Smelting from international sources

In the meantime Willson returned to Canada. He there established carbide operations in Merriton, Ontario, and at Shawinigan Falls, Quebec He formed the International Marine Signal Co. to manufacture carbide-energized buoys, and applied himself to the use of the electric furnace for smelting phosphate ores in his remaining years (W). Willson died in 1915, by which time he had seen his invention produce 90,000 tons of calcium carbide annually by 1904 and 250,000 by 1910, from zero in 1892 ( ). He perhaps would have been amazed to have witnessed the growth in the chemical uses of acetylene equivalent to one million tons per year of calcium carbide by 1960, produced in continuous furnaces which were 30 feet in diameter by 15 feet tall, each rated at 30,000 kw ( ). Nor could he have foreseen his furnace eventually supplanted as a source of acetylene by yet another electrothermic process, the direct formation of acetylene in an electric arc used to crack hydrocarbons such as natural gas. 

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