User:Milton Beychok/Sandbox

History

The industrial revolution began in the early 1800's and gave birth to a number of large-scale chemical plants including the Lead-Chamber method for producing sulfuric acid. The process raw materials include a nitrate which, in the final stage of the process, was lost to the atmosphere as nitric oxide gas and had to be replaced by costly fresh nitrate imported from Chile. In 1827, the French chemist Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac developed a tower that recovered most of the nitrogen oxide gases formed, thereby reducing the consumption of nitrate. The first Gay-Lussac tower was installed at a plant in France in 1837. However, it use was not widespread until a British chemist, John Glover, invented an improved version of the tower, patented in England in 1859. By the 1870s, the Glover–Gay-Lussac system was used throughout Britain and Europe. Because Glover's tower was essentially a mass transfer tower, he is often considered to be the first chemical engineer.

In 1791, a French physician, Nicholas Le Blanc, invented a method of producing sodium carbonate from sea salt. By 1810, it was in widespread use. However, the process produced very hazardous byproduct hydrochloric acid, nitrogen oxides, sulfur and chlorine gas. In 1811, Augustine Jean Fresnel, a French physicist, discovered a cleaner process for producing sodium carbonate by by bubbling carbon dioxide through an ammonia-containing brine. Attempts to build large-scale plants using Fresnel's process were unsuccessful. In 1863, over fifty years later, a Belgian chemist, Ernest Solvay, succesfully applied Fresnel's process using a tall gas absorption tower in which carbon dioxide bubbled up through a descending flow of brine, together with efficient recovery and recycling of the ammonia. The use of the Solvay process soon became widespread and it is still in use today. Ernest Solvay's work is sometimes thought of as one of the first accomplishments of chemical engineering.