Featured Biography: Frederick Bates

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          Featured Biography: Frederick Bates

Cane sugar first made its way to Europe in the early years of the second millennium, but for centuries, only the very rich could afford to import it. Most Europeans sweetened their bland diets with honey, and it was this substance to which “sweetness” was attached; sugar was just another “spice” to be used in combination with others. Just as they did with other spices, the mercantilist empire planners of Europe dreamed of possessing a limitless supply of sugar. The Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English all established empires in the New World in order to cultivate cane and thus corner the market for the commodity. As supply from the colonies affected the European market, the price drifted gradually downward, and the new merchant classes began to purchase and use sugar in small amounts. Within the classes below the aristocracy, sugar became a demonstration of social status, but the price of sugar had not yet fallen far enough to let ordinary citizens enjoy it.

The European governments, following mercantilist theory, maintained high tariffs and restrictive trade policies on sugar from other empires. The resulting high prices gave colonial sugar planters wealth that rivaled that of royalty. Ironically, as historian Eric Williams explains in Capitalism and Slavery, the planters’ own riches ended their dominance of the economic system. The European banks in which the planters deposited their wealth invested in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.

That economic and social upheaval transformed the traditional workday, in which patterns of work had followed the sun, into one in which the needs of machines and the ticking of clocks regulated the rhythm of life. Factory employees no longer enjoyed meals at home but instead now ate at the site of their labor. Food was no longer hot or fresh, and many diets did not provide enough calories to power tough industrial labor. As the anthropologist Sidney Mintz writes in Sweetness and Power, the English working class turned to a new beverage for energy and heat: tea.

The Royal East India Company began to import tea leaves from China in the late seventeenth century. The English, long fans of ale, quickly developed a taste for the new drink; the Company’s imports rose from twenty thousand pounds in 1700, to over two million pounds in 1800; and smuggling, the government unhappily estimated, brought in just as much. Tea could be bitter, however, so the English became consumers not of tea “neat” but of tea with sugar. For the worker, sweetened tea proved a potent concoction; as sugar’s calories kept them fueled, while its caffeine kept them awake.

As the United States began to industrialize, slowly at first, in the antebellum years, then much more rapidly after 1865, it also developed a noticeable appetite for sugar. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as industrialization transformed the society, America’s per- capita consumption of sugar skyrocketed. Just as importantly, the growing Federal government also came to rely on sugar as it took in enormous sums from customs duties on sucrose. Thus measuring sugar’s purity at the border became a problem of immense political and scientific importance.

The Sugar Tariff in America Before the Bureau of Standard

Parliament made sure that the British sugar colonies enjoyed a protected market throughout the whole empire, so in 1733, London imposed a tax on every gallon of foreign molasses flowing to the North American colonies. In the decade before the Revolution, Parliament passed the Sugar Act, which brought in ninety-seven percent of the tax revenue collected in the American colonies, by 1774. By 1789, though, it had fallen to the recently independent American government to levy its own tariffs. The new government distinguished between raw and refined sugar and continued to do so for the next century and a half.

America had different economic interests at stake than Britain. Whereas Parliament wanted to shield its colonial planters from foreign competitors, Congress had few growers to protect. Instead, it was the industries that processed sugar—the refiners and rum distillers—that needed tariff protection from their rivals. Thus, refined sugar was taxed at a higher rate than raw. Thus, the tariff on raw sugar existed almost entirely to make money for the government, not to protect any domestic interest or constituency. Inspectors generally weighed a sample to calculate its density, which was presumed to have a direct relationship to the proportion of sucrose. By the eighteen-thirties, however, importers began to increase the sucrose content of “raw” sugars and molasses, altering the already questionable connection between density and purity and forcing the Treasury Department, which oversaw the Customs Service, to find a new way of determining how much to tax a given shipment. The Secretary of the Treasury, John Spencer, eventually turned to the Office of Weights and Measures, who, in turn, appointed Richard McCulloh, professor of chemistry at Jefferson College in Philadelphia, to report on other methods of saccharimetry.

