Abstract
ON October 16 in the presence of the King of the Belgians and the Duke of Brabant, a monument was unveiled in Brussels to Ernest Solvay, the eminent chemist, philanthropist and publicist. Solvay was born at Rebecq in Brabant on April 16, 1838, and died in Brussels on May 26, 1922. The foundation of all his success in chemical industry and his immense wealth was his discovery of the ammonia-soda process. To the unfortunate Nicholas Leblanc (1753–1806), whose statue stands in front of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, the world owed the first successful process for manufacturing artificial soda, and by 1863, the year in which Solvay took out his patent, the world production of soda was about 300,000 tons a year. The Solvay process, after the many initial difficulties had been overcome, proved far more economical than the Leblanc process, and by 1914 there were some twenty-three works in various parts of the world engaged in the Solvay ammonia-soda process, capable of producing about 2,000,000 tons of soda ash a year. Mr. Runciman, President of the Board of Trade, in a speech delivered on October 20, when dealing with the question of trade recovery, said that “one first-class invention is worth fifty Acts of Parliament”. To that class of invention Solvav's belongs.
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Monument to Ernest Solvay. Nature 130, 657 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130657c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130657c0