xxi 



Lis attention to a task so different from all his previous occupations 

 cannot be stated with certainty. In an admirable memoir of him, 

 published in the ' Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry ' in 

 October, 1885, it has been suggested that he derived his first impulse 

 to this new work from his friend the late Charles Townsend Hook, 

 the well-known paper maker of Snodland ; and the writer has good 

 reason to believe that the suggestion is well grounded. From 

 whatever cause, Mr. Weldon, from that time to the very hour 

 of his death, devoted himself, with all the earnestness, zeal, and 

 energy of which he was capable, to the study of industrial chemistry, 

 and of the chlorine and alkali manufactures in particular. He 

 thoroughly mastered his subject in all its details, whether from a 

 scientific or a business point of view, insomuch that during the last 

 ten years of his life he was regarded as the highest authority upon it, 

 not only in England, but wherever the manufacture of alkali was 

 carried on. It may safely be averred that, so long as the practice or 

 the memory of this industry shall last, so long will the name of 

 Walter Weldon be honourably associated with it. 



The great work of his life, his process for the perpetual regenera- 

 tion of the manganese oxide used in the product' on of chlorine from 

 the hydrochloric acid which is the by-product of the Leblanc soda 

 process has been so often described, and is so widely known, as to 

 need no detailed explanation here. No better description of it exists 

 than that, written by the hand of the inventor, published in the 

 'Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry,' Sept., 1885 (vol. 4, 

 p. 525). Suffice it to say that it produced a revolution in the 

 industry which it affected, supplanting a method of working at once 

 crude, wasteful, and noxious ; that it has saved an expenditure to 

 this country of about £750,000 per annum since it has been in opera- 

 tion ; and that it has been one of the chief factors in bringing the 

 purchase of bleached fabrics —linen, calico, paper, &c. — well within 

 the power of the poorest classes. To invent a good and workable 

 chemical process, however, is not sufficient ; and it was perhaps as an 

 exploitant and as a man of business (though without a trace of the 

 sordid attributes of the mere business man), in the power of fixing 

 the interest, influencing the minds, and attracting the sympathies of 

 those with whom he had to deal, that Mr. Weldon specially excelled. 

 But for these powers, it is doubtful whether his process — so advan- 

 tageous in its use, and so facile in its working — would ever have 

 been put into practical execution. With all these advantages, it 

 required many years of arduous and anxious work — not to mention 

 the taking of many patents — before Weldon's process became, what 

 it still is, the almost universally adopted method of producing 

 chlorine. 



Patented in 1866, and temporarily experimented with soon after- 



e 2 



