THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDUSTRIAL 

 ELECTRO=CHEniSTRY. 



BY E. F. ROEBER. 



[Edward F. Roeber is one of the best known electro-chemists in the world. The 

 application of electricity to chemistry and the chemistry of electricity have been his 

 study for many years and he has written several articles on the art in whose devel- 

 opment he has had such a prominent part. The article below was written on the 

 occasion of the quarter-centennial of the Electrical World and is here pubUshed by 

 special arrangement.] 



While of all branches of electrical engineering electro- 

 chemistry has been the last one to achieve commercial suc- 

 cesses on a large scale and may justly be considered to be still 

 in the first phase of its industrial development, yet its funda- 

 mental principles were long exactly known (electrolytic action 

 — Faraday's law, electro-thermic action — Joulean heat) . More- 

 over, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the very first 

 experimental applications of the newly discovered electric 

 current were of an electrochemical nature. Shortly after the 

 primary battery had been invented by Volta, Nicholson and 

 Cariisle succeeded in decomposing water by electrolysis, and 

 in 1807 Sir Humphrey Davy delivered his famous lecture on 

 some chemical agencies of electricity. Yet (to quote from the 

 recent Bradley patent decision) ''Davy's experiments were 

 permitted to lie dormant during seventy six years of intense 

 activity," and in general the progress in the development of 

 industrial electrochemistry and electrometallurgy was ex- 

 tremely slow for a long period. In fact, thirty one years ago, 

 when the first issue of this journal appeared, there did not 

 exist any electrochemical industries, with the single exceptions 

 of electroplating and primary battery manufacture. 



It is now not difficult to see what held the development 

 of industrial electrochemistry back. In nearly all electro- 

 chemical and electrometallurgical processes the cost of the 

 electric power is a large fraction of the total cost of operation, 

 often 25 per cent or more, and even up to 90 per cent. Cheap 

 electric power is, therefore, the fundamental requirement for 



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