Evening Star Newspaper, October 12, 1930, Page 101

THE SUNDAY STAR, W ASHINGTON, ¥ C, OCTOBER 12, 1930. " MARVELS 7n Your MILK BOT'TLE Stephen M. Babcock Sacrificed a Fortune to Give the World Honest Dairy Products—But. This Month, at Eighty-Seven, He Will Reap One Reward for His Discoveries of Forty Prof. Stophen M. Babcock, father of scientific dairying, in his laboratory. \ HAT bottle of white milk on your door- siep along side the morning paper! There is in it more than a mere liquid for the breakfast cereal or the baby's bottle. From out of the milk pail science has caused to flow gay beads, buttons, fountain pen barrels, pipe stems, radio parts, spectacle frames, dice and a multitude of other useful and ornamental things that used to be made of horn,, celluloid, bone, ivory, ebony, pear]l, amber or tortoise shell. Hidden in the milk is glue for furniture, coat- ings for paper and leather, binders for paints, and even an essential constitutent of some face and shaving creams. One of the proteins of milk, cascin, finds a muititude of uses in industry. It is the stuff called curd, that remains when the whey or watery part of sour milk is removed. The transparent, tough cigar and candy wrappers so common today are made of casein. The sugar of milk also provides competition for the sugar cane and sugar beet. Lactose, or milk sugar, is prescribed by physicians for those suffering from digestive disorders, and pharma- cists use it to sweeten, dilute or coat unpleasant medicines in tablet form. Mother adds lactose to baby's milk so that it will mor~ <~~“'v nourish the growing infant. The fat of milk gives cream ius tue coffee and butter for the bread. Cheeses of several hundred sorts are manufactured from milk in various parts of the world, ranging from mild Swiss to powerful limburger. Cheese is milk in a more concentrated and less perishable form, and the change is accomplished by coagulation of th> cas?in caused by the acid given off by bacteria. -1 malted milk, ice creams and buttermilks, the essentials of mlik are merely mixed with other foods, before they are offered to the pub- lic. And there is even the possibility of a milk drink coming under the ban of the Volstead act because in such soured milks as koumis, both alcohol and sour milk acid is formed from the milk sugar. The alcohol may rise as high as 3 per cent. WELL over 20,000,000 cows and thousands of dairymen, milkmen and merchants par- ticipate in the American milk industry. It is not a new industry as industires go, for the use of milk of animals as food by man goes far back of all recorde¢ history. Nevertheless, it has been a mat'er of only a few years since science lent its brain and hands to making the dairying in- dustry more efficient and profitable. One of the significant beginnings of science in dairying was commemorated the other day when a Senator gave a professor $5,000. There was in the transaction no hint of any eause for other Senators to start an investiga- tion, fond as Senators have become of doing that sort of thing. On the contrary, everybody - knew why the Senator gave the professor the $5,000, and everybody applauded the donation. For the Capper prize of $5000 and a gold medal for the most distinguished service to American agriculture was awarded to Prof. Stephen M. Babcock of the University of Wis- consin, because, 40 years ago he invented a machine that made dairying an honest business, and put the old farm pump out of commission as a source of surefire jokes. The rewards of science are sometimes a bit leisurely in arriving. But then, perhaps, Sena- tor Capper didn’t have so many $5,000 prizes to spare 40 years ago, and in the meantime Prof. Babcock hasn’t missed the money. For the genial old gentleman—who will be Years Ago, and He Can See the Many Wonderful Articles Scientists Hawve Been Able to Obtain From Milk of triendly Cozw. but he has always been faithful to the same policy of not accepting any finan~ial gain from them for himself. Even before he brought cut the Babcock test, he had devised two other test: for milk quality, and afterward, in collaboration with his asso- ciates, he made discoveries that revolutionized cheeze making. Most notable among these latter, probably, was his original demonstration of the fact that cheese is not ripened by bacterial or mold ac- tion, as most dairy technicians believed, but by a digestive juice or ferment contained in the curd itself. This has made possible ripening of cheeses in cool rooms, instead of at risky high temperatures formerly considered indispensable. BUT it is the milk test that bears his name that has really made Prof. Babcock famous. And unlike many discoveries in science, even in Showing them how to use Babcock testers, with the flasks, acid bottle and cen- trifugal machine on the table. 