Wonderful Hydrazine

An innocent-looking chemical, much like water in appearance, has U.S. synthetic chemists in a state of eager anticipation. It is hydrazine (N2H4), which is just coming on the market in large quantities and at a reasonable price. It offers scientists a chance to discover new chemical continents.

Organic chemistry, which has produced hundreds of thousands of compounds, is built on the fact that carbon atoms combine with one another to form rings and chains. Nitrogen atoms will do the same thing to a limited extent, but making nitrogen atoms link up with one another is extremely difficult on more than a laboratory scale. Hydrazine, which has two linked nitrogen atoms each attached to two hydrogen atoms, is the first of these linked "hydronitrogens" that has been produced outside the laboratory in appreciable quantities.

During World War II, the Germans made hydrazine for use as a rocket fuel. The chemical bond between the two nitrogen atoms contains a large amount of energy, and when it is broken during combustion, the energy is released, giving the rocket a powerful push. In the U.S., hydrazine (which is poisonous and blows up if improperly handled) will be used in rocket fuels, but in the long run it will be more important in chemical synthesis. Here the possibilities are almost endless. Each of hydrazine's four hydrogen atoms is highly reactive; each can be replaced, sometimes in many ways, with almost any organic molecule. Or the hydrazine molecule can be made to act as a chemical link, each end of it attached to a different organic molecule. This permits chemists to create innumerable new substances, many of which are sure to have valuable properties. Even with hydrazine scarce and expensive, some hydrazine derivatives have already reached the market: drugs, insecticides, explosives and photographic developers. Soon hydrazine's magic twin nitrogen atoms may show up in dyes, detergents, plastics and synthetic fibers.

This week Mathieson Chemical Corp. announced that its new plant at Lake Charles, La. for the production of hydrazine in tonnage lots has been completed. The price, which was $50 a Ib. a few years ago, will be $2.50 a Ib., and Mathieson hopes to cut it eventually to 50-c- a Ib. At this price, chemists believe, magic hydrazine will find thousands of important uses.

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