This story
begins with the German organic chemist Hermann Hille. Hermann was born on June
7, 1871 in Mölln, Northern Germany, the city where the famous prankster Till Eulenspiegel
presumably died in 1350. The young Hermann studied in Würzburg and received his
PhD in 1900 in Heidelberg for his mere 42-page study Ueber das primäre und sekundäre symmetrische Hydrazid der Propionsäure
und Valeriansäure. The title sounds as if the 29-year old Hermann was a
bright young guy in his field. That is why he was soon recruited by a
young American chemist, Albert Coombs Barnes, who lured him into an adventure
in the USA. It was to be a great adventure.
Albert Barnes
was a true example of the American self-made man, who went from rags to riches.
He was born in a rough working class neighborhood of Philadelphia, but being
very intelligent, he had strong aspirations to emancipate from his milieu. He
almost literally fought his way into the University of Pennsylvania by earning his money
in boxing matches. At the university Albert enrolled in medicine, but he was
not interested in the practical side of it. Instead, he concentrated on
chemistry and philosophy; he called himself a ‘philosophical chemist’. Because
Germany was the center of chemical research at that time, he went to Germany to
refine his studies in both areas. He studied at the department of experimental
medicine and experimental physiology of the University in Berlin, for instance.
Lack of money drove him back to America within 18 months. His new employer, a
Philadelphia pharmaceutical company, where he worked at the sales department, sent
him back to Germany to study pharmacology. In Heidelberg finally he met Hermann
and convinced him to go to the US.
Once in
America, Hermann was disappointed about his salary and the badly equipped lab
he had to work in. He had an innovative mind, was a chemical expert and wanted
to experiment. So within two years, he and Albert joined forces. Albert would
propose ideas for products and Hermann would do the research and develop
sale-able products. Albert chose cheese first, but Hermann rejected this idea.
Then an idea for bread turned into a flop. Then Albert thought of a
disinfectant on the basis of silver. This was not a new idea at all, but
Hermann produced a substance that could hold a much larger quantity of silver
to treat infections.
Eureka! A
new product emerged: Argyrol. It was a treatment against gonorrhea, principally
used as an preventive treatment in gonorrheal blindness in neonates.
Soon the
roles of the two partners in the company crystallized. Hermann was the
scientist, Albert became the salesman. Albert’s marketing methods were unusual.
He circumvented the wholesale distributors by visiting the doctors personally
with testimonials from leading practitioners. Viral marketing – the
way many marketers today regard marketing as most successful.
So money
rolled in by buckets. Where money comes in, dissenting points of view usually
follow. Albert started to refuse to disclose financial matters to Hermann, and
consequently Hermann kept the scientific formula to himself. In 1907, Albert
brought his partner to court to buy him out. For a whopping amount of $ 350.000
Albert could call himself the owner of Argyrol. Hermann and his role in the
discovery of the formula were filtered out of history.
Hermann in the meantime had become a member of the Theosophical Society: in June
1904. It shows that he of the two partners was more interested in conceptual,
philosophical ideas about the way life was essentially a product of chemical
elements. Thus the two partners went different roads altogether.
Argyrol
went on to make a millionaire out of Albert. While the money kept rolling in, he
could devote his time to hobbies. Art. He had that much self-knowledge, that he
knew he was not a good artist himself, so beauty had to be found elsewhere.
Albert started to collect art. A former classmate, the well-known painter William Glackens, judged his
collection as mediocre. Now this verdict did not please the ambitious Albert. So he
sent William to Paris with a budget of $ 20.000 to spend on the avant-garde.
Later Albert went himself. He soon became well-known as the big spender – when
he left his hotel, he could be confronted by a crowd of artist and dealers on
the pavement, who would hold up their work for him to buy.
But money
doesn’t buy manners. Albert - his grandson was Cliff, the famous Texas oil businessman - became known as a rude person, who could be very
vindictive when people did not agree with his opinions. He scorned the
established art world, because it had scorned his art collection at a public display in 1921 - and it would scorn it again in 1923. 
Albert retaliated. He dedicated his museum, opened in 1922, to
poor uneducated – and black – people. In other words, he radicalized the 19th
century idea of educating the masses into a private, authoritarian enterprise. He was revolutionary in that sense, that he hung his paintings in his
pharmaceutical factory: an early example of 'art in the office'. But it should also be said that the real reason was: he had lack of space at
home. Albert’s museum was only open to people he liked, others were rudely kept
from the door. Why was Albert so obnoxious? Social Reformer John Dewey, who inspired Albert to his educational system and one of the few persons Albert
stayed in touch with, described him as ‘having an inferiority complex’,
which turned him into a bully. (View the pictures on the internet: he never smiles!) The new Albert C. Barnes Museum, which opened
this year, is now under severe public attack, because the city intends to bring in
the millions by making the collection into a tourist attraction (!).
