MINERAL INDUSTRIES OF THE UNITED STATES — SULPHUR- 7 
leum production from this type of occurrence has been of great im- 
portance, especially in the period of 1901 to 1906, when the gushers 
of the Texas field, especially those at Spindletop, near Beaumont, at- 
tracted widespread attention. The salt domes of Louisiana have 
been worked on a modest scale for several decades, but the centers of 
the salt industry still remain in Western New York and Michigan. 
Sulphur has been obtained from only two of the occurrences— 
one at Sulphur, La., and the other at Bryan Heights, Tex. — but 
these two produce over 98 per cent of the country’s entire output. 
Other domes probably contain workable masses of sulphur, although 
in most the sulphur is perhaps too scant to be commercially ob- 
tainable. 
The occurrence at Sulphur, a small town on the Southern Pacific 
Railroad, about 15 miles west of Lake Charles, was discovered in 
1865 by means of a bore hole put down in search of petroleum. A 
mass of pure sulphur 100 feet in thickness was encountered beneath 
several hundred feet of quicksand. Interest immediately attached 
to this body of sulphur, and during the ensuing 30 years numerous 
attempts were made to win its content by ordinary shaft mining. 
All resulted in hopeless failure. At first the main difficulty was to 
resist the great lateral pressure exerted upon the shaft by the moving 
water of the quicksand; but after this was sucessfully overcome by 
putting down a shaft of extraordinary strength, an inrush of poison- 
ous gases from the adjacent sulphur proved fatal to the workmen 
and indicated that human labor was not feasible within the bed 
itself. 
It became evident that some method of mechanical mining must 
be devised to meet these conditions. The result was the Frasch 
process. “This may fairly be described as one of the triumphs of 
modern technology, and the result of its successful development has 
been to provide a great industry for the United States, which it did 
not previously possess, and to remove from Sicily to this country the 
domination of the conditions regulating the world’s supply of sul- 
phur.” 
The Frasch process was worked out and applied between the years 
1891 and 1903 by Herman Frasch, previously engaged in industrial 
research work in connection with petroleum drilling and refining. 
In essence, it consists in pumping superheated water through a pipe 
to the sulphur horizon and lifting by means of compressed air the 
sulphur thereby melted to the surface, where it is piped to large bins 
into which it pours in the molten state and cools. The principle is 
simple enough, but the mechanical difficulties in the way of its prac- 
tical application were many; among which may be mentioned the 
tendency of the sulphur to cool and crystallize in transit, the liability 
of the piping to clog at the bottom, the necessity for avoiding the 
