Manchester, factory

A violent explosion of Picric Acid in a Manchester factory in 1887 was ascribed to the formation of picrates. Burning, molten Picric Acid flowed down onto lithopone, forming lead picrate which in consequence caught fire. The latter, being an initiator, detonated and caused the Picric Acid to detonate... 

In Britain, the manufacture of cordite had commenced in 1889 in the royal gunpowder factory at Waltham Abbey. The acetone, which was critical to the process, was made from the distillate collected from wood that was heated to a high temperature. The best wood for this purpose came from the forests of continental Europe, and it was therefore unavailable to the British after the start of World War i. But in 1915 a chance meeting solved this problem. C.P. Scott of The Manchester Guardian introduced David Lloyd George, the Minister of Munitions, to one Chaim Weizmann. 

In 1798, Lowitz and Klaproth independently discovered chromium in a sample of a heavy black rock found further north from the Beresof Mines and in 1799 Tassaert identified chromium in the same mineral from a small deposit in the Var region of South-Eastern France. The chromite ore deposits discovered in the Ural Mountains greatly increased the supplies of chromium to the growing paint industry and even resulted in a chromium chemicals factory being set up in Manchester, England around 1808. In 1827, Isaac Tyson identified deposits of chromite ore on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border and the United States became the monopoly supplier for a number of years. 

Named after William Henry (1775-1836), a factory owner from Manchester, who first put forward this law in 1803. 

Up to the start of World War I in 1914 picric acid, trinitrophenol, had been used as a high-explosive shell filling. It largely had replaced black powder and was termed melinite by the French and lyddite by the British. Trinitrophenol was a relatively easy batch-reaction nitration which had been carried out as a nonexplosive operation in the dyestuff manufacturing industry until a disastrous explosion took place in Manchester when a chemical factory caught fire. 

Haber op. cit. (11), p.3. Papers on boiler plants appeared from time to time in the publications of the Society of Chemical Industry. For example, a Mr. B. A. Oldham read a paper on Carbon dioxide recorders and their application in boiler efficiency control at a meeting in Manchester (Society of Chemical Industry. Review, III (1920), 144). Llewellyn Jones and Frederic I. Scard, in the second edition of their book The Manufacture of Sugar Cane (London Duckworth Co., 1921, first edition 1909), included a chapter on the Scientific control of the factory which was largely concerned with techniques for minimizing the energy used in the refining process, and paid close attention to the efficiency of the boilers. 

At the beginning of the war, the manufacture of TNT was poorly understood. The main risk was thought to come from its flammability, and, as a result of the urgency to increase production, some factories were built in inappropriate urban locations. Almost inevitably, this had tragic consequences. For example, a factory in a former textile mill at Ashton-under-Lyme, Greater Manchester, and a factory constructed in a former caustic soda plant at Silvertown, in London, both blew up with heavy loss of life. Less visible as catastrophes were the fatalities and sickness caused by TNT poisoning. 

Sir John Bennett Lawes (1814-1900), a pupil of Daubeny in Oxford, was a small land-owner. He took out a patent in 1842 for the preparation of superphosphate of lime by the action of sulphuric acid on coprolites, apatite etc., and began manufacture in 1843 he sold the factories etc. in 1872, but continued to be interested in technical chemistry. John Stevens Henslow, professor of botany in Cambridge, found that coprolites contain 56 to 61 p.c. of calcium phosphate. Sir Joseph Henry Gilbert (1817-1901), a pupil of Liebig, after academic work, experimented on dyeing and calico-printing in the Manchester district and then joined Lawes in 1843. ... 

Another study by Ratcliffe (1977) of children around a Manchester battery factory showed no significant differences on development and behavioural scores between groups with above and below 35 g Pb/lOOml blood. However, the small size of the group in this study (lead, n = 23 control, n = 29) might suggest an insufficient number of subjects. 

In later experiments Henry determined the olefiant gas in coal gas from the contraction when the gas in a narrow tube is mixed with chlorine, with the exclusion of direct sunlight, when liquid ethylene chloride is formed. He described the preparation, purification, and analysisof coal gas. He says the factory of Philips and Lee in Manchester was lighted by gas, and Mr. Lee s private residence by gas brought two miles daily from the factory in a portable gasholder on a cart. Henry estimated the hydrogen sulphide in gas by test-papers coated with white lead, the colour being compared with a standard. Analyses of coal gas were made by Thomas Thomson. ... 

Like Caro, Ivan Levinstein was educated at the Gewerbeinstitut in Berlin. There, Ivan studied the new aniline dyes, especially aniline red (fuchsine or magenta). In the early 1860s Levinstein Senior set up a factory in Berlin for the manufacture of synthetic dyes and in which the teenaged Ivan appears to have played a role. In 1864, however, Ivan Levinstein arrived in Salford, next to Manchester, and was soon preparing magenta on a small scale. By this time, blue and violet derivatives of magenta were available. 

Pharmacie in Paris (1847), expelled from France as a socialist, chemist in a dye factory in Manchester, and finally professor in Zurich (1871), modified the process by using ferric oxide instead of iron, and his process was worked for a time in England, producing some thousands of tons of soda annually. ... 

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