Mares' Nest

Chicago businessmen who attended their Executives Club luncheon at the Hotel Sherman last week expected their scientific guest to give them a bland, postprandial lecture on science's present accomplishments. He gave them instead a disturbing intimation of horrible death--by describing the effects of the gas cacodyl isocyanide.

Cacodyl isocyanide, new, vicious compound of poisonous cyanogen, kills instantly. It would, he commented with juggernaut impassivity, "destroy armies as a man might snuff out a candle. . . . War, if it comes again, and is to be deadly, will never again be fought with shot & shell. It can't be, for it is too much cheaper to destroy life wholesale with this new gas. It may be manufactured at the rate of thousands of tons a day and it costs much less than powder & cannon, yet it will destroy armies more thoroughly, more effectively, and more cheaply."

The Chicago executives heard and cringed, then recovered their ease upon reflecting that the lecturer was Dr. Hilton Ira Jones, sound scientist, at present director of scientific research for the Redpath (lyceum, lecture) Bureau and therefore a professional rouser of emotions.

After stirring his business audience so, Dr. Jones made them cringe again by showing them two bombs full of blindex, gas invented by Dr. Byron Cassius Goss, onetime lieutenant colonel with the Chemical War Service, now president of the Lake Erie Chemical Co., Cleveland. Said Dr. Jones to the Chicagoans: "I can take this fountain pen gun, discharge it at a man 20 feet away and in the twinkling of an eye he will be blinded for half an hour. I could discharge this large gun and blind everybody in this large ballroom in the fraction of a second."

Major General Amos Alfred Fries, who as Chief of the Chemical War Service should know most of such matters, treated Dr. Jones' alarums as rustlings from a mares' nest. The service, said he, had not asked that news of cacodyl isocyanide be squelched, for it knows nothing of the gas.