The Sun Chemist (4 page)

I tried to remember the letter. It was in German. I couldn’t remember a thing about it, except that the name Vava had cropped up, and I’d ringed it.

‘So now they’re all at it,’ Julian said. ‘You can make the stuff anywhere. All this crisis they’re having in the West and Japan and everywhere, they don’t need it. Any piddling little country can just make its own, and the Arabs can go back to being Arabs instead of the financiers of the world.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Weizmann was, and he was a damned good chemist. He got blocked by the oil interests. He sent Churchill a stinker on the subject. They’re digging all the stuff out of the files now. Your Vava letter started a few things.’

I stared at him. Churchill, oil interests, energy crisis.

‘You see, Hopcroft was
mugged
,’ I said. ‘He had six pounds in his wallet, which they took from him. I saw him in hospital the day before yesterday.’

‘Yes. Connie told me. Unlikely. Other stuff has gone missing, too, you see. Bergmann passed the word round in America. A chap got hit on the head in a place called Terre Haute, in Indiana. That’s where Commercial Solvents was, the outfit that handled Weizmann’s processes. This chap had picked up a pile of
correspondence
and two men came and took it off him while he was going to his car. He’s dead. We only heard about it yesterday or I’d have warned you. We won’t be seeing your papers.’

‘But Hopcroft didn’t have any,’ I said.

‘Well, they’ll know that now. He was gabby, Hopcroft, wasn’t he?’

‘He
is
gabby,’ I said. ‘He’s perfectly all right. I saw him.’

‘That’s all right, then.’

‘Olga is going to
post
the papers. She said so. She is going to do it on Thursday.’ I suddenly realized it
was
Thursday. She was popping down to Wimbledon today. Her husband wouldn’t be there. It seemed suddenly a very long way away.

‘Yes. Doubtful. Have a cup of coffee. Nellie!’ he called.

Nellie came in. I’d heard her slowly typing next door. She was his secretary. She worked in what had been the nurse’s room, next door to Chaimchik’s room. She was a tiny, white-haired, lamblike creature, very gentle. ‘Hello, Igor,’ she said softly. ‘I saw you flit by.’

‘This man has brought me a present of cigars from his friend Castro,’ Julian said. ‘He deserves a cup of coffee.’

I heard Nellie clacking slowly and precisely down the marble staircase, and the coffee turned up presently. Later I went to see Connie along the corridor. All the files were in her room; she was the main coordinator of research. Later still, I was working in Chiamchik’s bedroom.

I state this because it happened in this order, but in fact I was thinking all the time of Olga, popping over to Wimbledon today, and of Hopcroft, nattering convivially in the St Mary and St Joseph, and of the unknown man in Terre Haute, Indiana, who was no longer in a position to be convivial. I was delving into the acetone process during this, and into a couple of other processes.

Chaim Weizmann was born in 1874 in Motol, a small village in Byelorussia, and as a boy moved with his family to Pinsk, a few miles away, which was bigger and even nastier. His father was a timber merchant, not prosperous, but he managed to put all of his large family through university. There was a rather sound family way of doing this. As each child completed
university
, he got a job and began contributing to the tuition fees of the next in line. (Years later, while Chaimchik was pawning his compasses, or scraping a living with Verochka in Manchester, he still managed to send a pound or two a month to keep two sisters going in Switzerland.)

He soon got away from Pinsk and went to Germany to study chemistry, ultimately to the Technische Hochschule at Berlin Charlottenburg where he worked under the immediate direction of a Dr Bistrzycki. When Bistrzycki was called to a professorship at Fribourg in Switzerland in 1896. Weizmann followed him. He
picked up his D.Sc. there in 1899, and went to the University of Geneva as a junior lecturer.

Dyestuff chemistry was much the thing at the time, and this is what he had been doing with Bistrzycki. He immediately began researching and publishing at a great rate. In a single year he produced three very extensive papers and took out four
well-documented
patents. But he was busy in a bewildering number of directions.

