INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY—BAEKELAND. 233 
All these examples of the struggle for efficiency and improvement 
demonstrate why, in industrial chemistry, the question of dollars and 
cents has to be taken very much into consideration. 
From this standpoint, at least, the “dollars and cents’”’ argument 
can be interpreted as a symptom of industrial efficiency, and thus the 
definition sounds no longer as a reproach. With some allowable 
degree of accuracy, it formulates one of the economic aspects of any 
acceptable industrial chemical process. 
Indeed, barring special conditions—as, for instance, incompetent or 
reckless management, unfair competition, monopolies, or other 
artificial privileges—the money success of a chemical process is the 
cash plebiscite of approval of the consumers. It is bound, after a 
time at least, to weed out the inefficient methods. 
Some chemists. who have little or no experience with industrial 
enterprises, are too much overinclined to judge a chemical process 
exclusively from the standpoint of the chemical reactions involved 
therein, without sufficient regard to engineering difficulties, financial 
requirements, labor problems, market and trade conditions, rapid 
development of the art involving frequent disturbmg improvements 
in methods and expensive changes in equipment, advantages or 
disadvantages of the location of the plant, and other conditions so 
numerous and variable that many of them can hardly be foreseen 
even by men of experience. 
And yet these seemingly secondary considerations most of the 
time become the deciding factor of success or failure of an otherwise 
well-conceived chemical process. 
The cost of transportation alone frequently will decide whether a 
certam chemical process is economically possible or not. For 
instance, the big Washoe Smelter, in Montana, wastes enough 
sulphur dioxide gas to make daily 1,800 tons of sulphuric acid, but 
that smelter is too far distant from any possible market for such a 
quantity of otherwise valuable material. 
Another example of the kind is found in the natural deposits of 
soda or soda lakes in California. One of these soda lakes contains from 
30,000,000 to 42,000,000 tons of soda. Here is a natural source of 
supply which would be ample to satisfy the world’s demand for many 
years tocome. Similar deposits exist in other parts of the world, but 
the cost of transportation to a sufficiently large and profitable market 
is so exorbitant that, in the meantime, it is cheaper to erect at more 
convenient points expensive chemical works in which soda is made 
chemically and from where the market can be supplied more profitably. 
In addition, we can cite the artificial nitrate processes in Norway, 
which, notwithstanding their low efficiency and expensive installa- 
tion, can furnish nitrate in competition with the natural nitrate beds 
of Chile, because the latter are hampered by the cost of extraction 
