Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/84

Pasteur listened politely and then proceeded to show them the stuff he was made of. He was much more than a man of science! Think of a committee of business men asking Isaac Newton to show them how his laws of motion were going to help their iron works! That shy thinker would have thrown up his hands and set himself to studying the meaning of the prophecies of the Book of Daniel at once. Faraday would have gone back to his first job as a bookbinder's apprentice. But Pasteur was no shrinking flower. A child of the nineteenth century, he understood that science had to earn its bread and butter, and he started to make himself popular with everybody by giving thrilling lectures to the townspeople on science:

"Where in your families will you find a young man whose curiosity and interest will not immediately be awakened when you put into his hands a potato, and when with that potato he may produce sugar, and with that sugar alcohol, and with that alcohol ether and vinegar?" he shouted enthusiastically one evening to an audience of prosperous manufacturers and their wives. Then one day Mr. Bigo, a distiller of alcohol from sugar beets, came to his laboratory in distress. "We're having trouble with our fermentations, Professor," he complained; "we're losing thousands of francs every day. I wonder if you could come over to the factory and help us out?" said the good Bigo.

Bigo's son was a student in the science course and Pasteur hastened to oblige. He went to the distillery and sniffed at the vats that were sick, that wouldn't make alcohol; he fished up some samples of the grayish slimy mess and put them in bottles to take to his laboratory—and he didn't fail to take some of the beet pulp from the healthy foamy vats where good amounts of alcohol were being made. Pasteur had no idea he could help Bigo, he knew nothing of how sugar ferments into alcohol—indeed, no chemist in the world knew anything about it. He got back to his laboratory, scratched his head, and decided to examine the stuff from the healthy vats