Switzerland was at the time a hotbed of political activity. There were numerous groups of impassioned émigrés, mainly Russian, covering a wide spectrum of contrary opinion. There were simple Socialists, not so simple Socialists, Communists (including incipient Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), Anarchists, Bundists, Zionists. The wild object of many of them was to create a revolution in unchanging Russia, and of the last group to alter an equally unchanging situation, the dispersion of the Jews.

Zionism as a political movement was of later vintage than the others. Its basis was that the millions of Jews scattered about the world were not simply religious minorities in their different countries, as might be Protestants, Catholics, or Muslims, but a single people exiled from a particular land. The proposition was to repurchase the land, and the movement’s organizer, a Viennese journalist called Theodor Herzl (whose dignified portrait today appears on Israeli hundred-pound notes), in fact tried to do this by offering the Sultan of Turkey several million pounds for a ‘charter’ to it. The deal fell through, to the Sultan’s regret, but there were very many alternative proposals, hotly contested by the impecunious polemicists and students who made up the active body.

Weizmann had been a Zionist for years, and in Switzerland found fertile ground and much unattached or even downright errant Jewish youth. He decided to collect what he could of it for Zionism, and with half a dozen friends arranged a meeting in the Russian library. This was a rash thing to do without securing the prior approval of G. V. Plekhanov, doyen of the squabbling émigré society and founder of Marxism in Russia. (In later life, Verochka recalled often seeing his two juniors Lenin and Trotsky meeting in a flat across the street.) Plekhanov’s disapproval could 
virtually be guaranteed for interlopers to his scene, so that when the founding seven arrived at their venue they found, with no surprise, that all the furniture had been removed. They held the meeting, nonetheless, standing up, voted on a Hebrew name for themselves,
Ha-Shachar
, The Dawn, and then voted to call a mammoth conference to recruit membership.

This tremendous affair, addressed by representatives of all
factions
, lasted for three and a half days and ended at four in the morning with a great personal triumph for Weizmann –118 new members – and a trembling confrontation with Plekhanov.

‘What do you mean by bringing dissension into our ranks?’ the offended Marxist demanded.

‘Monsieur Plekhanov,’ Weizmann grandly informed him, ‘you are not the Czar!’

Apart from these heated public affairs, the young experimenter was having a couple of private ones. He was living with a young lady, Sophia Getzova, to whom he was engaged, and carrying on with another, Vera Khatzmann, a medical student from
Rostov-on-Don
. By about 1904, things began to get on top of him, and he decided to narrow his activities to the scientific and try his luck elsewhere.

His fancy fell on Manchester, center of the British textile industry, which had an excellent university department of organic chemistry presided over by the distinguished Professor Perkin. Perkin’s father, many years before, had made his name in the field of dyestuff chemistry by synthesizing aniline blue (thus heralding in the ‘mauve decade’) – a fact that Weizmann thought might dispose him in favor of another dyestuff chemist. But Perkin greatly took to the animated young Russian anyway. In an affable conversation in German (Weizmann as yet had no English), he pointed out that while no staff jobs were open at the moment, he could offer him the use of a little basement laboratory at a nominal sum of six pounds, with the services of a lab boy thrown in. Weizmann accepted, and while Perkin’ went off on vacation – it was the summer of 1904– installed himself in the empty university.

By the time Perkin returned, he had quite a lot of English. He had learned it from the chemistry department stores book,
the Bible, and the purchased works of Macaulay and Gladstone; and also – as he wrote to his sweet darling, the joy from
Rostov-on-Don
– from conversations with a young demonstrator of Perkin’s who had arrived back from vacation. With this young man he instituted a series of experiments, so that when Perkin took up his chair again, much refreshed by his holiday,
Weizmann
was able to show him quite a lot. By the winter he was on the staff, with students of his own.

He couldn’t, however, stay away from Zionism. Progroms in Russia brought a mass protest rally in Manchester, which the young Russian was asked to address. At the rally was the
prospective
Liberal candidate for the constituency, a Mr W. S. Churchill, keeping his eye on the electorate. He couldn’t understand a word of Weizmann’s fiery oration in Yiddish, but was much impressed by the effect on the audience, and made haste to wring the orator’s hand and to hint that he could be of great service in swaying the Jewish vote. Weizmann declined: he said he was interested only in Zionist issues. Anyway, the
January
, 1906, elections were at hand, with other politicians astir. Contesting them was the Prime Minister himself, Mr Balfour, also with a Manchester constituency. Came January and Mr Balfour, and Mr Balfour’s agent, who thought he ought to have fifteen minutes with the intriguing young man who knew so much about Russia and the state of the Jews there. The fifteen minutes stretched to an hour and a quarter, and ended with both men knowing rather more about the state of everything.

