Word: berle
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Bartle's opponent was Berl Berry, who bills himself as the world's largest Lincoln-Mercury dealer. Berry's style of living became the main issue of the campaign. Noting that Berry was promising lower taxes, Roe Bartle roared: "I have seen his lovely master bedroom with the especially designed bed ten feet wide and ten feet long. If a man can enjoy his night's rest in a bed of that type, he ought to be willing to pay more taxes than those of us who have te sleep in ordinary beds. If he desires...
Died. Dr. Ernst Berl, 68, chemical-warfare specialist for Austria-Hungary in World War I, for the U.S. in World War II, whose process (1940) for converting carbohydrate-containing plants to coal and oil telescoped into a single hour a job that takes nature hundreds of millions of years; of pneumonia; in Pittsburgh...
...American Chemical Society convened in Detroit last week, Professor Ernst Berl of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute for Technology made an astonishing announcement. He said he had made, experimentally but successfully, oil, coal, coke and asphalt from grass, leaves, seaweed, sawdust, scrap lumber, corn, cornstalks, cotton...
Apparently, converting the carbohydrate vegetable matter into hydrocarbons is the most ticklish part of Dr. Berl's process, and he did not talk about it too freely. He heats the carbohydrate under pressure with limestone and "similar substances." Probably one or more catalysts (chemical activators) are involved. The time required is only one hour-considerably less than the millions of years that nature needed. The New York Herald Tribune gulped with excitement: "What the Wrights did to distance, he [Professor Berl] has done to geologic time. One's imagination gags at the possibilities...
...Berl did not say how much or what fuel would be needed to run his fuel factory (if coal or oil were used, the amount consumed would certainly have to be less than the amount manufactured). He did say that, with natural coal and oil still plentiful and prices low, the cost would be too high to undertake commercially now. But he believes the chemist's job is to be ready for future shortages...