chemical laboratory company

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Saniter spent three years as a pupil in J.E.Stead's chemical laboratory in Middlesbrough, and then from 1883 was employed in the same town as Assistant Chemist at the new North-Eastern Steelworks. In 1890 he became Chief Chemist to the Wigan Coal and Iron Company in Lancashire. There he devised a desulphurizing treatment for molten iron and steel, based upon the presence of abundant lime together with calcium chloride. Between 1898 and 1904 he was in the Middlesbrough district once more, employed by Dorman Long \& Co. and Bell Brothers in experiments which led to the establishment of Teesside's first large-scale basic open-hearth steel plant. Calcium fluoride (fluorspar), mentioned in Saniter's 1892 patent, soon came to replace the calcium chloride; with this modification, his method retained wide applicability throughout the era of open-hearth steel. In 1904 Saniter became chief metallurgist to Steel, Peech \& Tozer Limited of Sheffield, and he remained in this post until 1928. Throughout the last forty years of his life he participated in the discussion of steelmaking developments and practices.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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The son of a Congregationalist minister, Hall was educated at Oberlin College. There he was instructed in chemistry by Professor F.F.Jewett, a former student of the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler, who encouraged Hall to believe that there was a need for a cheap process for the manufacture of aluminium. After graduating in 1885, Hall set to work in his private laboratory exploring the method of fused salt electrolysis. On Wednesday 10 February 1886 he found that alumina dissolved in fused cryolite "like sugar in water", and that the bath so produced was a good conductor of electricity. He contained the solution in a pure graphite crucible which also acted as an efficient cathode, and by 16 February 1886 had produced the first globules of metallic aluminium. With two backers, Hall was able to complete his experiments and establish a small pilot plant in Boston, but they withdrew after the US Patent Examiners reported that Hall's invention had been anticipated by a French patent, filed by Paul Toussaint Héroult in April 1886. Although Hall had not filed until July 1886, he was permitted to testify that his invention had been completed by 16 February 1886 and on 2 April 1889 he was granted a seventeen-year monopoly in the United States. Hall now had the support of Captain A.E. Hunt of the Pittsburgh Testing Institute who provided the capital for establishing the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, which by 1889 was selling aluminium at $1 per pound compared to the $15 for sodium-reduced aluminium. Further capital was provided by the banker Andrew Mellon (1855–1937). Hall then turned his attention to Britain and began negotiations with Johnson Matthey, who provided land on a site at Patricroft near Manchester. Here the Aluminium Syndicate, owned by the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, began to produce aluminium in July 1890. By this time the validity of Hall's patent was being strongly contested by Héroult and also by the Cowles brothers, who attempted to operate the Hall process in the United States. Hall successfully sued them for infringement, and was confirmed in his patent rights by the celebrated ruling in 1893 of William Howard Taft, subsequently President of the USA. In 1895 Hall's company changed its name to the Pittsburgh Aluminium Company and moved to Niagara Falls, where cheap electrical power was available. In 1903 a legal compromise ended the litigation between the Hall and Héroult organizations. The American rights in the invention were awarded to Hall, and the European to Héroult. The Pittsburgh Aluminium Company became the Aluminium Company of America on 1 January 1907. On his death he left his estate, worth about $45 million, for the advancement of education.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Metallurgy

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MacArthur served his apprenticeship in the laboratory of Tennant's Tharsis Sulphur and Copper Company in Glasgow. In 1886 he was appointed Technical Manager of the Tennant-run Cassel Gold Extracting Company. By 1888 he was advocating a treatment scheme in which gold was dissolved from crushed rock by a dilute solution of alkali cyanide and then precipitated onto finely divided zinc. During the next few years, with several assistants, he was extremely active in promoting the new gold-extraction technique in various parts of the world. In 1894 significant sums in royalty payments were received, but by 1897 the patents had been successfully contested; henceforth the Cassel Company concentrated on the production and marketing of the essential sodium cyanide reagent.

