The French Revolution cost Nicolas Leblanc his prize for making soda
Deforestation was making wood ash too expensive to supply the alkali needed for glass, soap and textiles, so the French Academy of Sciences offered 2,400 livres for a way to make it from sea salt. Nicolas Leblanc cracked it and patented his process in 1791, but the Revolution meant he never collected the money.
Today's chemical industry turns oil, gas, air, water, metals and minerals into the building blocks of modern products: polymers for plastics and synthetic fibres, acids and alkalis, fertilisers and pesticides, industrial gases and medicines. Chemicals have been made for millennia, but large-scale heavy chemical production arrived with the Industrial Revolution. One of the first bulk products was sulfuric acid. In 1736 the pharmacist Joshua Ward made it practical by heating sulfur with saltpetre, and in 1749 John Roebuck and Samuel Garbett opened a big factory at Prestonpans in Scotland using lead-lined chambers.
Textiles created the next big demand. Early eighteenth-century cloth was whitened with stale urine or sour milk and weeks of sunshine, a serious bottleneck. Charles Tennant's bleaching powder, chlorine combined with dry slaked lime, was cheap and effective, and his St Rollox works near Glasgow went from 52 tons in 1799 to almost 10,000 tons five years later, the first great chemical enterprise.
Leblanc's method flourished in Britain once salt taxes were scrapped in 1824, after William Losh had opened the first British soda works on the Tyne in 1816. Works in Liverpool and near Glasgow became the biggest chemical centres anywhere, and by the 1870s Britain was making 200,000 tons of soda a year, more than the rest of the world combined. The process belched alkaline waste, prompting one of the earliest environmental laws in 1863, with inspections and heavy fines. The Belgian Ernest Solvay's 1861 process proved cheaper and cleaner; he and his brother Alfred built plants at Charleroi and Nancy, and Ludwig Mond, partnering with John Brunner in England, refined it into a commercial success.
Fossil fuels joined in early. From 1822 the Bonnington works in Edinburgh processed the tar and ammonia-laden liquor left over from making lighting gas, producing naphtha, creosote, pitch, carbon black and ammonium chloride, and later fertiliser and road asphalt.
Source: Chemical industry