McCulloh concluded that the specific gravity of a sample had no connection to its purity. He also, in a series of reports between 1845 and 1848, brought to the government’s attention, the “polarimeter,” an invention of the French physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot. The polarimeter could measure the concentration of a known optically active material by its rotation of the plane of polarization of light. However, as Deborah Warner of the Smithsonian Institution recently pointed out, the scientific and business communities split on whether a polarimeter would provide ample opportunity for fraud, how much scientific training was needed for its use, and how accurate it was in theory and in practice.

In 1861, therefore, Congress decided to adopt the Dutch method of measuring the purity of sugar by its color, according a scale standardized by Amsterdam merchants. But color, like density, proved unrelated to the sugar content. Soon, importers began to manipulate their shipments’ hue to take advantage of the Dutch scale.

Despite numerous hearings that revealed the financial importance of the problem, Congress failed to produce any legislation that dictated the method to be used by the Customs Service. Frustrated, the Secretary tried to let each inspector do as he pleased. The Supreme Court, however, decided in 1882 that Congress held sole authority over the method of testing. It ordered the Treasury to refund millions in duties and return to the Dutch standard.

Immediately following that decision, however, the House Ways and Means Committee specifically appointed a commission to revise the tariff system. After hearing from both scientific and industrial witnesses, the members recommended that the polarimeter be adopted. Simultaneously, the National Academy of Sciences confirmed that using the device was as accurate as any other method, if not more so. Finally, in 1883, Congress acceded to the polarimeter’s employment by the Customs laboratories.

By this point, the growing American industrial working class demanded sugar as if it were a necessity of life and the tariff had become an indispensable source of money for the Federal government. Though Congress had enacted a small income tax during the Civil War, the government paid for its expenses with excise taxes (mostly on vices like alcohol or tobacco) through the sale of land and through tariffs on imports. The sugar tariff, which alone accounted for between one-fifth and one-sixth of all revenue, was the largest single source of funds.

Between 1880 and 1890, annual consumption of sugar rose from forty-two to fifty-two pounds per American. The world price of sugar fell during roughly the same period, from 10 cents per pound in 1870, to 3.2 cents in 1884. But in 1890, Congress passed the McKinley Tariff, which placed both raw sugar and molasses on a list of duty-free products. To protect the domestic refining industry, refined sugar was still taxed at half a cent per pound. Lifting the tariff led to extraordinary growth in consumption—in 1891, each American used an astonishing 66.3 pounds of sugar. However, the recession of 1893 took a heavy toll on other sources of income for the government, and in 1894, Congress passed the highly unpopular Wilson-Gorman Tariff, which again imposed a small duty on raw sugar, and raised it, again, in 1897.

For the Treasury and for the refining and importing industries, therefore, an enormous amount of money rested on the success or failure of the polarimetric method of testing sugar. It was troubling, however, that the adoption of the polarimeter did not end the flood of costly  challenges to Customs decisions, nor did it impose uniformity on laboratories in different cities. By the turn of the century, the lack of uniform and accurate saccharimetric methods had become a never-ending source of disputes between commercial interests and the government, and many millions of dollars were at stake. Saccharimetry became one of the many problems that, to scientists and Congress, demonstrated the need for a national measurement agency. Testifying before a House commit tee hearing in 1900, on the proposed Bureau of Standards, McMurtrie naturally raised the question of sugar; it had once, he said, taken him four months of correspondence to settle a dispute over the calibration markings on a piece of laboratory equipment. If each customs laboratory had “a set of instruments which had been properly calibrated by a person in authority, such as this bill provides for, it would have been an easy matter to standardize the flask in question, and this difficulty would not have arisen.” Moreover, he said, it was not just devices but the theoretical grounding of saccharimetry that needed work. “The very large amount of sugar which is imported into this country would make a very great difference in the money value if there should be a variation of even so much as two-tenths of 1 per cent.”

