Dow, Herbert

Dow, Herbert Henry (i866-1930) ACanadianindustrialscientist who founded the Dow Chemical Company in 1897. He is noted for the invention of the Dow process for extracting bromine using electrolysis to oxidize bromide to bromine. He had a major impact in the breaking of a cartel of European companies in chemical manufacture at the time. 

M. Campbell and H. Hatton, Herbert H. Dow Pioneer in Creative Chemist Appleton-Century-Crosts, Inc., New York, 1951, p. 1114. 

Daniel A. Growl is the Herbert H, Dow Professor for Chemical Process Safety at Michigan Technological University. The author of numerous books and instructional materials on process safety, he also serves on several committees of the AICHE/CCPS. 

Herbert H. Dow founded the Dow Chemical Company in 1897 as a chloralkali company. He found that there were extensive brine wells near Midland, Michigan, and started a small company there to produce bromine, chlorine, and caustic soda (NaOH) there. 

DuPont, presented at the beginning of this chapter, and Dow are the largest chemical companies in the United States. Dow Chemical Company was started by Herbert Henry Dow (1866-1930) in Canton, Ohio. Dow was a student at Case Institute in Cleveland who studied the characteristics of salt brines acquired from wells around the Great Lakes. Dow was determined to discover methods to extract chemicals from the salt brine. Rather than use the standard distillation method of his day to obtain chemicals, Dow employed electrolysis to separate... 

Each company was asked to send an annual report with the CER. Despite this, six companies out of the 35 did not send an annual report. Tioxide was in the process of being sold by ICI and Herberts had just been bought by DuPont. The others were Dow, DuPont, EniChem and Sumitomo. However, the essential point is that the CER... 

Dow process /dow/ An industrial method whereby magnesium is extracted from seawater via the precipitation of Mg(OH)2 by Ca(OH)2, followed by solvation of the precipitated hydroxide by hydrochloric acid. The process is named for the American industrial chemist Herbert Henry Dow (1866-1930), who founded the Dow Chemical Company (1897). 

The changes taking place in America during the 1920s are perhaps best summarized in the words of Herbert H. Dow, President of the Dow Chemical Company, writing in 1929 ... 

Herbert H. Dow, Economic trend in the chemical industry, Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, 22 (1930), 113-116. 

Herbert H. Dow Papers, Post Street Archives, Midland, Michigan Charles H. Herty, "The chemists club," Journal of industrial and engineering chemistry, 10 (May... 

Bromine extraction (Herbert Henry Dow) Dow s method for extracting bromine from brine enables bromine to be widely used in medicines and in photography. 

Dow quoted 0.0086 to his customers. The British folded. United Alkali immediately raised their price back up to 0.0125. Dow honored his contracts and lost a lot of money. But the Bleach War was over. The American chemical industry had arrived, thanks to pioneers such as Herbert Dow (81-82), whose creativity in industrial electrochemistry spawned what was to become an enterprise with global impact in many areas of technology. 

No sooner was the Bleach War over and Herbert Dow found himself in a similar struggle with the German Bromine Convention, which threatened to cut prices if Dow insisted on marketing bromine products in Europe. He refused, and there followed... 

Like many industrialists in the Progressive Era, Herbert Dow believed, or at least espoused the belief, that most industrial accidents were the result of worker carelessness. Although he had not shown much remorse about earlier plant accidents, Dow seemed truly distressed by the rate of injuries among his employees in the mustard gas plant. He noted at least two minor injuries every day, and the accidents led Dow to establish hospital facilities for the victims of the gas burns. The hospital consisted of two refurbished rooms in the Dow Company s education building. A local doctor attended the hospital until an army doctor, Lester L. Roos, arrived at the end of May. Local nurses staffed the hospital rooms... 

At the end of 1915, Representative Ebenezer J. Hill, a Republican from Connecticut, proposed a flat ad valorem rate of 30 percent, plus another TAi, per pound, or specific, rate to protect American dyes manufacturers from renewed postwar competition from the German firms. Hill wrote to Redfield arguing that while it is beautiful to maintain a theory, Democratic opposition to tariff legislation would prevent the investment necessary to make the domestic industry viable in the long run. Hearings on Hill s bill opened on January 14, 1916, before the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Representative Claude Kitchin, Democrat of North Carolina. J. F. Schoellkopf Jr., William Beckers, and Herbert Dow all testified that their... 

---