power: its significance and needs. 
45 
great number of metallic alloys, such as ferromanganese, ferrochro- 
mium, ferrotungsten, and others needed to give to steel the various 
special properties demanded by its many applications, electric power 
is essential, while for the production of iron and steel the use of 
electricity is finding a growing application. Indeed, many “ metal- 
lurgists in active practice in the United States are convinced that the 
time is rapidly approaching when all steel made will be passed 
through the electric furnace to receive its final refining and its finish- 
ing touches. We may safely look forward to the establishment of 
not only hundreds but possibly thousands of electric steel furnaces .” 1 
In the metallurgy of copper, zinc, and tin electricity is coming into 
play, while in the refining of metals it is affording the means for 
recovering many constituents formerly going to waste, in addition to 
producing products of such purity as to open up new uses not pre- 
viously enjoyed . 2 The United States is the greatest producer of 
metals in the world, and proper electrical-power development will 
give a great impetus to the advancement of the mineral industries. 
No problem is more fundamental to any country than the matter 
of food supply, and electrochemistry has a very direct bearing in this 
respect through its promise of lending assistance in producing fer- 
tilizers. Of the three important fertilizing materials — nitrogen, 
phosphorus, and potassium — nitrogen may be drawn from the atmos- 
phere by the expenditure of electrical energy ; cheap electrical power 
offers an immediate means for doing away with the cumbersome 
method of converting phosphate rock into acid phosphate, with its 
consequent burden upon transportation and upon sulphuric acid 
manufacture ; 3 while the locked-up stores of potash held in unlimited 
amount in widespread areas of silicate rocks must eventually be 
1 J. W. Richards, Electric furnace metallurgy, Proc. Second Pan American Scientific 
Congress, vol. 7, 1917, p. 265. 
2 The United States Bureau of Mines has recently announced the perfection of an 
electric smelting furnace that may he revolutionary in the making of brass. The use of 
this furnace will replace costly crucibles of imported clay and graphite and reduce the 
losses incidental to the older process by an amount estimated at $3,000,000 a year in 
normal times and perhaps $10,000,000 a year in war times, besides contributing more 
healthful working conditions. Such announcements are suggestive of the tremendous 
latent possibilities in the field of electrometallurgy. 
3 The Bureau of Soils of the Department of Agriculture, in cooperation with the 
R. B. Davis Co., of Hoboken, N. J., has recently conducted important experiments in this 
field, with results published in an article, “ The use of ‘ mine-run phosphate ’ in the 
manufacture of soluble phosphoric acid,” by William H. Waggaman and C. R. Wagner in 
the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, May, 1918, pp. 353-355. It is 
found that the manufacture of pure phosphoric acid from high-grade phosphate rock at the 
mines by means of an electric furnace comes to about $65 a ton of available phosphoric 
acid, which is some $12 higher than the cost of an equivalent availability in the form 
of acid phosphate as conventionally made by treating high-grade phosphate rock with 
sulphuric acid. But by manufacturing phosphoric acid from mine-run phosphate rock, 
thus eliminating part of the mining cost (and incidentally greatly enlarging the yield of a 
deposit), and treating high-grade phosphate rock with the phosphoric acid so produced, 
a double superphosphate is obtained containing three times as much phosphoric acid 
as ordinary acid phosphate and at a cost of around $46 a ton of available phosphoric 
acid. In the process the item of power amounts to roughly two-thirds of the total 
