234 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
from the soil where fuel for crystallization is expensive, in addition to 
the considerable cost of freight. 
But there is no better example illustrating the far-reaching effect 
of seemingly secondary conditions upon the success of a chemical 
process than the history of the Leblanc soda process. 
This famous process was the forerunner of chemical industry. 
For almost a century it dominated the enormous group of industries 
of heavy chemicals, so expressively called by the French ‘‘La Grande 
Industrie Chimique,”’ and now we are witnesses of the lingering death 
agonies of this chemical colossus. Through the Leblanc process 
large fortunes have been made and lost; but even after its death it 
willleave a treasure of information to science and chemical engineering 
the value of which can hardly be overestimated. 
Here then is a very well worked-out process, admirably studied in 
all its details, which in its heroic struggle for existence has drawn 
upon every conceivable resource of ingenuity furnished by the most 
learned chemists and the most skillful engineers, who succeeded in 
bringing it to an extraordinary degree of perfection, and which, never- 
theless, has to succumb before inexorable although seemingly sec- 
ondary conditions. 
Strange to say its competitor the Solvay process, entered into the 
arena after a succession of failures. When Solvay, as a young man, 
took up this process, he was himself totally ignorant of the fact that 
no less than about a dozen able chemists had invented and reinvented 
the very reaction on which he had pinned his faith; that, furthermore, 
some had tried it on a commercial scale, and had in every instance 
encountered failure. At that time all this must undoubtedly have 
been to young Solvay a revelation sufficient to dishearten almost 
anybody. But he had one predominant thought to which he clung 
as a last hope of success, and which would probably have escaped 
most chemists; he reasoned that in this process he starts from two 
watery solutions which, when brought together, precipitate a dry 
product, bicarbonate of soda; in the Leblanc process the raw materials 
must be melted together with the use of expensive fuel, after which 
the mass is dissolved in water, losing all these valuable heat units, 
while more heat has again to be applied to evaporate to dryness. 
After all, most of the weakness of the Leblanc process resides in the 
greater consumption of fuel. But the cost of fuel, here again, is 
determined by freight rates. This is so true that we find that the 
last few Leblane works which manage to keep alive are exactly those 
which are situated near unusually favorable shipping points, where 
they can obtain cheap fuel, as well as cheap raw materials, and whence 
they can most advantageously reach certain profitable markets. 
But another tremendous handicap of the Leblanc process is that 
it gives as one of its by-products hydrochloric acid. Profitable use 
