230 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
This seemingly unimportant laboratory curiosity, so long dormant 
in the textbooks, was made a starting pomt by Charles S. Bradley 
and D. R. Lovejoy, in Niagara Falls, for creating the first industrial 
apparatus for converting the nitrogen of the air into nitric acid by 
means of the electric arc. 
As early as 1902 they published their results as well as the details 
of their apparatus. Although they operated only one full-sized unit, 
they demonstrated conclusively that nitric acid could thus be pro- 
duced from the air in unlimited quantities. We shall examine later 
the reasons why this pioneer enterprise did not prove a commercial 
success; but to these two American inventors belongs, undoubtedly, 
the credit of having furnished the first answer to the distress call of 
Sir William Crookes. 
In the meantime many other investigators were at work at the 
same problem, and soon from Norway’s abundant waterfalls came 
the news that Birkeland and Eyde had solved successfully, and on a 
commercial scale, the same problem by a differently constructed 
apparatus. The Germans, too, were working on the same subject, 
and we heard that Schoenherr, also Pauling, had evolved still other 
methods, all, however, based on the Cavendish-Priestley principle 
of oxidation of nitrogen. In Norway alone the artificial saltpeter 
factories use now, day and night, over 200,000 electrical horsepower, 
which will soon be doubled; while a further addition is contemplated 
which will bring the volume of electric current consumed to about 
500,000 horsepower. The capital invested at present in these works 
amounts to $27,000,000. 
Frank and Caro, in Germany, succeeded in creating another 
profitable industrial process whereby nitrogen could be fixed by 
carbide of calcium, which converts it into calcium cyanamide, an 
excellent fertilizer by itself. By the action of steam on cyanamide, 
ammonia is produced, or it can be made the starting point of the 
manufacture of cyanides, so profusely used for the treatment of gold 
and silver ores. 
Although the synthetic nitrates have found a field of their own, 
their utilization for fertilizers is smaller than that of the cyanamide; 
and the latter industry represents to-day an investment of about 
$30,000,000, with 3 factories in Germany, 2 in Norway, 2 in Sweden, 
1 in France, 1 in Switzerland, 2 in Italy, 1 in Austria, 1 in Japan, 
1 in Canada, but not any in the United States. The total output 
of cyanamide is valued at $15,000,000 yearly and employs 200,000 
horsepower, and preparations are made at almost every existing 
plant for further extensions. An English company is contemplating 
the application of 1,000,000 horsepower to the production of cyana- 
mide and its derivatives, 600,000 of which have been secured in 
Norway and 400,000 in Iceland. 
