The meeting was held at the behest of what would become the National Defense Research Committee. The NDRC was the government group charged with developing new weapons for the American military. Its most famous effort was, of course, the Manhattan Project, the multibillion-dollar operation out of Los Alamos to develop the atomic bomb. But the scale of the war effort was such that the NDRC had many other projects under way as well. It had Americans, off in corners, working on schemes shrouded in darkness. Missions launched that no one heard about. Ideas being pursued in one place that contradicted ideas being pursued in another place. During the war years, to use the cliché, the right hand of the United States government did not always know what the left hand was doing. And one of those shadowy left-handed projects was Hoyt Hottel’s subcommittee.
Unlike the geniuses down at Los Alamos, the men weren’t physicists. Their job was not to find better ways to blow things up. They were chemists. Specialists in the particular consequences of combining oxygen, fuel, and heat. Their job was to find better ways to burn things down.
As Hoyt Hottel recalled after the war, “Come ’39, a lot of people thought that a war was something we’d be in sooner or later, and our state of preparedness was poor…We needed to know more about incendiary bombs.”
Hottel’s group of chemists and industry officials and Nobelists began to meet whenever they could. They planned; they tinkered; they schemed. And on May 28, 1941, at a session in Chicago, they had their first real breakthrough. Hottel told his committee about a strange incident that had just happened at a DuPont chemical plant in Delaware. A group there had been working with something called divinylacetylene. It’s a hydrocarbon—an oil by-product—and if you mix it with a pigment, the paint will dry into a tough, thick adhesive film. But the film kept bursting into flames, which was a problem for a paint company such as DuPont. For the fire obsessives on the NDRC chemistry committee, however, that was fascinating.
Around the table, one man raised his hand. I’ll look into that. It was the Harvard chemistry professor, Louis Fieser.
Fieser was born in Ohio in 1899. He majored in chemistry at Williams College, got his PhD from Harvard, and earned postdoc fellowships at Oxford and Frankfurt. Before the war, he was the first to synthesize vitamin K. His research assistant was his wife, the equally brilliant Mary Fieser. Women didn’t get hired as chemistry professors in those days, but together, the couple wrote one of the definitive chemistry textbooks of the twentieth century. Louis was largely bald and a little heavyset. He sported a mustache and was always with a cigarette.
Louis Fieser was also a man of imagination and whimsy. His scientific memoir, published in 1964, begins with his wartime work, but then quickly turns to detailed descriptions of things such as a pocket firebomb that he called, in an inspired bit of brand awareness, the Harvard Candle. There is a chapter about attaching incendiary devices to bats. There is an extended riff on how to ignite a thousand-gallon oil slick. Detailed plans for a squirrel-proof bird feeder. And, the coup de grace, a chapter about one of his many cats, a Siamese called Syn Kai Pooh.
In the Science History Institute archives, there’s an extended interview with a colleague of Fieser’s named William von Eggers Doering, who taught chemistry for years at Yale and Harvard. The interview goes on for hours—and it’s weirdly riveting. It gives you a glimpse into a world of scientists who had license to be just a little mad. This is how Doering remembers working in Fieser’s laboratory at the very beginning of the war:
God, what was the compound we were after? Oh, yes, trinitrobenzyl nitrate [laughter]…Listen to this: you put it—do you remember those heavy Carius tubes? They were for some sort of an analysis where you digested something with nitric acid at high temperature. So these were eighth-inch-thick tubes, about an inch in diameter and a couple of feet long. So you put in about twenty or thirty grams of TNT, you poured [in] a little excess of bromine, no solvent. You sealed the damn tube, put it in a bomb—an iron bomb—you know, with a wire wrapped around it to raise the temperature [laughter]…So that in effect, if you put the heating tube in that little space, then if it blew up, the glass would hit this little part of the wall [laughter] on the left and the other on the right. Well, of course, half the tubes blew up! [laughter]
Understand that Doering was one of the great chemists of his generation. He published his first scientific paper in 1939 and his last in 2008—eight decades of work. In every picture I’ve seen of him, he’s wearing a polka-dot bow tie. But in this interview, he’s like a thirteen-year-old kid with a chemistry set: