This
diagram from the _Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry_ of
July, 1917, shows how the supply of potassium muriate from Germany was
shut off in 1914 and how its price rose.]
Yet potash compounds are as cheap as dirt. Pick up a handful of gravel
and you will be able to find much of it feldspar or other mineral
containing some ten per cent. of potash. Unfortunately it is in
combination with silica, which is harder to break up than a trust.
But "constant washing wears away stones" and the potash that the
metallurgist finds too hard to extract in his hottest furnace is washed
out in the course of time through the dropping of the gentle rain from
heaven. "All rivers run to the sea" and so the sea gets salt, all sorts
of salts, principally sodium chloride (our table salt) and next
magnesium, calcium and potassium chlorides or sulfates in this order of
abundance. But if we evaporate sea-water down to dryness all these are
left in a mix together and it is hard to sort them out. Only patient
Nature has time for it and she only did on a large scale in one place,
that is at Stassfurt, Germany.
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