Toms River Read Online Free Page A

anything from a salve to a star,
    If you only know how to, from black Coal-tar. 8
    When the chemical manufacturers finally did expand beyond coal tar chemistry at the end of the nineteenth century, they did so byadapting their manufacturing protocols to petroleum and other raw materials, thereby producing an even larger array of tremendously successful products, from acetone to X-ray plates. Ciba even acquired its own shale oil deposits in the Alps as a new feedstock. By the time the three huge Basel-based chemical makers (Ciba, Geigy, and Sandoz) had formed an alliance to make dyes and other products in the United States—first in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1920 and then in Toms River in 1952—the industry had proved itself capable of synthesizing almost any material. It was a phenomenally profitable business, as long as no one paid too much attention to what the manufacturing process left behind.
    Johann Rudolf Geigy-Merian and Alexander Clavel brought aniline chemistry to the banks of the Rhine, but they were not the first to have to face its consequences. That distinction belongs to a little-known Geigy manager named Johann Jakob Müller-Pack, who in 1860 leased one of Geigy’s factory sites and formed his own company to make aniline dyes on a grand scale. The story of what happened next is uncannily similar to what would happen in Toms River more than a century later. 9 Müller-Pack’s motivation in launching his own manufacturing company was obvious: By 1860, it was clear that fuchsine, the red aniline dye, would be an even bigger moneymaker than Perkin’s mauve. Fuchsine was not just an excellent magenta dye, it was also an intermediate in the production of many colors. As with mauve, those dyes were produced by mixing aniline with oxidizing agents. However, instead of using sulfuric acid as an oxidizer, as Perkin did, fuchsine manufacturers used arsenic acid. This colorless acid was as toxic as arsenic itself, the fabled murder weapon of Renaissance nobility.
    Fuchsine production required large quantities of arsenic acid, and much of it came out as waste at the end because the dye manufacturing process was so inefficient. As one aniline chemist later wrote: “In the action of arsenic acid … on aniline, only forty percent of soluble, useful coloring matter is formed from the aniline consumed; the rest of the aniline goes over into resinous masses, insoluble in water or in diluted acids. Their nature has not yet been exactly determined in science,their quantity, however, amounts to many times as much as the quantity of magenta formed.” 10 In other words, this astonishingly profitable new industry generated far more toxic waste than useful product, and no one had any idea what was actually in that waste or how to get rid of it. This was still true a century later in Toms River, where Ciba and Geigy were still using the same crude disposal method Müller-Pack had selected back in 1860: dumping untreated, unidentified waste into open pits and unlined lagoons on the factory property.
    Müller-Pack was selling fuchsine as fast as he could make it, so in 1862 the Geigy family built a second factory for aniline production and rented this one to him also. The new factory was larger and required even more arsenic acid: 200 kilograms per day, or 441 pounds. That was too much for a lagoon to handle alone (even one that was unlined and leaked like a sieve), so this time Müller-Pack adopted an additional disposal method that would become all too familiar a hundred years later in New Jersey: He discharged his arsenic-laced wastewater into the nearest waterway—in this case, a canal beside the plant that led to the Rhine. On the outskirts of London, Perkin was doing the same thing in the canal next to
his
factory, though on a smaller scale and with less arsenic. Even so, the pollution was apparent enough that his neighbors could tell what color Perkin was making that day by looking at the waters of the canal. 11
    The Swiss