Synthetic Rubber (1)
June 12, 1925. Oktyabrsky Station, Leningrad.
"I'm truly sorry, Professor."
Favorsky had been summoned to Moscow by someone very high up — the demonstration plant, of course — and I bowed my head and offered him a genuine apology.
"What's all this fuss about?"
On the platform he waved the words away, a kindly smile creasing his face.
"I put this old name of mine on the line. Of course I have to go myself. Even if you went, there wouldn't be a thing you could do."
"...Still. I hate that you've had to take the dawn train because of me."
"That's nothing. When you get old like me, you stop sleeping at night anyway. The dawn train is actually more comfortable than traveling in the middle of the day."
Favorsky shifted his grip on his bag and snorted.
"By the way — did you get any sleep?"
"...About three hours."
"Good heavens. Just because you're young doesn't mean you can treat your body like that. Abuse it at your age and you'll pay for it when you're old."
He looked at me with those gentle eyes. I pulled a heat pack from my pocket and held it out to him.
"Moscow is every bit as cold as Leningrad. Please be careful not to catch a cold."
"...Haha! You're the first student who's ever told me to watch out for a cold. Summer's almost here — what's there to worry about?"
He laughed from the belly, but he stuffed the heat pack into his coat all the same.
"That's the address of my laboratory in Moscow. If anything comes up, contact me there."
"Understood, Professor."
"And don't lose sleep over the demonstration plant. I have no shortage of students in Moscow. I've been so busy these past three years I've only written them letters — and thanks to you, I get a free trip out of it. I'd call that a stroke of luck."
Whenever Professor Favorsky spoke of his students, a smile always bloomed across his face. He was the complete opposite of Professor Park, and I found myself wondering, just for a moment, what it would have been like if Favorsky had been my advisor.
Ah, forget it. Why dwell on someone who's gone.
He was still boasting about his pupils when the train's whistle split the morning air — a long, low blast that rolled down the platform.
"Well then. I'll be off."
I stood there long after he boarded, watching until the train slipped from the platform and was gone.
I left the search for a petroleum plant that could refine toluene to Foreman Ivan and headed for Vasilyevsky Island, home of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute.
Favorsky had already departed for Moscow by train, so I had expected we wouldn't cross paths for some time. To my surprise, the student he had introduced me to was himself a professor at the Polytechnic.
Petroleum chemistry was closer to this man's field than Professor Favorsky's to begin with...
I knocked.
"Come in."
A rough, middle-aged voice answered from behind the door. The hinges complained as I pushed it open.
"So you're the young pupil our teacher Favorsky mentioned. Enchanté."
"Pupil... might be a stretch. I'm not even in the field."
"What does that matter? A student isn't defined by academic pedigree alone, n'est-ce pas?"
I bowed my head.
"Yakov Iosifovich Svanidze. Production supervisor, Red Triangle Third Galoshi Factory."
"Sergei Vasilievich Lebedev. Director, Leningrad Institute of Petrochemistry."
Lebedev thrust out his hand. As we shook, I took a discreet look at him. He was a sturdy man, built like a proper Russian — a little taller than me, with a broom-bristle mustache under his nose in the same style as Mikoyan's. His forehead was broad and his hairline had receded well past the crown. Even a chemist of his reputation, it seemed, could not beat the Westerner's hereditary curse of baldness. That said, he had a handsome, sharp-featured face. In his younger days he must have cut quite a figure.
One other detail stood out. The fingertips I was shaking were blackened and scorched, and a thick white callus had formed between his thumb and forefinger. Severe burn scars mottled the back of his hand. These were not a chemist's hands. They were a factory worker's.
"Have a seat first. We'll talk."
Lebedev pointed beside the lab bench. A wooden chair stood there, his lab coat — or what I assumed was his — draped carelessly over the back. He offered me the chair and perched on the edge of the bench himself.
The arrangement felt a little awkward, so I tried to give the chair back. He only shook his head.
"...Our teacher, Department Head Favorsky, is quite the chatterbox."
Lebedev flicked a stack of letters across the bench with one finger.
"In the past month alone, the department head sent twenty-nine letters. Astonishingly, half of them were about you."
