Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?

by Max G. Gergel

Genres: Nonfiction, Chemistry, Biography, Science, Memoir, Literature

193 pages

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Gwern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moved to gwern.net.

[Nick Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

everybody reads Ignition, but this one goes sadly unnoticed. great stuff here.

[Saurin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between hilarious stories and fleshed-out characters the job of a chemist seems pretty glamorous, at least once one gets past the smells, explosions, fires, failures, and creative maneuvers that made Gergel successful. I wish I had done more chemistry in high school.

[Stephanie R. · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the autobiography of Max Gergel, and it is the worst chemistry-related book I have ever read. I really don't know if it is a true story, as he sounds like the kind of person to exaggerate and/or make things up to make a few bucks. Gergel's voice is so strong that it sounds like he's sitting there talking to you, especially with the way he meanders from idea to idea, occasionally throwing in bits of TMI. Parts of it are more lucid than others, and there are some good stories if you're willing to sit through the rambling, disjointed parts. The whole time I read this I was just amazed at how different times were back then.

Things I Have Learned About the Old Days According to Max Gergel
There was no unemployment problem back then. People would just walk up to you and say "Excuse me sir, how would you like to work for me?" and shake hands and you had a job. Most people had two or three jobs, yet they were still poor.
College students were so hypercompetitive that it was normal to receive death threats if you do well. Other students knew who was doing well because the professors posted exam scores on the wall. There was obviously no FERPA.
There was no EPA. Gergel would pour hazardous waste onto the ground and giggle when it killed the grass. By the way, the former site of Columbia Organics in South Carolina is now a Superfund site. See here: http://www.epa.gov/region4/superfund/...
Everybody is a liar. Especially pest control people and Gergel's group of travelling soap salesmen.
Your draft status is the most important piece of information about you and you check it often to compare with friends.
18-year-olds can still wet the bed. If you are a bed-wetter, you are 4F draft status. This means you will never be sent to war. (I personally wonder if some men said they were bed-wetters because they didn't want to go into battle and were ok with the shame of bed wetting.)
You could buy a house for $500 (no, the word foreclosure was not mentioned).
You can call up a hotel or hospital and ask "What room is so-and-so in?" and they will tell you.
You don't have to say who you are or why you need to know. You can also call up the government and ask them "What is the draft status of so-and-so?" and they will tell you that too.
PPE was either nonexistant or too expensive to use. (he did mention lab aprons at one point, selling them not wearing them of course)
Women are called coeds for some reason.
If you are running a company and having a hard time making a profit, don't raise your prices or reconsider your line of business. Just don't pay yourself a salary. You can get free food at ACS meetings.
Chemists give mercaptan compounds as gifts.
Methyl iodide poisoning causes visual and auditory hallucinations (and usually death, but not for Gergel). One of the "good" parts of the book was when Gergel described the symptoms of methyl iodide poisoning in great and terrifying detail.
It's a good idea to run into burning buildings to save objects, even if it turns out to be isopropyl alcohol.
If your company burns down and you don't have insurance, you can still use the force of your personality and help from friends to rebuild as if nothing happened.
Going to Israel to make shady "consulting" deals is a fun vacation and nobody will think you are a terrorist.
45 was very old for a chemist. Gergel retired at 45, feeling very old and broken down, and most of his friends were already dead from lab accidents or cancers.

[Betawolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

_Excuse Me Sir_ is a pretty crazy autobiography, to suit a pretty crazy life. Max Gergel was a chemist in 'the old days' of chemistry, back when any old fools with a shed and some resources could set up and start making horrible smells and potentially set things on fire. Much of the book centres around the times where Gergel was doing just that, working with one or two other people to cook up dangerous mixtures in sub-par conditions and dump waste straight into the river.

Much of the actual chemistry in the book goes far over my head, but to a large degree that doesn't matter -- when Gergel describes something in more detail, he usually expounds on what it's for and why it's difficult, making the material accessible for people who (like me) don't have a clue what isopropyl bromide even is. He also gives you a sense of how dangerous some of the things he did were, to the point where you realise that it's a medical miracle he survived and is in fact still alive, given how many young men he describes dropping around him and the fact that he was in no way particularly careful, and indeed repeatedly suffered from some kind of reaction:

> Ten years later I had a chance to meet Dr. Hoffmann himself and he marveled that I had made his compound and survived. He told me that in Germany in Bockemuller's lab everyone knew of the terrible toxicity of fluoroethanol which metabolized in the body to fluoroacetic acid and was a Krebs Cycle blocking agent. I told him that in our laboratory we had taken no precautions but somehow I had survived. For those who are curious, or wish to make fluoroethanol and offer it to us at Columbia Organics the compound has a musky, rather tart odor. By the time you have established this you have probably had a fatal exposure.