He was determined to stick to science, however, and he did. He brought over Miss Vera Khatzmann, his Verochka, married her, and slogged on with his chemistry. An interesting new problem had appeared. The world’s supply of rubber was
unequal
to the demand: a task for the synthetic chemist. Perkin interested himself, and put teams on it, including Weizmann’s.

Chaimchik’s approach was novel. He had become interested in fermentation. Verochka’s sister had married a scientist who lived in Paris on the Left Bank. The Weizmanns visited from time to time, and Chaimchik picked up a free-lance assignment that involved work at the Pasteur Institute, kingdom of the great fermenter himself.

The basis of fermentation was that microorganisms, bacteria, could by creating a ferment in one substance change it into another. He looked up the literature and found that the essential substance of rubber was the five-carbon compound isoprene.
Further
study showed that a Russian called Winogradsky had recently observed a five-carbon compound in nature. It could be isolated by fermenting sugar with certain bacteria to produce a volatile compound exhibiting the odor of fusel oil.

Weizmann repeated the experiment in Manchester, and found that Winogradsky had got it wrong. The substance produced, though smelling of fusel oil, was something else. It was not a five-carbon molecule, either. It was a four-carbon one, and it was butyl alcohol. He was a very dogged experimenter, and he tried it many times with a variety of bacteria. It always turned out the same, but in the end he got more butyl alcohol.

Professor Perkin, to whom he showed the results, permitted himself one of his rare puns. He said, ‘Your butyl alcohol is a very futile alcohol,’ and advised him to pour it down the sink. Chaimchik didn’t do this. He kept on refining the product with a variety of treatments. He got a very large yield of butyl alcohol and smaller quantities of other substances, including methyl alcohol and acetone, the latter about 30 percent of the total.

He kept on doing this, and the First World War broke out, and a new problem asserted itself. It impinged on Manchester in the form of a Dr Rintoul, from the Scottish branch of the Nobel explosives firm, whose problem was most acute. His firm was supplying the British fleet with cordite for its large naval guns. Strategic considerations made it imperative that the location of these guns should be concealed from the enemy. The solution was to propel the shells by smokeless gunpowder, made possible by the chemical solvent acetone, previously, but no longer,
obtainable
in generous supply from the forests of Europe as a by-product of charcoal. Not all the forests of Britain could supply the present need for acetone. Was there some other method of producing it?

‘Walk this way, Dr Rintoul,’ said Dr Weizmann, and showed him a method.

Dr Rintoul made haste to the telephone, and the night train
from Scotland brought the managing director of Nobel’s, together with several of the senior scientific staff. They went carefully through Chaimchik’s lab books and repeated his
experiments
: acetone in abundance. Terms were stated for this valuable patent, to which Chaimchik and the university readily agreed. And then occurred a strange accident. The Nobel works blew up. They were unable to take up the patent. The problem was no less urgent for the accident, and Chaimchik, placed in charge of it, was sent by express train to London and ushered into the office of the First Lord of the Admiralty. He found the First Lord of the Admiralty was Mr W. S. Churchill, last encountered wringing his hand while trying to get him to nobble the Jewish vote in Manchester.

The two men got on famously, and Churchill asked him what he required. Weizmann replied that existing fermentation plants were largely operated by distillers of whisky and gin. Churchill told him to take his pick, and he picked the Nicolson gin
distillery
in Bow, which was immediately sequestered for his use.

For the next two years he took on a most daunting, almost mind-boggling task, the one-man creation of a completely new industry: industrial fermentation. The government built him a factory and took over the largest distilleries in the country. He himself took over the laboratory of the Lister Institute in Chelsea, to train teams of chemists to go out and operate the plants.