Andrew Mangravite

More From the Author

Visual Evidence

Distillations Article

Freelance inventor, litigious chemist, and explosives expert—the many lives of Walter O. Snelling.

Magical Thinking

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What happened to physics in Nazi Germany?

Up in the Air

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Some of the greatest technological achievements from the 18th through the 20th century required the public to look up—from the first balloon flights of the Montgolfier brothers to the birth of the ocean-crossing behemoths built by Ferdinand, Graf von Zeppelin.

Meeting the Miner’s Friend

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Art and advertising have always been bed fellows. Advertising art must be quickly comprehensible to its audience and make an immediate impact, even when the object being advertised makes its own bang.

Cellophane Comes to Buffalo

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In 1905, in France, chemist Jacques Brandenberger spilled wine on a tablecloth and wished for a material that could be wiped clean with a wet cloth. Swiss-born Brandenberger spent the next several years perfecting a transparent, moisture-repellent film he named cellophane.

A Better Pill

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Archives place history at our fingertips, but sometimes that history needs a little interpretation. Take the records of early pharmaceutical company William H. Rorer, which point to a lesson in pharmacy and good government.

Factory to Farm

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In 1944 Henry Morgenthau, Jr., President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury, had a vision. He saw postwar Germany as a vast farm—an agrarian state in which all heavy industry would be strictly forbidden and all advanced technologies effectively banished.

Money Man

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For more than 30 years chemist James Curtis Booth successfully oversaw quality and minimized waste at the U.S. Mint. Then three bars of silver bullion disappeared.

Hot Pursuit

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At the end of World War II chemist Charles Phelps Smyth chased down German nuclear scientists and the equipment they left behind.

Sweet Harmony

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Wilhelm Ostwald, winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on catalysis and an accomplished “Sunday painter,” conducted extensive research into the nature of color. His resulting aesthetic provided a stark contrast to the emerging artistic movements of the early 20th century.

The Dream in the Machine

Distillations Article

Rudolph Pariser uses one of the earliest computers to calculate the molecular structure of Dacron.