User:Milton Beychok/Sandbox

History

The industrial revolution of the early 1800's gave birth to many large-scale chemical plants including the Lead-Chamber method for producing sulfuric acid. The raw materials included a nitrate which, in the final stage of the process, was lost to the atmosphere as nitric oxide gas and had to be replaced by costly fresh nitrate imported from Chile. In 1827, the French chemist Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac developed a tower that recovered most of the nitrogen oxide gases formed and reduced the consumption of nitrate. The first Gay-Lussac tower was installed at a plant in France in 1837. However, it use was not widespread until a British chemist, John Glover, invented an improved version of the tower, patented in England in 1859. By the 1870s, the Glover–Gay-Lussac system was used throughout Britain and Europe. Because Glover's tower was essentially a mass transfer tower, he is often considered to be the first chemical engineer.

In 1791, a French physician, Nicholas Le Blanc, patented a method of producing sodium carbonate from sea salt. By 1810, it was in widespread use. However, it produced hazardous byproduct hydrochloric acid, nitrogen oxides, sulfur and chlorine gas. In 1811, Augustine Jean Fresnel, a French physicist, discovered a cleaner process for producing sodium carbonate by bubbling carbon dioxide through an ammonia-containing brine. Attempts to build large-scale plants using Fresnel's process were unsuccessful. In 1863, some fifty years later, a Belgian chemist, Ernest Solvay, succesfully applied Fresnel's process using a tall gas absorption tower in which carbon dioxide bubbled up through a descending flow of brine, together with efficient recovery and recycling of the ammonia. Use of the Solvay process soon became widespread and it is still used today. Ernest Solvay's work is sometimes thought of as one of the first accomplishments of chemical engineering.

Under the British Alkali Act of 1863, an Alkali Inspector and four subinspectors were appointed to curb the discharge into the air of hydrochloric gas from the Le Blanc sodium carbonate plants. During his long career, one of the Alkali Inspectors, George Davis, inspected many of the Lead Chamber, Le Blanc and Solvay plants in the Midland area of England. What he learned convinced him of the necessity for a new branch of engineering that combined applied chemistry and traditional engineering. In 1880, George Davis proposed the formation of a Society of Chemical Engineers which was failed. In 1887, he gave a series of 12 lectures on industrial chemical operations at the Manchester Technical School. His lectures can be regarded as the forerunner of the discipline of chemical engineering. In 1901, Davis published a Handbook of Chemical Engineering. He is considered to be the father of modern chemical engineering.

In 1888, the first chemical engineering curriculum, designed by Lewis Norton, began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1892 and 1894, respectively, the University of Pennsylvania and Tulane University in Louisiana also began chemical engineering programs.

In 1908, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers was formed and, in 1922, the Institute of Chemical Engineers was founded in England.