You Can Research Anything: Example One
In yesterday’s post I talked about you can research anything with nothing more than questions. Here I will give a short example of a random thing I decided to research and learn a little more of: Glycerin.
I decided to research glycerin after my post where I talked about the example of hand cream. I noticed glycerin as one of the ingredients in my hand cream, and since I had seen and heard about glycerin but never looked into it, I thought I could use my own technique to learn more.
The word Glycerin originates from the Greek glukeros, meaning sweet, and glycerin is a French version. Glycerin is a simple compound polyol. That means it contains a chain of oxygen and hydrogen atoms attached to a carbon backbone. It is an alcohol. It is a non-toxic liquid, and if consumed, is processed in the liver. It has many uses in the food and pharmaceutical industries, but it is also used as fuel, as antifreeze, as a vibration dampener, as a lubricant, hair gel, for vaping (with some controversy as increasing the potency of marijuana vaping), and as an explosive. In fact, glycerol’s use in explosives is the major reason for it existing in our market economy.
Glycerin was not used for very much until Alfred Noble (yes, that Alfred Noble) discovered its use as an explosive in nitroglycerin. Before Mr. Noble, a French chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul had discovered it. Chevreul worked with animal fats and made several important discoveries for science as a result of his work: separating and isolating fats, discovering glucose in diabetes patients urine, isolating creatine and others. Glycerin is manufactured from plants, chiefly soybeans and palm, and from animal tallow. Nearly a million tons of glycerin is produced each year. It can made synthetically, but the process is too expensive to be practical.
The major producer of glycerin in the U.S. is Cargill. Cargill was founded by William Wallace Cargill, who started the company to store grain and was conveniently located along the new railroad systems in Minnesota. He expanded to include the handling of other products and opened many other grain storage facilities. The company continued to expand and grow beyond the death of Cargill in the early 1900s through his children and they incorporated in 1930. After World War II they diversified and began purchasing soybean and oilseed processing plants. They continued to expand in agricultural products through the latter half of the 20th century, growing to become America’s largest privately owned company as of 2008. You may recognize one of their inventions: Truvia, introduced in 2008 as a natural zero-calorie sweetener.
Glycerin absorbs water but is also miscible with it, meaning it forms fully with water, it does not separate like how oil does when it sits on top of water. It is used as a humectant in the food industry, this means it keeps things moist. It has no direct competing substance, it is the cheapest and most useful substance for its applications. Glycerin itself would dry out your skin by absorbing the water from it, so it is mixed with water and other additives when used as a moisturizer. You can buy pure glycerin in a drugstore. There are almost 300,000 search results for glycerin in Google Scholar, and 915 books can be purchased from Amazon that contain information and uses about glycerin. Fin.
As you can see, I can now write a small factual summary of glycerin, a product one would think had nothing interesting about it, but after doing some research I found I liked what I was learning. I learned a few new words (miscible, humectant, polyol) and I had topics I could easily expand into to learn more: a biography of Michel-Eugene Chevreul and the history of Cargill, an American business success story that is large enough to influence many factors of our lives that we aren’t even aware of.
If I really wanted to deep dive and write a book or giant article on glycerin I would want to contact Cargill and see if I could get in touch with any of their experts who process glycerin. Maybe even ask to tour a facility. I would read some of the science papers and reach out to researchers who are currently doing work with glycerin and see where that takes me. I would call the numbers on the backs of the products I own with glycerin who say I can call if I had any questions. Beyond reading a lot of information, people are the next step in researching a topic thoroughly.
Before I wrote this article I knew nothing about glycerin. Now I feel informed enough to have a small conversation about it. I could keep researching glycerin and ask more questions, but I feel I know all I will ever want to know about it so I can move on to other things. I could do this about everything in my house if I wanted to have a lot of interesting little conversations or know more about the world around me, but that is not my purpose for this kind of research.
Instead, this was practice and to demonstrate a result from the use of my previous post’s technique. The real purpose of being able to do this kind of research is to do this with things that matter for your professional life. Maybe you need to know more about a product you work with. Maybe you need to generate content in one area. Maybe you are trying to be an expert in a field. It may take many nights of researching deeper and deeper into your one topic, but the end result is something that will benefit you, not just provide you with interesting tidbits about random objects. It is not through a tiny bit of knowledge about a million topics we improve, it is through a million bits of knowledge about a tiny array of topics.