Hermann
went to live in Cook, Chicago, and started his own enterprise. He was
naturalized in 1907, got married to Christina from Åmål in Sweden (she had been on the same boat to America...). The couple had one daughter, Mona Wandanita (1909-2000), who in 1949 married Bruno W. Siemers (1911-2006 in Germany). Hermann might not have accumulated such a fortune as Albert, but he was not
poor either. In the 1930s he lived in a $ 50.000 villa near the lake (post-Crash estimate).
He also attracted some media attention for new ideas. Read this. Part of the newspaper
clipping could have been written these days, in ecological sense, another part (still) sounds like
science fiction.
The Daily
News, Frederick, MD, March 29, 1911.
Startling theory is true. Dr. Hille tells of
production of nutriment from chemicals.
News
dispatches from Chicago that Dr. Hermann Hille, a wealthy scientist, has
discovered that it is possible to manufacture food for the human species from
earth or from air, attracted considerable attention in the city and recalled
clearly the startling theories of John Jacob Astor on the same subject,
published on Christmas Day. Dr. Hille in an address before the Chicago Medical
Society, announced his discoveries. Mr. Astor wrote his article only as an
educated layman, but the scientist confirms every word he wrote.
Mr. Astor
wrote on the food problem and his main theory was that we may find in the waste
substances of the earth sufficient nutrition to cause us to look with
equanimity upon the disappearance of vegetables or the scarcity of
meat-producing animals. Either we should find some way of eating those waste
products or we should evolve edible animals that could live upon them. …
Dr. Hille,
who is a graduate of German universities, declared that all life is chemical
and that he had discovered a chemical compound which contains in solution every
chemical form in the human body, that by use of this, vegetables as food may be
eliminated, and the chemist of the future, instead of the butcher and the
baker, will supply the food of the populace. …
At the
meeting, Hermann also showed a bottle with copper sulphate, on which fungus
were thriving. He told that Dr. Swann of South Chicago has cured a case of
tuberculosis with organic copper, ‘while Dr. Webster was employing it on
another case with flattering results’.
Hermann was
clearly the idealist, the thinker, who wanted to change the world into a better
place. Occult chemistry in theosophical circles and his strictly scientific
approach apparently went well together – as with many scientists at that time.
Even Einstein read Blavatsky, if it were only to tickle his brain. He called
the book a box full of mysterious goodies.
Hermann
stayed a theosophist all his life – although I haven’t been able to find when
he died exactly. In any case, he was not removed from the membership list, or
had himself removed. In 1931 a lengthy essay of his hand was published in the
World Theosophy Magazine. This magazine was edited by the flamboyant Mary
Russak Hotchener, who was also part of my previous entry in this blog. The
title of Hermann’s essay is: ‘Why I Do Not Go to Church’. The introductory
footnote explains the impetus of the essay;
it was ‘…supplied by a discussion of the pros and cons among a group of
earnest physicians constituting “The Medical Round Table of Chicago”.’
In the
autobiographical essay, Hermann describes that as a boy he already was a deeply
spiritual person, but in the strictly ‘agnostic’ environment of German science
this inclination had been so suppressed, that he regarded himself as
non-religious too. When he came to America, the pendulum swung to the other
side: he immersed himself in occult circles and joined societies (Aha! Not only
theosophy! Aha! Was this the real reason for the break with Albert?). But after
a while he realized that dabbling in popular occultist practices had nothing to
do with the practice and development of spirituality; it was dangerous and
addictive. Hermann here cites Friedrich Schiller – ‘who, by the way, was an
army surgeon’ – from his poem Der Taucher (1797):
Und der
Mensch versuche die Götter
nicht
Und begehre
nimmer und nimmer zu schauen
Was sie gnädig
bedeckten mit Nacht und Grauen.
Hermann states,
that he believes in keeping his feet on solid ground and only his head in the
sky. His interpretation of the motto of the Theosophical Society, ‘There is no
wisdom higher than truth’, was reformulated by him into ‘There is no authority
greater than our own reason and our own conscience’, adding to it the Bible
text from Proverbs 23: ‘After all: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he”.‘
Well. What
is there more to say about Hermann? He did not become a public figure like
Albert. His daughter also became a theosophist and a minor poet in a Chicago circle called The Parnassian. The funniest
thing I found is the assignment of two patents from Severin L. Egenas to
Hermann and his daughter, dated 1940. One of the patents is on aerial
navigation. The other is a patent for a toilet flush. I can advise you to check
the Wiki page on toilets, and discover a whole new world. Check the site against your own toilet, and discover if the site is
accurate…