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  Personnel problems were amplified, however, by the formation of the gas and flame regiment. The census had been designed to locate scientists and chemists who could contribute to the war gas effort, divert them from the front, and direct them instead toward technical work. Now the army was seeking chemists, too, for the gas regiment, and Amos Fries was clamoring for chemists to be sent to France for his own AEF laboratory and overseas gas service. Though Fries had been in his position since mid-August, he and Manning had never directly corresponded. Moreover, both men believed that their organizations on their respective sides of the Atlantic should guide the research, which would lead inevitably to conflict.

  In the struggle to recruit the sharpest minds, Manning had a powerful tool to attract scientists that the engineers lacked: prestige. From the perspective of pure science, gas warfare represented a vanguard of technology, a new and exciting field of chemical weapons. Manning’s appeal to scientists in the first weeks of the war set a chain reaction in motion, fueled by the twin engines of patriotism and intellectual curiosity that drew scientists to the chemical weapons race. Many of the chemists were “dollar-a-year” men, receiving a symbolic wage for their patriotic efforts in service to the government. Their names appeared in the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry; they were celebrities in their fields who had reached the pinnacle of academic success. This pantheon of intellectual luminaries, thrown together in the common cause of war and science, exerted a gravity of its own, attracting other scientists because of academic ties or informal acquaintances. Like atoms pulled by the tug of a molecule, professors convinced their students, and academicians invited their colleagues, and suddenly scientists with little inclination for picking up a gun discovered they had a place in the war effort.

  The Research Division gained a crucial recruit from a chance encounter on the street. James F. Norris, a debonair MIT professor known as Sunny Jim when he attended Johns Hopkins, was walking in downtown Washington one day when he ran into a young associate professor of chemistry at Harvard. The chemist, James Bryant Conant, was just twenty-four years old, with tousled hair and piercing eyes. That fall, Conant spent his days at the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry. Shy and retiring, Conant probably didn’t socialize much with other chemists flocking to Washington from places like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Johns Hopkins during that summer and fall of 1917; if he had, he surely would have known all about the war gas investigations gaining steam in Washington.

  Conant had grown up in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, the child of a prosperous, middle-class family. From a young age, the power of engines and speed fascinated Conant. Transformation enthralled him—the thrill of explosions, the violent discharge of energy and heat, and currents of electricity sparking through circuits. He spent hours hitching up batteries, tinkering with motors, electric buzzers, and electromagnets.

  As he grew older, chemistry captured his attention. His father built an unusual workshop for his son in a vestibule of the house. His friends had carpentry shops, but Conant had something else in mind. His father installed a gas line into the workshop, which allowed James to have a Bunsen burner, turning the space into a laboratory. He bought a blast lamp, which turned the gas flame into a blowtorch hot enough to melt glass into liquid. He experimented with glassblowing, heated red oxide of mercury to create pure oxygen, and made an apparatus for distilling water.

  Conant’s scientific curiosity made him a natural for Roxbury Latin School, one of Boston’s storied exam schools. His grades in some subjects were middling, but he excelled in chemistry. He filled notebooks with sketches of lab apparatuses, equations, and observations far more complex than the school curriculum.

  His teacher Newton Henry Black praised the advanced work in Conant’s notebooks. “The experiments described in this book are quite different than the usual list offered by the boys of the school, because Conant has already done at home most of the usual experiments in elem. chemistry,” Black wrote.

  In the school magazine, his classmates poked fun at him for his fascination with chemistry. “This year, he has practically lived in the laboratory, concocting every kind and condition of a smell. We sincerely hope he will not blow up the laboratory at Harvard,” they wrote.

  Conant found his calling in the Harvard labs as an undergraduate and later as a graduate student. The outbreak of the war in 1914 polarized the campus. Many children of Boston Brahmins gravitated toward Britain and its allies, while a smaller group of German sympathizers opposed intervention. A confessed contrarian, Conant was in the latter group, contemptuous of the widespread campus support for the Allies. He called himself “a pro-German apologist,” and he supported Wilson for his neutrality stance.

