682 TECHNICAL CHEMISTRY 



amounts of money at stake, and everywhere he finds it is only by the 

 close and constant supervision of the chemist that these resul-ts could 

 have been attained while the quality of the product was assured. 

 The authority of the chemist in these enterprises has been extending 

 over a continually widening territory and becoming more positively 

 recognized; so that, taking again the blast-furnace as an example, 

 where at first he was occasionally employed to analyze the ore used 

 or the pig-iron produced, he now analyzes all of the fuel, flux, and ore 

 that goes in at the throat, and the gases, slag, and metal that are pro- 

 duced in the furnace. One has but to examine casually a modern 

 technical work such as Harbord's Metallurgy of Steel to be convinced 

 of the absolute dependence of the modern steel-maker upon the tech- 

 nical chemist. Mr. Carnegie admits that he owes his success in steel- 

 making to having been among the first to employ chemists through- 

 out his establishments; and we find that the other industrial com- 

 binations, such as the Standard Oil Company, Amalgamated Copper, 

 and the like, which consider no detail of business too small to be 

 ignored, employ chemists at all points, auditing their operations, 

 accounting for their materials at all stages, stopping wastes, dimin- 

 ishing costs, improving the quality and increasing the speed of 

 manufacture. 



Technical chemistry, then, invades the domains of economics, of 

 politics, and of diplomacy. A striking example of its effects in eco- 

 nomics and politics is found in the settlement of the silver question. 

 Gold is a most widely diffused metal. It has, for instance, been 

 shown by assayers at the U. S. Mint at Philadelphia that if the gold 

 in the clay of the bricks of which the buildings of the Quaker City 

 are built could be brought to the surface, the fronts would all be 

 gilded. In the past our processes for the isolation of this metal have 

 been so costly that only the richer ores would bear treatment. Large 

 bodies of low-grade ores which have been discovered and mountains 

 of tailings carrying values were looked upon as worthless, while enor- 

 mous quantities of copper, lead, and other metals containing gold 

 were sent into the market to be devoted to common uses, because the 

 cost of separation was greater than the value of the separated pro- 

 ducts. Eight years ago, when the "silver question" was made the 

 national issue, while the orators were declaiming from the stump, the 

 chemists were quietly working at the problem in their laboratories 

 and factories. Marine's process for bessemerizing copper ores was 

 combined with the electrolytic refining of the product, so that even 

 traces of gold were economically recovered, while the cyanide pro- 

 cesses, such as the Mac Arthur-Forrest, the Siemens-Halske, the 

 Pelatan-Clerici, and others for the extraction and recovery of gold 

 from low-grade ores and tailings, were successfully worked out and 

 put into practical operation to such effect that by the cyanide pro- 



