676 TECHNICAL CHEMISTRY 



nical chemists, were most active in its promotion and successful 

 in convincing our national legislators of the economic advantages 

 which would result from the establishment of such an institution 

 invested by law with the proper authority. 



Technical chemistry is indebted to pure chemistry for much 

 precise information regarding the properties of substances, espe- 

 cially as to their behavior toward reagents, and for accurate and 

 carefully investigated analytical methods like those with which 

 the honored name of Wolcott Gibbs is associated. But the tech- 

 nical chemist revises these methods and adapts them to his spe- 

 cial needs, as shown in the standard work of Blair on the Chemical 

 Analysis of Iron, and in others that might be cited, while he verifies 

 the published data as to the particular substances with which he 

 has to deal. Realizing that "time is money," he has devised, with 

 the aid of the collected information, rapid methods of analysis l 

 which enable one to arrive at an approximately true and in some 

 instances a very precise result in a few moments, when the aca- 

 demic methods require hours and perhaps days to arrive at the same 

 conclusion. It is true that methods of this nature, devised to meet 

 technical needs, have been generalized and made more available 

 in the university laboratory. As an early example of this we have 

 volumetric analysis, devised by Descroizille and Vaquelin, investi- 

 gated and generalized by Gay Lussac, and as a recent example we 

 have the use of a rotating electrode in electrolysis, long employed 

 in the arts, critically studied and generalized by Smith, by Gooch, 

 and by their pupils. Yet the systematic treatment of the accu- 

 mulated material, the working-out of a comprehensive scheme of 

 qualitative analysis, and the collating, the sifting, and the arrange- 

 ment of correlated methods for quantitative determinations in a 

 connected manner are due to C. Remigius Fresenius, who for so 

 long conducted a technical analytical laboratory at Wiesbaden, 

 and his publications are classics. 



But technical chemistry has especially looked to the pure chemist, 

 with leisure for thought and work and with libraries and other 

 facilities at command, to correlate and discuss data, to trace rela- 

 tions, suggest hypotheses, invent theories, and discover laws which 

 the technical chemist has been ready to test and, when proved, to 

 be guided by. To-day we find the technical chemists earnestly 

 studying Arrhenius's theory of electrolytic dissociation, Willard 

 Gibbs's phase-rule, van 't Hoff's law governing osmotic pressure, 

 Guldberg and Waage's law of mass-action, and the many other 

 valuable generalizations which have resulted from the systematic 



1 The number of determinations made in one week in the laboratory of the 

 Bethlehem Iron Company amounted to 2444; accurate analyses of carbon being 

 made in 12 minutes, of manganese in 10 minutes, and of phosphorus and silicon 

 in 30 minutes. Engineering & Mining Journal, LX, 375, 1895. 