  But the chlorine gas attack at Ypres and the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 isolated pro-German chemists; many were aghast that German scientists they idolized and worked with had turned their brilliance to such ends. When unrestricted submarine warfare finally pulled the United States into the war, Conant began to worry. He didn’t worry about which side was right but that the conflict would interrupt his studies. He didn’t feel as though it was an option to wait until he was drafted. Many of his classmates were enlisting in the army and navy. Conant was torn. He considered joining an ambulance corps, but his former teacher at Roxbury Latin and his parents talked him out of it.

  There was another route—the private sector. The war had clamped off the supply of German chemicals and equipment that American companies had long relied on. With a mix of naïveté and opportunism, Conant saw potential for wartime profit and launched an industrial chemical company with two Harvard classmates. The project ended in disaster. An explosion killed one partner and sent another to the hospital. Conant was so dismayed that he pledged to shun industrial chemistry and stick with academic work, but the problem of what to do during the war persisted. He visited chemical companies in Delaware and Washington seeking a proper wartime endeavor and wound up at the Bureau of Chemistry. There, he spent his days trying to replicate a German pharmaceutical drug that the war had made unobtainable, a task only distantly related to the war.

  He lived in an apartment building on Biltmore Street NW, just east of Rock Creek. He had begun to tinker with a new idea: to enlist in the army and go overseas to train men in using and repairing gas masks. When he bumped into Norris on the street, Conant described his plans. Norris scoffed.

  “You’re crazy.” Norris snorted. Enlisting would be a waste of Conant’s time and talent, he said. “You can do more good for your country by staying here in the Bureau of Mines. We’re working with gases.” Chemists that Conant knew well were already working for the bureau, such as his mentor Elmer Kohler and Arthur Beckett Lamb, who headed Harvard’s chemistry lab, and both were working on defensive problems around gas. Norris had been charged with organizing a research team, Organic Research Unit No. 1. He told Conant he should come to American University and lead the new research unit. Conant accepted.

  Norris was almost certainly correct—Conant was not a natural fit for the army, either by disposition or experience. He had a methodical and calculating mind that carefully weighed decisions, and he expressed impatience, even disdain, at other ways of thinking. By his own admission, he was contrarian—hardly a trait suited to regimented, hierarchical army life. Still, he had been prepared to be swept into the tide of war. Had Conant gone overseas, the Chemical Warfare Service might well have gone in a very different direction.

  Conant left his Bureau of Chemistry job and began work with Norris’s organic unit in McKinley Hall in mid-September. There were just three men in Organic Unit No. 1 when Conant started, but it grew quickly—by mid-October he was working with seven other chemists. Conant must have found it a dismal working environment compared with what he was used to. McKinley Hall was unheated, and the windows lacked glazing to keep out drafts. Condensers for cooling hot gases and liquids dangled from shelves, suspended with bits of string. The lab lacked basic equipment, such a
s ring stands to secure beakers and test tubes in place over a flame, and the wind whistled in the hoods that funneled out fumes. Samples of mustard gas, chlorine, sneezing agents, and tear gases filled the lab. The chemists constantly skated on the edge of injury. Each afternoon, the scientists guzzled a quart of diluted milk to neutralize fumes they inhaled during the day.

  One day, a bumbling young chemist in Conant’s lab who had recently graduated from MIT leaned over an uncovered bowl and sniffed its contents. The bowl contained hydrocyanic acid. Immediately realizing what a poor idea that was, the chemist exhaled quickly to expel the gas from his lungs. That same chemist, the future Nobel laureate Robert S. Mulliken, would later be badly burned in a mustard gas experiment gone awry and spend six months recovering in a hospital.