That's not a singular example, the book is full of such casual mentions of Gergel being exposed to some deadly toxin and suffering in manners ranging from headaches to full-blown visual and auditory hallucinations. One is tempted to suggest that it's the combination of several lethal doses of different substances that is keeping him alive -- the one cancelling out the others in some Mr. Burns-style balance of immortality.

Gergel also gives you a good sense of his time outside of chemistry, including the draft-dodging involved in being an academic during the war years and his personal relationships, along with the more general 'soft skills' he developed as an entrepreneur trying to flog chemicals and chemical products across America. You get a sense of the book as a confessional for all the highly dodgy things Gergel took part in. Definitely a stylish account of a life.

[Nathan Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating autobiography of a chemist living the dream of being a chemical entrepreneur. The author was bon in 1921, so this also serves as an interesting cultural record off the WWII era. There was no EPA yet, and chemists were pretty blasé about safety and environment protection; he shares stories of chemists seriously injuring themselves (blinding, burning, whatever) and just trucking on because that's how you do things. They worked out of some shanty building and poured any waste they had into the ground. At one point the EPA (which they considered a nuisance) required them to have a waste disposal tank, but it had a hole in it so everything went into the ground anyway. You can see the EPA inspection of the site here: https://www.epaosc.org/site/site_prof...

Overall a fascinating snapshot of the period and subculture. And yes, I'm really glad we have an EPA now :D

[Zachary Jacobi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amusing collection of chemistry anecdotes. Annoying in the same way as Feynman's book was – because the author had nothing to say about the women he married.

[Lloyd Dalton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pete came home. Part of his face was smashed and one eye looked off at an angle. He had cracked up the TBF on the qualifying run, riding it to the ground. He had managed to crawl away before it exploded, to drag himself the three miles back to the base, bleeding and in great pain. They told him it was a miracle that he was alive; there was a clot in his bloodstream and sooner or later it would block and the lights would go out.

Pete was tall and handsome in his Lt. SG uniform. He had been promoted after the accident, but this was small recompense, his face was terribly scarred. I took him home and my mother nearly fainted. He was amused. We decided to get dates and fortunately Olin Crouch loaned us his girl Betty, she had a friend Camille and we took the girls riding. They had to be back at Sims Dormitory at 10:00 so after taking them home we decided to drive up to the lake where we had been Sea Scouts, to the shore where we had launched our sailboats, to the little point where C. had yielded her all. We talked and talked. He told me that time no longer mattered. I knew I would never see him again. Oh, Pete, my wonderful best friend, Pete, my companion on so many hikes; Pete with your red bulldog sweater running around the ice park to join me when we were kids going to school.

His voice was low. He told me not to feel bad, that he had no fear, that we would always keep in touch no matter what happened, no matter where he was. We were back in front of my house. The dawn was breaking but we were wide awake. He had never been a toucher but now he put his arms around me for a great hug and then he was gone. Three weeks later in a heavy snow fall at Great Lakes Training Station his car ran into the huge tree at the entrance. He was already dead. I saw him two days Inter and his eyes were closed but there was a faint smile on his face. We buried him at Greenlawn Cemetery but he lives down by the water works. He walks the old trail winding by the Broad River where we walked and played as boys. I take my closest friends to walk there, or go alone. Only I can see him.

[Jeff Greason · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining story of a start-up chemical company. The anecdotes can be as much distracting as entertaining, but it was pleasant to get exposure to the start-up environment in the chemical industry of old. However, I think just reading this book might be enough to start a Superfund site, as the safety and environmental practices go beyond hair-raising and in to the realm of the reckless. However, having read 'The Green Flame' is was amusing that even the author, who was clearly willing to do *anything*, still wouldn't touch pentaborane.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gergel's (presumably impressive) compendium of names dropped from the annals of industrial chemistry fell right past me since I know nothing of the chemical business. However, as a memoire of growing up in the south, tale of starting a business, and portrait of characters almost too good to be real, the book really shines.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting.

Inspiring to see the hard graft involved in keeping a business going in the post-war years.

Sad, but eye-opening, to see the amount of blagging, dishonesty, and even theft that happens in the business world,

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Odd. Good. Free.

[Fritz · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unexpectedly engaging memoir.