Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/549

Rh found their chemical ingenuity severely taxed. Various economical methods of recovering waste by-products were adopted, and finally attention was turned to the "burned ore" or "pyrites-cinders" obtained in roasting pyrites for the sulphuric acid; this is now treated for copper, silver, and, to some extent, for gold. A Spanish company, owning enormous deposits of pyrites on the Rio Tinto, plan to establish in France alkali-works with the intention of deriving their profits solely from the residual oxide of iron and the copper.

Forty-eight years ago alkali manufacturers might have seen a cloud arising, no bigger than a man's hand, which gradually grew darker and heavier, and now threatens to overwhelm the Leblanc process. Dyer and Hemming patented the so-called "ammonia process" for manufacturing soda in 1838; Schlossing and Holland attempted to. carry it out practically in 1855, but it was not found profitable. The credit of overcoming the practical difficulties, and placing the process on an economical basis, belongs to Solvay, of Brussels, who began to manufacture so-called "ammonia-soda" in 1866. Commencing with the modest yield of 179 tons in that year, he increased it in ten years to 11,580 tons, and in 1883 about forty per cent of all the soda made on the Continent was produced by the ammonia process. The success of the new process has completely killed the Leblanc method in Belgium, and has caused the closing of many works in England. A drawback to the new process is that no hydrochloric acid is produced, yet chloride of lime is always in demand; hence a high authority, Dr. Lunge, thinks that in the future the two processes will, of necessity, exist side by side. Mr. Rowland Hazard and others, having secured the right to work under Solvay's patents, have established a manufactory at Geddes, near Syracuse, New York. The estimated production of these works for 1886 is thirty million kilos, and the soda obtained is of great purity. It will be interesting to watch the future of this industry in America.

In modern chemical literature by far the greatest amount of space is occupied with researches and discoveries in organic chemistry. To the non-professional reader the peculiarly technical language, abounding in words of unusual length, is not only incomprehensible, but positively forbidding. A vocabulary which contains such terms as toluyldiphenyltriamidocarbinol acetate and methylorthomonohydroxybenzoate does not encourage the casual reader; and when he learns that the first-named body is the dye-stuff commonly called magenta, and that the second is the innocent oil of wintergreen, surprise gives way to feelings of despair. When one is gleefully informed that a distinguished foreigner has discovered that orthobrombenzyl bromide treated with sodium yields anthracene, which, heated with nitric acid, yields anthraquinone, and that anthraquinonedisulphonic acid fused with potassium hydroxide furnishes dioxyanthraquinone, the lay hearer can hardly be expected to become enthusiastic over the announcement,