  While the lab was far from perfect, in some ways it was ideal for someone like Conant. Brilliant scientists were all around him, working feverishly on stubborn problems that would mean life or death for soldiers sent to Europe. These were not petty industrial dilemmas; they were the kinds of problems that might determine the outcome of the war. The work at McKinley Hall wasn’t always efficient, but it was pure—a set of discrete problems that the men had liberty to tackle however they saw fit.

  Mustard was one of those problems. Over the summer, Manning had focused on production of a handful of gases: phosgene, chloropicrin, hydrogen cyanide, and the tear gas xylyl bromide. From overseas, Fries pressured the Bureau of Mines to concentrate on mustard. “Full investigation physiological and defensive and manufacture on large scale of gas No. 475 [mustard] vital,” he wrote via cablegram from Pershing’s office on October 11. A week later, samples extracted from German yellow-cross shells arrived at American University, and mustard became a top priority at the experiment station. As chief of gas research, Jim Norris was in charge of learning first how to synthesize the chemical, then manufacturing enough to pack shells and mortars to launch back at the Germans. At the head of Organic Research Unit No. 1, Conant began distilling the oily liquid to study its composition.

  Mustard was a vexing problem. The Germans had been using the same production method that the chemist Victor Meyer had described in 1886, known as the chlorohydrine method. Ethylene chlorohydrine treated with sodium sulfide produced thiodiglycol and sodium chloride, or salt. When thiodiglycol was treated with hydrochloric acid, a solution of dichloroethyl sulfide and water formed. Hydrolysis removed the water, leaving mustard. But removing the water was time-consuming and expensive, and this process also required chlorine, which was in limited supply because it, too, was a war gas. The process was slow and inefficient and had required the Germans to stockpile the meager output so as to have sufficient quantities to make attacks effective. There had to be a better way, and it was Conant’s task to find it. He finally had the war job that he craved.

  Across the campus, new facilities were rising from the hillside to meet the chemists’ demands. Engineers were building a long boardwalk extending northwest across the hilltop outside McKinley Hall. The wooden duckboard turned at an angle and went due west, to the top of a ravine. There, the engineers were building a bridge spanning the gulch. On the other side, a bomb pit was under construction. When the boardwalk was finished, the chemists would be able to step from McKinley Hall carrying their potions and grenades and smoke candles, walk on the level platform all the way to the bomb pit, and test their research there, safely contained inside the buried detonation chamber.

  Every Thursday morning, the scientists of the organic chemistry section gathered for a meeting to compare notes, update one another on their work, and debate new avenues of research. E. Emmet Reid and his mentor, Joseph Frazer, traveled from Baltimore to Washington. Arno Fieldner, too, would have been there, discussing the latest experiments with gas masks, soda lime, and charcoal. Jim Norris was always present, along with Eli Marshall, the head of the pharmacology division, as well as Yandell Henderson, despite a cloud of suspicion over him for his incendiary writings before the war.

  At the meetings, Reid acted as secretary, recording everything on notecards. When a new substance was suggested, Reid wrote down the name of the chemist proposing it; then it would be assigned to another chemist to explore further. Later meetings would include updates on the investigations, and sometimes the chemists would bring samples of the compounds to the meetings to discuss their properties. From there, they would be passed on to Marshall and Henderson’s division for further exploration. The numbers of cards in Reid’s file began to multiply, and Reid rated each of the substances on a toxicity scale that he invented.

  The scientists didn’t always have the easiest time obtaining chemicals. Since the summer, the chemists had been looking at war gases based on arsenic, rather than sulfur, so William McPherson, the chief of the Small-Scale-Manufacturing Section, pleaded with chemical companies for arsenic. At first, he begged businesses for small amounts—six pounds from one chemical company, one hundred pounds from another. By late fall, as the lethal potential of arsenic became more evident, McPherson was ordering vast quantities of arsenic trichloride. Astonished company officials warned that his requests would disrupt the market, to the detriment of commercial industries that relied on it. After he wrote to one company asking if it could manufacture eight hundred tons of arsenic trichloride, the company director wrote back to say that “it could not be furnished in the next three months without upsetting the industries of the whole country.” It would have a particularly deleterious effect on companies making insecticides, so much so that a different federal agency, the Food Administration, told his company not to provide it to the Bureau of Mines.

