Recycling and Laughing Gas: The Beginning of George Poe’s Journey
After the Civil War, and completing an A.B. degree, George Poe worked alternately as a practical chemist with chemical firms, and as a laboratory demonstrator at several universities (where his title “professor” likely originated). At some point in his early career, he became enamored with gases and their properties. The dental profession had recently begun administering Nitrous Oxide (Laughing Gas) to patients to relieve pain, and in 1876, Poe was approached by medical supply firm S.S. White to formulate an inexpensive way to produce mass quantities of Nitrous Oxide for national distribution.
Today, when presented with a problem such as this, most scientists would turn to the internet- its vast array of information can provide solutions to almost anything, it seems. But, in those days, the only way to solve a problem such as this was to delve into textbooks, write out chemical equations, and conduct experiments. So, George Poe did exactly that.
He concluded that the most efficient way to make Nitrous Oxide “on the cheap” was to extract it from Ammonium Sulfate. He found that many “ammoniacal products” were present in what was called “waste liquor” from the process of coal gasification. Coal gas was the “natural gas” of the 1800s, used for city street lamps, and cities everywhere had gasification plants to manufacture the gas to light up the night. Poe found that the city Gas Works of Trenton, New Jersey, had the waste liquor with the right amounts of the ammonia compounds he needed. So, he erected a large plant next to the Gas Works, and arranged to have the waste products piped to his plant, instead of being dumped in the Delaware River. The Poe Chemical Works was born (so was recycling).
Poe’s chemical plant was probably a hellish place. At the center of the works was a hot, noisy, Baxter steam engine (illustrated), that provided steam for heating chemicals and the motive power for Poe’s gas compressors. Poe employed direct action steam pumps operated by belts from the Baxter engine, and Swiss-made lab vessel reactors to boil and extract his chemicals from the waste liquor. Steam must have filled the air, and it was probably very, very hot, and humid. To top it all off, noxious fumes belched from the reactors, filled with ammonia products and sulfur. But, through all this, Poe produced gases that were useful, and profitable. Nitrous Oxide, compressed into liquid form, for dentists; phosphates, for chemical manufacturers; and aqua ammonia, used for cleaning and industrial processes, were turned out from this Hell on Earth to make the world a better place.
And through it all, even though the nastiness of this work would eventually lead to George Poe’s illness and demise, he found inspiration to make other products, like the oxygen generator, and, through his obsession with death and dying, found the first bits of knowledge he needed to make his dream of artificial respiration a reality.
So, sometimes that is how it goes. One starts off working on one idea to make money, or improve the world, or whatever, and the Universe shows you another way. Small animals and his tormented past showed George Poe how to do great things.
Third in a series on the history of the “Machine for Inducing Artificial Respiration”