Twenty-nine in a month. That was nearly one a day.
...They're on the same campus. Why write letters?
"Isn't it a bit close for letter-writing? You'd practically trip over each other."
"Well... it's something of a hobby. The department head prefers to converse by post. Your factory will be buried in letters soon enough, I expect."
Lebedev gave a short laugh.
"At any rate, thanks to that I know everything — the date you took up your post at that factory, your movements, even what you were thinking when you came here."
He plucked a single sheet from the pile.
"A solvent using toluene instead of benzene... Honestly, when I first read the letter I scoffed. Toluene as a rubber solvent? But a couple of days later I couldn't stop thinking about it."
He stood up from the bench.
"Here I am, developing a substitute for isoprene — the monomer of natural rubber — and I caught myself thinking, 'We've already got benzene, why bother?' I was thoroughly ashamed."
Lebedev bowed his head.
"Allow me to apologize, here and now. I'm sorry."
I waved both hands at him.
"Professor Lebedev, if you put it like that, you put me in a very awkward position..."
This was a university laboratory, not a church confessional.
"In any case, I'll take full responsibility for producing your toluene solvent. And that's not the department head twisting my arm. That's my own decision."
"Th-thank you..."
If he was volunteering to make the toluene solvent on his own, the least I could do was offer a little help with his research.
"Professor. You just said you're developing a substitute for isoprene, didn't you?"
"I did."
"Then... would I be right in thinking you're working on synthetic rubber?"
"...I beg your pardon?"
Glass exploded against the floor. Lebedev's elbow had swept a piece of apparatus clean off the bench. He did not even glance at the wreckage.
"Y-you — how did you figure that out?"
"Sorry? Isoprene is the monomer of natural rubber, so replacing it would mean synthetic rubber, wouldn't it..."
"Ordinary people don't make that connection! Isoprene, monomers — how is a layman supposed to understand any of that?"
Lebedev seized me by the shoulders.
"Très bien!You've passed!"
"...Excuse me?"
"It means you're qualified to enter my laboratory. Come with me. Now!"
He snatched my arm and started dragging me somewhere.
"P-Professor! Weren't we supposed to be talking about toluene?"
"Is that what matters right now? Allons-y! Less talk, more walking!"
...It does matter, actually.
Lebedev led me to the most secluded corner of the laboratory — a room whose door bore a single stark label.
"As you know, until the 1880s isoprene was believed to exist only in natural rubber. That is, until Tilden isolated it from terpenes and made rubber from it."
William A. Tilden — vice president of the Royal Society, president of the Chemical Society of London — had been the first chemist to discover that isoprene could be produced from terpenes.
"But that method couldn't really be called true synthetic rubber. Terpenes and natural rubber are essentially the same substance."
"True synthetic rubber, false synthetic rubber — I don't care about any of that. What matters is that rubber made from terpenes was never economically viable. And the polymerization took months. Completely impractical for commercial use."
Just as Lebedev said, Tilden had spent years on the research only to conclude that synthetic rubber from terpenes had no economic future.
"But I am different. I set out to produce rubber from butadiene — a byproduct of crude oil."
Lebedev had submitted a method for synthesizing butadiene rubber as his master's thesis, a technique that would go on to become the foundation of the Soviet synthetic rubber industry.
He set something down with a dull thunk.
"Voilà. Synthetic rubber made from butadiene."
Lebedev took a fist-sized lump from a safe.
"May I touch it?"
"...Carefully."
I pulled a handkerchief from my coat and pressed a finger into it. The butadiene rubber yielded, dimpling softly under the pressure. The dent slowly recovered — but not all the way.
"Well, as you can see, it isn't quite a chef-d'œuvre yet. Still, at next year's international synthetic rubber competition I intend to take first place, and I will—"
"Professor."
"...Yes?"
Sergei Lebedev, the man who would one day be called the father of Soviet synthetic rubber. But at this point in time, he had laid only the theoretical groundwork. He had not yet produced a synthetic rubber economical enough to commercialize.
In that case...
"I have an idea. Would you hear me out?"
What would happen if I placed IG Farben's Buna-S — SBR — in the hands of the father of synthetic rubber?