Despite the importance of sugar and the other tasks before the Bureau, however, the new agency did not complete its new laboratories in northwest Washington, D.C. for a few years, so it had to wait until 1903 to begin its work on saccharimetry for the Treasury. That same year, Samuel W. Stratton, the physicist appointed as the Bureau’s first director, hired Frederick Bates to head the Polarimetry Section of the Bureau’s Optics Division. Bates was a young Kansan agricultural physicist straight out of graduate school at the University of Nebraska, where he had studied under a specialist in the optical properties of sugars. He now took charge of all of the Bureau’s saccharimetry work.

The Impact of using Lead Acetate

Bates’ first success at NBS was precisely determining the error produced by lead acetate, the most common clarifying reagent used by sugar inspectors. In order to make a raw sugar solution more transparent, inspectors would drop a small amount of lead acetate into their sample, even though they knew it would introduce a slight error into their measurements. Chemists had guessed that this effect would cancel out another error introduced by slight variations in temperature. But when the International Commission for Uniform Methods of Sugar Analysis (ICUMSA) agreed on values for temperature corrections in 1900, they could not agree on similar tables for lead acetate.

In 1906, after only a few years at the Bureau, Bates decided to f ind the values to correct for lead acetate as well. He noted that all of the previous studies had calculated values only to tenths of degrees on the Ventzke scale, the most widely used scale for measuring sugar purity. In his research, Bates declared, “an accuracy of 0.02° Ventzke was desired.” Fortunately, he had at his disposal better equipment and better techniques than “the comparatively crude polarizing apparatus and methods” used by his predecessors. Working with J.C. Blake, over the course of several months, Bates combined samples of high-quality commercial sugar—not, he noted, chemically pure sucrose—with various amounts of lead acetate (half a cubic centimeter in some samples to 63 cc5 in others) and took careful polariscopic readings. Their final paper, published in the Bulletin of the Bureau of Standards, included a comprehensive table of the differences between precise and over-clarified polariscope readings. When Bates plotted his meticulous results, he found that the reagent had much more of an effect than anyone imagined.

After Bates and Blake published their results, handbooks on sugar analysis began to include a version of their table of errors and advised practitioners to adjust their results by a suggested amount. It remained for others to f ind precise corrections for raw sugar, but the Bureau scientists had made a crucial contribution to the accurate determination of sucrose.

Enter the Bates Saccharimeter

Bates had devised a system of gears and milled heads that he designed to fit onto a Fric saccharimeter using the Lippich system. He also included a thermometer to indicate the temperature of the quartz wedges, which had been the source of some error in previous devices. The gears could be locked “instantly” by clamps, and included smaller screws for especially fine adjustment. The only disadvantage of Bates’ device was that its especially fine construction made it far more expensive. The Fric catalog listed the price at between $800 and $900, depending on its capacity, which was four times the price of any Schmidt & Haensch instrument. Yet its overwhelming virtues made it an instant success. In the same year that it was developed it was adopted as the standard saccharimeter for the United States Customs Service. This design was produced, with slight but continual modifications, for several decades.

Bates’ accomplishment made it possible for all sugar testers—from customs assistants in minor ports of entry, to skilled scientists in the best-equipped laboratories—to detect sucrose to an equally high degree of accuracy. Within a few years, Stratton reported that as a result of the Bates saccharimeter’s introduction, “the differences in the results at the five principal sugar ports have been reduced to as low as 0.2 percent; a concordance which is quite satisfactory.” Bates’ device was so successful that it remained the standard Customs saccharimeter through the nineteen-forties.

In 1942, Bates was named chief of the Optics Division. That year, the Bureau published its Circular 440, “Polarimetry, Saccharimetry, and the Sugars,” an eight-hundred-page book that compiled all of the research that Bates and the other sugar researchers had conducted over the previous four decades. By 1958, Bates had served three terms as the head of the ICUMSA and had been elected its Honorary Lifetime President. At its convention in Washington, D.C., the members dedicated the session’s publications to Bates and gave him a standing ovation.