MacArthur was Managing Director of the Cassel Company from 1892 to 1897; he resigned as a director in December 1905. In 1907 he created the Antimony Recovery Syndicate, and in 1911 he set up a small plant at Runcorn, Cheshire, to produce radium salts. In 1915 this radium-extraction activity was transferred to Balloch, south of Loch Lomond, where it was used until some years after his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Mining and extraction technology

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After studying chemistry in Breslau and Leipzig and assisting inter alia at the institute of Fritz Haber in Karlsruhe on the catalysis of ammonia under high pressure, in 1909 he went to Hannover to pursue his idea of turning coal into liquid hydrocarbon under high hydrogen pressure (200 atm) and high temperatures (470° C). As experiments with high pressure in chemical processes were still in their initial stages and the Technical University could not support him sufficiently, he set up a private laboratory to develop the methods and to construct the equipment himself. Four years later, in 1913, his process for producing liquid or organic compounds from coal was patented.

The economic aspects of this process were apparent as the demand for fuels and lubricants increased more rapidly than the production of oil, and Bergius's process became even more important after the outbreak of the First World War. The Th. Goldschmidt company of Essen contracted him and tried large-scale production near Mannheim in 1914, but production failed because of the lack of capital and experience to operate with high pressure on an industrial level. Both capital and experience were provided jointly by the BASF company, which produced ammonia at Merseburg, and IG Farben, which took over the Bergius process in 1925, the same year that the synthesis of hydrocarbon had been developed by Fischer-Tropsch. Two years later, at the Leuna works, almost 100,000 tonnes of oil were produced from coal; during the following years, several more hydrogenation plants were to follow, especially in the eastern parts of Germany as well as in the Ruhr area, while the government guaranteed the costs. The Bergius process was extremely important for the supply of fuels to Germany during the Second World War, with the monthly production rate in 1943–4 being more than 700,000 tonnes. However, the plants were mostly destroyed at. the end of the war and were later dismantled.

As a consequence of this success Bergius, who had gained an international reputation, went abroad to work as a consultant to several foreign governments. Experiments aiming to reduce the costs of production are still continued in some countries. By 1925, after he had solved all the principles of his process, he had turned to the production of dextrose by hydrolyzing wood with highly concentrated hydrochloric acid.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Photography, film and optics, Synthetic materials

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The son of an illiterate shoemaker, Baekeland was first apprenticed in that trade, but was encouraged by his mother to study, with spectacular results. He won a scholarship to Gand University and graduated in chemistry. Before he was 21 he had achieved his doctorate, and soon afterwards he obtained professorships at Bruges and then at Gand. Baekeland seemed set for a distinguished academic career, but he turned towards the industrial applications of chemistry, especially in photography.

Baekeland travelled to New York to further this interest, but his first inventions met with little success so he decided to concentrate on one that seemed to have distinct commercial possibilities. This was a photographic paper that could be developed in artificial light; he called this "gas light" paper Velox, using the less sensitive silver chloride as a light-sensitive agent. It proved to have good properties and was easy to use, at a time of photography's rising popularity. By 1896 the process began to be profitable, and three years later Baekeland disposed of his plant to Eastman Kodak for a handsome sum, said to be $3–4 million. That enabled him to retire from business and set up a laboratory at Yonkers to pursue his own research, including on synthetic resins. Several chemists had earlier obtained resinous products from the reaction between phenol and formaldehyde but had ignored them. By 1907 Baekeland had achieved sufficient control over the reaction to obtain a good thermosetting resin which he called "Bakélite". It showed good electrical insulation and resistance to chemicals, and was unchanged by heat. It could be moulded while plastic and would then set hard on heating, with its only drawback being its brittleness. Bakelite was an immediate success in the electrical industry and Baekeland set up the General Bakelite Company in 1910 to manufacture and market the product. The firm grew steadily, becoming the Bakélite Corporation in 1924, with Baekeland still as active President.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Synthetic materials, Textiles

