Creative Chemistry

Robinson Crusoe, Edwin E. Slosson suggests, is not merely a castaway: he is all humanity, stranded on a planet with no imports but meteorites. How does a species with nothing but raw materials learn to make what nature never supplied?

Writing in the early twentieth century, Slosson traces human progress from finding and reshaping what lies at hand to chemistry’s power to create entirely new substances. He brings that grand idea down to earth with examples from buildings, weapons, clothing, medicines and dyes—and challenges the belief that human craft can only imitate nature. The chemist, he argues, can take matter apart and build it anew, making chemistry not just a science of analysis but of invention. What can this creative power make possible—and what happens when industry begins to use it?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.