Nicolas Leblanc

Nicolas Leblanc was a French chemist and surgeon, born in 1742 at Ivoy le Pre in the Cher. Trained at the College of Surgeons in Paris, he became private physician to the household of the Duke of Orleans and worked on chemistry on the side. In 1791 he succeeded in making sodium carbonate, or soda ash, from common salt by a two-step process in which salt is first heated with sulfuric acid and the resulting sodium sulfate is then roasted with charcoal and limestone. The French Academy of Sciences had offered a prize for such a process in 1775, and Leblanc built a works that produced hundreds of tons a year. The revolutionary government confiscated it and never paid his prize, and he died by his own hand in 1806. His process was later replaced by the Solvay process.