Leblanc industry

The new price and allocation were a rude shock for the market. The alkali industry (i.e., Leblanc industry), the largest customer of Sicilian sulfur, was again threatened by the high pricing and, more importantly, a cut back in supply. Within a year into the TAC deal, the situation began to deteriorate, especially for the Brit-... 

The company s first president was Charles Tennant, who had been running the legendary company Charles Tennant Company, founded by his grandfather. This same yoimger Tennant was no entrepreneurial slouch. For example, he had invested in the risky first major pyrites mines in Spain, albeit two decades earlier. While the Spanish opportunity needed an entrepreneur, the Leblanc industry needed a hard-nosed business leader to protect their investments. Tennant adjusted to the circumstances. 

What if they had modernized What if they had consolidated Would the outcome have been different if... Or, would they have simply wasted their investment in time and dollars The what if scenario is so easy to apply after the fact, as arm-chair critics are protected from the subtle complexities of the situation. The Leblanc industry in Britain, for example, had modernized and consolidated, but still succumbed to a better technology. Likewise, the cost advantage of the... 

Because calcium sulfide contained in the black ash had a highly unpleasant odor, methods were developed to remove the odor by recovering the sulfur, therein providing at least part of the raw-material for the sulfuric acid required in the first part of the process. Thus, the Leblanc prtKcss demonstrated, at the very beginning, the typical ability of the chemical industry to develop new processes and new products, and often in so doing to turn a liability into an asset. 

Unfortunately, the process that made soap produced a great deal of filth before it cleansed the happily unwashed populace at large. In fact, Leblanc s process polluted industrial regions so cruelly that it created an early rallying cry for environmental reform. 

Sadly one of the by-products from his first step was the powerfully corrosive hydrochloric acid, a potentially serious pollutant. But Leblanc may have been so excited at making sodium carbonate that he hardly noticed. He had found a way to synthesize a purer and thus more efficient substitute for the alkali traditionally extracted from plant ashes. When perfected, his method would make stronger, more consistent soda with far more alkali than the best soda made from plants. He must have felt utterly elated. He was a patriot about to save French industry and win a fortune, 12,000 gold coins. 

Leblanc s process survived him. Within several decades, it was almost the only one used to produce washing soda for the textile, soap, glass, and papermaking industries. And eventually his synthetic sodium carbonate put the barilla and kelp collectors out of business. 

In 1863, the British Parliament passed the Alkali Act, which forced the LeBlanc factories to reclaim 95 percent of the hydrochloric acid gas that they produced. Angus Smith, the Alkali Inspector assigned to enforce the law, demonstrated that industrial towns suffered from higher sulfate levels than did the countryside. When Angus Smith also coined the term acid rain, air pollution became a public issue. By the 1870s, Leblanc factories emitted less than 0.1 percent of the hydrochloric acid gas they produced the rest was reclaimed and sold. 

While Nicolas Leblanc and his washing soda helped start the bulk chemical industry, Perkin s mauve spawned the world s dye and pharmaceutical drug industries. His synthetic dye was the first in a cascade of colors that institutionalized scientific research, professionalized chemists, changed the economies of vast regions, and helped make turn-of-the-century Germany the world s leading industrial power. Perkin was an ado-... 

T. C. Barker and J. R. Harris. A Merseyside Town in the Industrial Revolution St. Helens 1750-1900. Liverpool Liverpool University Press, 1954. Source for pollution in Leblanc towns and factories industrial map of Europe regulation and court suits children, women, and Irish in work force. 

Lavoisier. Isis. 87 (Sept. 1996) 481-499. Source for Lavoisier. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers. A History of Chemistry. Cambridge MA Harvard University Press, 1996. Source for Leblanc as founder of industrial chemistry and for history of natural alkalis. 

Johannes Richard Lischka. The Leblanc Alkali Process in Britain, 1815-1890 From Handicraft to Corporate Organization in the Chemical Industry. Duke Univer-... 

R. Norris Shreve. Chemical Process Industries. 3rd ed. New York McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1967. Source for no Leblanc factory in U.S. 

The Times The Struggle for Supremacy Being a Series of Chapters in the History of the Leblanc Alkali Industry in Great Britain. Liverpool Gilbert G. Walmsley, 1907. 

Kenneth Warren. Chemical Foundations The Alkali Industry in Britain to 1926. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1980. Source for family shops changing to giant factories Liebig quotation plant sources of alkalis Leblanc s experiment Victorians like Leblanc factories reduction in hydrochloric acid pollution cost of pollution abatement electrolysis and 3 raw material units make 1 unit of product. 

When these natural sources of soda became depleted and inadequate to meet the demand, various processes were devised for the manufacture of it from the cheapest raw material, common salt. An account of the most successful of these early processes and the tragic story of its discoverer, Nicolas Leblanc, has been told by Dr. Ralph E. Oesper in the Journal of Chemical Education (71). The same journal also contains other valuable articles on the alkali industry by Dr. Oesper (72), E. Berl (73), and Desmond Reilly (74). 

During the beginning of the nineteenth century, the alkali and acid industries provided the model for other chemical industries. One characteristic of the chemical industry is that development in one area often stimulates development in another area. For example, the lead-chamber method produced enough sulfuric acid to make the acid practical for use in the LeBlanc process. Similarly, the Solvay process used ammonia produced when coke was made for steel production. Certain chemical industries were perceived by royalty and national leaders as critical to their nation s welfare. One of these was the manufacture of gunpowder, also known as blackpowder. Gunpowder is a mixture of approximately... 

Hence, although the hydroxide can be made by the action of water on the oxide, it is far more economical to employ a method of preparation based on that described by Albertus Magnus. The chloride is first converted into carbonate by Leblanc s or Solvay s process, and the carbonate is subsequently converted into the hydroxide by causticization with lime. If the alkali chloride could be transformed directly into the hydroxide, without the intermediate formation of the carbonate, by a cheap enough process, the waste of industrial energy, so to speak, involved in this roundabout procedure would be avoided. Numerous patents 7 have been obtained for decomposing common salt by steam or superheated steam, but without any useful result. 

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