87 on his next birthday anniversary, October 22—is one of those rare souls who in a commer- cial age has never bothered about money. ‘When he invente¢ the Babcock test in 1890, it was recognized instantly as something of tremendous possibilities, and he was urged to patent it. Had he done so0, and collected even the small- est of royalties, he would be a very rich man today. But he preferred to give his idea freely to the world, for everybody’s profit, and he has never expressed the least regret. In his long career as an agricultural chemist, Prof. Babcock has done a number of things that have resulted in great profit to the dairy indus- try and great benefit to the consuming public, applied science, it did not have to wait long years and fight its way against obstinate recog- nition and acclaim. Some of the praise that has been bestowed upon the Babcock test would seem extravagant if it were not quite sincere and fairly demon- strable. The outstanding bit is the epigram attributed to former Gov. Hoard of Wisconsin: “It has made more dairymen honest than the Bible has ever made any one.” And that is not so much of an exaggeration as it may sound. A generation and a half ago, when commercial creameries were beginning to figure as a major factor in American rural eco- nomics, they had troubles of their own. Their aim was to deliver to the public milk, and espe- cially butter, of high and uniform quality, re- placing the old “tub” butter made by rule of thumb at individual farm houses. But they had to strive for this uniformity and quality pretty much in the dark, and often against sheer dishonesty. For milk is anything but uniform. High-grade milk contains around 5 per cent butterfat, but there are plenty of mediocre cows whose milk yields less than 3 per cent. And to the unaided eye it all looks pretty much alike. Add to that variability the tricks of the god- less, adding water to the milk or “high grading” some of the cream off it, and you 'have a riddle nobody could solve with his eye, no matter how experience a milk handler he might be. There wasn’t a scientific test for the percent- age of butterfat in milk in existence during the 80s. So when young Dr. Babcock went to the University of Wisconsin from the New York Agricultural Experiment Station, with most of the shine still on his German university degree, his dean, W. A. Hanry, put it up to him to devise a sure milk test. He worked out two or three, but they didn’t satisfy him, and he would not give up the search, although his colleagues thought that the others would be good enough for all practical purposes. Babcock wanted the right test; for him no bread has always better than 4 - At last he got it, and published it freely for all the world. As fast as dairymen could get the hang of it they began to use it. Milk water- ers and cream skimmers “goth ethics.” THOUSANDS turned honest overnight, while the honest dairy farmers rejoiced im an even break at last. Payment was by the pound of butterfat now, and gallons of water or thin milk meant merely so much unprofitable hauling. Babcock’s test is all the more remarkable not merely for its very literal bread-and-butter im- portance, but also because it is such a simple thing when you see it made| that you are tempted to wonder why the scientists and agri- cultural technologists of the woprld have been heaping praises and prizes on Prof. Babcock’s careless head for half his lifetime. The answer to that is the old story of Columbus and the egg. Somebody had to think of it first. All there is to the Babcock test is to put samples of the milk to be tested into some long- necked bottles with marks at proper intervals on their calibrated necks, pour in sulphuric acid and whirl the bottles in a centrifuge. When .the machine is slowed down, the milk® is in the bottles and the butterfat is up in their necks; where the percentage can be read off directly by the grade marks. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But it is worth while to look at milk a Mttle more closely to see why through all the cen- turies of butter making nobody ever worked out this test, and why it was a chemist at last, with really very little knowledge about the practical problems of commercial dairies, who thought of dumping sulphuric acid into milk and then whirling it around to make the cream “rise.” Milk is not a single, simple, uniform sub- stance like water. It looks as though it were “all one piece” when it comes out of the cow, but as everybody has seen thousands of times, if milk is left to itself for a little while it sepa- rates itself into two parts, One of these is cream, the other is skim milk. If you churn the cream you again get a sepa- ration, this time into a nearly pure fat—butter— and the thickish buttermilk. But if you squeeze the butter a thin, watery stuff comes out; so butter has at least two substances in it. And if you let the skim milk alone until sour- : ing bacteria have done their work upon it, you find that il “curdles”—separates into a semi- solid, cheesy substance and a thin, watery fluld called whey. But to get a real picture of how much butter- fat there is in a given lot of milk you shoul be able to get the butterfat droplets—all of them, even the tiniest—out of their films. Prof, Babcock was given this problem 40 years ago, and he solved it not by thinking especially of milk, but by going back to his general knowl- edge of chemistry, which reminded him that all proteins are soluble in sulphuric acid and that fats are not. Then, to hasten the process of separation, he put his milk and acid mixture in a centrifugal machine and spun the mixture about. 'The heavier milk and water went to the bottom and the fat floated clear, where it could be measured. There is probably no modern invention that has so radically reformed a great industry, and it was the beginning et the science of milk