  The difficulty in obtaining chemicals was part of a still-bigger problem: producing the war gases themselves. As representatives of the War Department and the Bureau of Mines conferred with industrial chemical producers, they realized that the companies were reluctant to get in the business of manufacturing war gases. One reason was that many companies were already deep in orders for chemicals that were in heavy demand from the army, such as chlorine. Furthermore, making war gases was a dangerous and risky proposition. Unlike arms makers or shipbuilding companies that could convert factories back to peacetime purposes after the war, plants built to produce chemical warfare agents would be useless when the war ended.

  A few companies, however, were willing to make chemical weapons. Dow Chemical, which was among the nation’s largest chemical producers, was one of them. Herbert H. Dow had perfected a process in Midland, Michigan, for extracting chemicals from “brine wells,” chemical-rich caverns deep underground that were the remnants of ancient oceans. Salt solutions pumped to the surface also contained chemicals such as magnesium, chlorine, and bromine that could be extracted through electrolysis. Midland was one of the country’s richest sources of bromine, and bromine was one of the key ingredients in lachrymators, or tear gases. Midland also produced large amounts of sulfur chloride, which was a chief constituent chemical in mustard gas. Toward the end of 1917, Herbert Dow offered the plant to the Bureau of Mines, and in early 1918, the bureau would establish a Midland station which would turn the town into a hub of chemical warfare.

  Another cooperative chemical maker was the Oldbury Electro-Chemical Company of Niagara Falls, New York. Carbon monoxide, one of the ingredients of phosgene, was a by-product of its furnaces. Prior to the war, phosgene was imported from Germany for industrial dyes, and when war appeared inevitable, the company had begun exploring commercial production of phosgene. Not long after Congress declared war, the company offered to assist the government in making it. An experimental lab produced batches of the chemical for the Bureau of Mines to test, and in November of 1917, Oldbury signed a contract with the government to produce twenty thousand pounds of phosgene a day.

  A few other companies were also prepared to make gas, such as the American Synthetic Color Company in Stamford, Connecticut; the Frank Hemingway Company in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and Zinsser & Company in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. But in the fall of 1917
, the War Department concluded that there simply weren’t enough cooperative companies. If the government wanted chemical weapons, it would have to make them itself.

  The decision to manufacture war gases coincided with another effort already under way in the War Department. Since June, the Army Ordnance Department had been searching for land to build plants for filling the shells that would need to be packed with gas and sent to France by the millions. They also needed a large proving ground to test ordnance, both conventional and chemical. For that, they needed a sparsely populated area with an unobstructed, twenty-five-mile shooting range both to the north and south—fifty miles in all—to test long-range shells. They found what seemed to be the perfect spot: Kent Island, a hatchet-shaped outcropping of land jutting into the Chesapeake Bay, with open water on three sides and a short bridge to the mainland for its five hundred residents. But when army officers went to Congress for approval to buy the seventeen thousand acres, Senate hearings turned into an embarrassing spectacle, with bitter protests from Maryland lawmakers on behalf of the island’s inhabitants. Secretary of War Baker himself pleaded directly with the islanders who packed the hearing room, making a patriotic appeal for sacrifice.

  Baker’s words fell on deaf ears. Tempers flared during the hearing, which had to be gaveled to order. An officer from the Ordnance Department, Colonel Colden L. Ruggles, set off a firestorm when he said the army would be testing gas shells on the island. In a bombastic rhetorical flourish, one senator said that if the army couldn’t find another spot, “I say this country is not worth defending. Just let the Germans come and take it.” Two days later, the Senate committee killed the bill.