drink." They take a drink of beer, wine, or whisky, and right away they feel different, so they are inclined to have another and another. When they keep on taking the drinks until they have fifteen hundredths of one per cent of alcohol in the blood stream, they are intoxicated. They cannot think or walk straight.
The caffeine and nicotine both have the property of shrinking the capillaries so that the blood cannot circulate freely. When they take the alcohol it dilates the capillaries, and makes them feel more comfortable. This causes a rush of blood to the head, and they get a headache and a hang-over from it, and then they jump back to the coffee and tobacco to shrink the capillaries and try to get back to normal. That process is going on in the lives of perhaps forty or fifty million people every day. They get up in the morning, take their coffee, then smoke all day long. Not being able to sleep when they go to bed, they take their beer or whisky, which makes them drowsy so they can go off to sleep. These vicious habits are costing each family in America an average of four hundred dollars a year. Now that is a. lot of money to spend for the wrong way of life, and what we are trying to do is get people to see that there is a better way in the world. We want them to try it out, and to help others to see it.
I believe the coffee habit is the root of the liquor and the tobacco habit, and I believe it is doing more damage to the American people today than liquor. It is more universally used, and people think it is something good, when it is just good for nothing! The caffeine puts the nerves on edge, interferes with the digestion, speeds up the heart, and makes people less able to make quick and accurate decisions. Many people think, "Well, I drink Sanka coffee, and that has the caffeine taken out. It must be all right." But there is where they make a big mistake. The caffeine has been taken out, but they still have trigonelline and chlorogenic acid, which are violently toxic, and the coffee still contains tar.
Whenever you roast any organic matter it breaks down and forms tar, and tar is the thing that is likely to cause cancer. Cancer is on the increase these days, and so is the use of coffee and tobacco. The tar from tobacco has been proved to be cancer forming, and I believe that the tar from coffee is a contributing factor. In addition to the tar, the coffee has a bitter taste, and that bitter taste calls for other bitter tastes, and I think that is one reason why people pick up the smoking habit. And another thing, it desensitizes the taste buds in the mouth so that they do not taste and relish simple, plain food. Then the tobacco users pour on the chili sauce and the catsup and the mustard and all kinds of condiments, trying to get a taste out of their food.
Now, when you stay away from coffee and tobacco and liquor you have a good taste in your mouth, food tastes good, and you get the benefits from it and can detect what is good and what is bad. I believe that for that reason we need to help people to get away from these habits.
In families where coffee is used the ritual of making the coffee occurs three times a day, and the smell of brewing coffee goes through the house and into the nursery. Children smell it every day from infancy on, and as they grow up they associate the smell of coffee with good food, and feel that a meal is not a meal without the coffee. But the parents say to their children, "You can't have that. You must take your milk." Every wise parent knows that there is no food value in coffee, and that children need to take milk in order to grow up and be strong and healthy. But it is human nature to want what you cannot have, and because coffee has been denied to children it becomes the center of their affection, and they can hardly wait until they can have it.
A young woman said to me the other day, "Mr. Bishop, what do you do to get started in the morning without a cup of coffee?
"Well," I said, "I do what the other creatures of God's dominion do, and what you need to do likewise."
Now, you will find that when the birds and the chickens get up in the morning they sing, and I believe that is the thing that man needs to do when he gets up in the morning—sing and whistle. That puts new oxygen into his lungs, and another good starter for the day is to drink a glass of hot water. The doctors have gone to the trouble of determining the proper temperature of that water, and they say it should be at a temperature of 122° F. Many people take their coffee and tea hotter than that, and that is one reason why so many people get stomach ulcers. It has been found that the caffeine in the coffee excites the glands so that an excessive amount of gastric juice is formed. If there is no meat in the stomach for this gastric juice to digest, it goes to work on the lining of the stomach, and that is another cause of stomach ulcers.
I want to show you a little experiment that will perhaps stick with you better than my words, and help to explain what is going on in the lives of people. As a chemist I feel right at home with these chemical experiments. I won der whether someone will give me a hand with this qualitative test. I hate to contaminate the atmosphere, but we are going to light a cigarette and test the smoke. That is a solution of barium hydrate with phenolphthalein in the water, and that red color is due to the alkalinity.