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The introduction of one type of artificial fibre encouraged chemists to look for more. J.T.Dickson and J.R. Whinfield discovered one such fibre in 1941 when they derived polyester from terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol. Dickson, a 21-year-old Edinburgh graduate, was working under Whinfield at the Calico Printers' Association research laboratory at Broad Oak Print Works in Accrington. He was put onto fibre research: probably in April, but certainly by 5 July 1941, a murky-looking resin had been synthesized, out of which Dickson successfully drew a filament, which was named "Terylene" by its discoverers. Owing to restrictions imposed in Britain during the Second World War, this fibre was developed initially by the DuPont Company in the USA, where it was marketed under the name "Dacron". When Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) were able to manufacture it in Britain, it acquired the brand name "Terylene" and became very popular. Under the microscope, Terylene appears identical to nylon: longitudinally, it is completely devoid of any structure and the filaments appear as glass rods with a perfectly circular cross-section. The uses of Terylene are similar to those of nylon, but it has two advantages. First, it can be heat-set by exposing the fabric to a temperature about 30°C higher than is likely to be encountered in everyday use, and therefore can be the basis for "easy-care" clothing such as drip-dry shirts. It can be blended with other fibres such as wool, and when pressed at a high temperature the creases are remarkably durable. It is also remarkably resistant to chemicals, which makes it particularly suitable for industrial purposes under conditions where other textile materials would be degraded rapidly. Dickson later worked for ICI.

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f < Ind> industrial engineering

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Deville was the son of a prosperous shipowner with diplomatic duties in the Virgin Islands. With his elder brother Charles, who later became a distinguished physicist, he was sent to Paris to be educated. He took his degree in medicine in 1843, but before that he had shown an interest in chemistry, due particularly to the lectures of Thenard. Two years later, with Thenard's influence, he was appointed Professor of Chemistry at Besançon. In 1851 he was able to return to Paris as Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He remained there for the rest of his working life, greatly improving the standard of teaching, and his laboratory became one of the great research centres of Europe. His first chemical work had been in organic chemistry, but he then turned to inorganic chemistry, specifically to improve methods of producing the new and little-known metal aluminium. Essentially, the process consisted of forming sodium aluminium trichloride and reducing it with sodium to metallic aluminium. He obtained sodium in sufficient quantity by reducing sodium carbonate with carbon. In 1855 he exhibited specimens of the metal at the Paris Exhibition, and the same year Napoleon III asked to see them, with a view to using it for breastplates for the Army and for spoons and forks for State banquets. With the resulting government support, he set up a pilot plant at Jarvel to develop the process, and then set up a small company, the Société d'Aluminium at Nan terre. This raised the output of this attractive and useful metal, so it could be used more widely than for the jewellery to which it had hitherto been restricted. Large-scale applications, however, had to await the electrolytic process that began to supersede Deville's in the 1890s. Deville extended his sodium reduction method to produce silicon, boron and the light metals magnesium and titanium. His investigations into the metallurgy of platinum revolutionized the industry and led in 1872 to his being asked to make the platinum-iridium (90–10) alloy for the standard kilogram and metre. Deville later carried out important work in high-temperature chemistry. He grieved much at the death of his brother Charles in 1876, and his retirement was forced by declining health in 1880; he did not survive for long.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity

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Leclanché was sent to England for his early education. Returning to France, he entered the Central School of Arts and Manufacture, from which he graduated as a chemical engineer in 1860. He spent some years with a railway company in setting up an electrical timing system, and this work led him to electrochemical research. Driven by political pressure into exile, he set up a small laboratory in Brussels to continue the studies of the behaviour of voltaic cells he had started in France. Many workers directed their efforts to constructing a cell with a single electrolyte and a solid insoluble depo-larizer, but it was Leclanché who produced, in 1866, the prototype of a battery that was rugged, cheap and contained no highly corro-sive liquid. With electrodes of carbon and zinc and a solution of ammonium chloride, polarization was prevented by surrounding the positive electrode with manganese dioxide. The Leclanché cell was adopted by the Belgian Government Telegraph Service in 1868 and rapidly came into general use wherever an intermittent current was needed; for example, in telegraph and later in telephone circuits. Carl Gassner in 1888 pioneered successful dry cells based on the Leclanché system, with the zinc anode serving as the container, and c. 1890 commercial production of such cells began.

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