AbstractsLaw & Legal Studies

"The Hargraeves process of manufacturing salt cake has not lived up to the great expectations that were held for the process at the time of its development...The inventors, Hargreaves and Robinson, do not pretend to have been the first to make salt cake by the action of sulfur dioxide upon common salt in the presence of air and steam; they claim only to have made the process practicable by a large number of patents. Numerous earlier patents for this reaction were taken out by others but none of these former proposals was successful; it was the details of the process as worked out by Hargreaves and Robinson that at length made the process successful - they reaching their goal only after years of incessant toil and after spending large sums of money" – Introduction, p. 1-2.