PHILADELPHIA — Tourists roaming around Independence Hall and Benjamin Franklin's former home seldom stop to tour the historic First Bank building around the corner.
But the head of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, which now occupies the building, says that if Franklin were to return, that is where he could catch up on the biggest changes in the intervening 200 years.
"If Benjamin Franklin came back today, he would not tell you, 'I am astonished by the Constitution of the United States,' "said Arnold Thackray, the foundation's president. "He would not tell you, 'I am astonished by politicians, Bill Clinton, or the war in Iraq, or crime in the streets.'
"He would be astonished by the transformation of material life, and the intellectual understanding of the universe and how we fit into the scheme of things," Thackray said. "Those changes are really the only significant thing that's happened in the history of the last 200 years. Not using a quill pen, that's chemistry. Plastic glasses, that's chemistry. This is the great cumulative story of mankind."
To preserve that story, the University of Pennsylvania, American Chemical Society and American Institute of Chemical Engineers started the Center for the History of Chemistry in 1982. The center grew, gaining backing of 29 affiliates, from the Alpha Chi Sigma professional chemistry fraternity to the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Society.
In 1995, the group, renamed the Chemical Heritage Foundation, bought the historic bank building in Independence National Historical Park. There, it houses books, paintings and artifacts tracing progress from the days of alchemy to the development of nylon and mapping of the human genome.
It has built an endowment that Thackray would only say is significant, and has an operating budget of more than $7 million a year spent mostly to maintain collections and for outreach efforts such as sponsoring awards and traveling exhibitions.
The group publishes books, such as "Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew," a biography of a chemist whose life Thackray said illustrated "the human condition that every advance in understanding can be used to do good or evil."
As a contemporary in Berlin of physicists Max Planck and Albert Einstein, Haber led the 1909 development of the synthesis of ammonia that made possible mass production of fertilizers that helped feed millions. He later led in the development of gas warfare and was present at the first gas attack on April 22, 1915, at Ypres, Belgium, which killed an estimated 350 people and sickened about 7,000.
