>...gin factory in Bow, London, so industrial scale production of acetone could begin in six British distilleries requisitioned for the purpose in early 1916. The effort produced 30,000 tonnes of acetone during the war...
Evidently, he delivered exactly the amount Churchill requested. That is an incredible feat to go from bench to industrial scale within a couple of years. Was there any other putative process on the table at the time or was the entire acetone effort dependent upon scaling up Weizmann's process?
The production of butanol by biological means was first performed by Louis Pasteur in 1861.[5] In 1905, Austrian biochemist Franz Schardinger found that acetone could similarly be produced.[5] In 1910 Auguste Fernbach (1860–1939) developed a bacterial fermentation process using potato starch as a feedstock in the production of butanol.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetone%E2%80%93butanol%E2%80%...
Methanol, Ethanol and Acetic acid (vinegar) production probably were the only precursor methods of bio reactor well understood.
Penicillin which was significant in WW22 was industrialised at scale by Du Pont and the USDA in Peoria using bioreactors. the British method (Ernest Chain Howard Florey), demanded huge surface area mould growing, in semi-open trays based on bedpans, which is what they jury-rigged in the lab for the first production cycles. du Pont took it and ran with it.
Leonard Bickel's biography of Florey has quite a lot about the industrialisation of production in bioreactors.
If you want another good story about them, read up on Quorn, and why it was invented and how Fusarium was bred up in bioreactors to try and make protein at scale. It was Lord Rank (the naked man banging the gong at the front of movies... No thats not Lord Rank, (it was his movie company) but it should be) who pushed for this, concerned about Soylent-green futures
(The Making of the Atom Bomb: Richard Rhodes)
- Chaim Weizmann, then Manchester University, subsequently the president of Israel, on his method of using B-Y Bacteria to "brew" acetone. This very probably single-handedly ended a materiels supply crisis for shell explosives, affected the conduct of WW1 and led directly in turn to the post-war politics of Palestine and the nascent state of Israel.