Now we will light the cigarette, and the gas and smoke from the cigarette will be carried down through this solution. The carbon dioxide formed here will decolorize the solution, and then the smoke will be carried over into this bottle. We will show you the effects of the smoke later. (Assistant lights cigarette.) I will start the water, and you will see the white smoke coming over. You will notice that here we have a deposit of a very brown sticky material which adheres to the glass, and that is part of the tar. You can imagine what happens to the lungs when the tars from tobacco smoke are taken into them day after day and year after year. It takes just so much of barium hydrate to neutralize the carbon dioxide in the smoke.
It is interesting to note that the cigarette will not go out when you throw it down. The reason for that is that the tobacco companies, in order to make the cigarettes burn quickly, add potassium chlorate. This is one of the strong oxidizing agents that keeps the cigarette burning, and that is why there are so many fires caused from cigarettes. Now the solution is getting paler, and the color will eventually disappear. When we do it right one cigarette will decolorize the solution. That shows the acid property of the cigarette smoke and the carbon dioxide in it.
To the smoke that is carried over into the bottle we are going to add some potassium permanganate. The red color of the permanganate is due to its oxygen content. It is one of the most powerful oxidizers we have. You see so many people blowing smoke every day that you have plenty of object lessons. This permanganate is another red solution. Notice that when the smoke is well mixed with the solution in the bottle the color vanishes. That shows that the smoke is a very powerful reducing agent, and you know we all depend on oxygen for our life. We can go without food for weeks; we can go without water for days; but if we go without oxygen for more than four minutes, we are dead. Oxygen is one of the most vital things that we have in our lives, and it is being destroyed here by the tobacco smoke.
Many people say, "Well, I don't smoke, so it doesn't hurt me any." But if you live in a smoky atmosphere, it will hurt you. I gave one of these articles on "Cigarettes Cause Cancer?" to a tobacco merchant, and he said, "Well, Mr. Bishop, I have been smoking for thirty-five years, and I never had cancer, but my wife died of it."
"Well," I said, "did it ever occur to you that you can get just as much poison by breathing somebody else's smoke as you can by smoking yourself?" That was a new idea that had never occurred to him. He was poisoning his wife every time he smoked in her presence.
People are smoking every place you go these days, and thinking nothing of it. Coming down to this meeting on the train, I was getting lunch in the diner, and two men were at my table. I handed them my little card and said, "Here's a way to have a Happy New Year. And I can guarantee it will make a Happy New Year for anyone." They read it over. They were both coffee drinkers. One man said he was a cigarette smoker too and had a fifteen-month-old baby girl. "Well," I said, "there's the reason that you ought to get rid of this habit now and not smoke."
"Oh," he said, "I notice that my little girl is already putting things in her mouth to imitate me with my cigarette, and I think you're right about it." I gave this man some ideas—how he could save money, have better health, live longer, and enjoy life more fully.
On this same train I saw many servicemen, and I handed each a card and said with a smile, "Here's the way to have a Happy New Year. You want to start the New Year different from the way you did last year, and I'll guarantee the results." To the women I would say, "Here's the way to prolong your good looks, and stay young and beautiful." They could hardly wait to read it.
I have another experiment here. This is a bottle of tea, and I will add to it a solution of ferrous sulphate. Have you noticed the change in color? When a solution of ferrous sulphate is added to tea it turns jet black. That black color is due to the formation of ferrous tannate, a combination of iron with the tannic acid in the tea. To make ink, tannic acid and ferrous sulphate are put together. (Coffee also has tannic acid, but on account of its black, tarry color it cannot be used for this experiment.)
I showed this experiment to a woman one day, and told her about how her tea reacted with the iron in the food, so that she did not get the proper utilization of this most essential ingredient. I met her a month afterward, and she said, "You know, Mr. Bishop, I haven't touched a drop of tea or coffee since you showed me that experiment. I don't want to make an inkwell out of my stomach." That is what people are doing—they are making ink wells out of their stomachs. I believe a new day will dawn when people become educated to these vital facts. If we could only get our schools and colleges to stress these things and to show the students this better way of life, students would progress much faster, and we would have a happier, healthier nation.
