Making tonnes of metallic sodium!! History of the chemical industry & chemical engineering in action

[@benetutbenechamun8205]

Thank you for sharing this!

[@drbartsworldofchemeng]

A pleasure!

[@stephenpearson3153]

I worked at cassel works in 1990s. Though sodium plant was long gone the land was deemed contaminated with heavy metals including mercury ☹️

[@drbartsworldofchemeng]

I can well believe it. I saw some very 'interesting' mercury contamination at Runcorn when I worked there years back...

[@stephenpearson3153]

The people that worked there would have too drink milk to absorb the metals and have time out after a blood test. Hard times

[@drbartsworldofchemeng]

@@stephenpearson3153 That's pretty awful - hard times indeed

[@mi6uk]

NEIGHBOURS & LOCAL HISTORY - THE NORTH OF ENGLAND - BILLINGHAM, DARLINGTON, MIDDLESBROUGH, NEWCASTLE, STOCKTON, YORK & YARM Most people living in the North of England think they know their neighbours and local history but how would you know your neighbour worked for MI6? Most who knew the Fairclough family didn’t have a clue that from the seventies Bill Fairclough was a secret agent (MI6 codename JJ) working for various intelligence agencies. What’s more they had no idea he was following in his parents’ footsteps. Bill's parents met during the Second World War when his father, ostensibly working for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), worked secretly on creating bombs to wipe out the Nazi's industrial hinterland. They married in Yarm in 1941. After the war in Europe ended in May 1945, Dr Richard Alan Fairclough continued to work for British Intelligence (MI1). Not long after retiring from ICI in the seventies, Richard Fairclough opened and ran an antiquarian book shop business in Yarm until his death in 1987. The book shop was a bit of an enigma as it was also a haunt for spooks. When not gated at St Peter’s School, York Bill Fairclough spent most of his childhood and early teens in the North East of England. As a child in the fifties he was educated at Red House School in Norton. He lived in Billingham and then in a vast white house (once the home of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) in Norton Green overlooking the duck pond. In Bill’s teens, the Faircloughs lived in Middleton St George and later in Yarm. He also lived in flats he rented near nightclubs he helped run during the late sixties and early seventies in Portrack, Stockton-on-Tees and Jesmond in Newcastle upon Tyne. Conveniently for him they were near the offices of the firm of Chartered Accountants he worked for in Middlesbrough and Newcastle upon Tyne. So if you lived, worked or visited any of these places you may well have unwittingly encountered this “spooky” family, been their neighbours or inhabited the houses they lived in. A quick web-search will even disclose some of the addresses where they lived. Mind you, if you live in any of them now, best sweep them for bugs! Details of where the Faircloughs lived and worked are given in most of Bill Fairclough’s bios on the web such as can be found at everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/bill-fairclough. If you were as fascinated as we were, you can also read the raw fact based thriller Beyond Enkription, the first stand-alone novel to be released in The Burlington Files series (theburlingtonfiles.org/#/reviews). It’s a memorable and distinctively different noir espionage thriller based on his and his family’s experiences in 1974.

[@drbartsworldofchemeng]

That is a fantastic bit of history! Thank you for sharing and I'll check out that book!

[@tomspeed2000]

I was 10 years old when i trying getting na from nacl using simple tools , my biggest difficulty was melting salt which need over 800c, i was able to melting salt directly on the flame but it was not melted inside any dishes..

[@nicksgarage8295]

how does the dredger device make sure it does not scoop up electroylte as well, and if so is that an issue. Also the molten sodium does it appear as little sporadic things randomly so wouldnt the dredger need to be moved around so it collects the sodium balls as the appear and disappear in the bath.

[@dimaminiailo3723]

sodium has much greater surface tension than molten NaOH, so it might've had small holes in its spoons (or whatever those scooping things are called), which captured sodium blobs whilst left NaOH behind

[@mahammadshukurzade97]

which country is it ? and date of this video? is it england because industrial revolution began in there?

[@drbartsworldofchemeng]

Yup, this is England in about 1930 or so. The process is much older (late 1800s) but it was run for a long time!

[@ricoricky98]

This looks dangerous ASF

[@drbartsworldofchemeng]

Yup!!

[@thefinalkayakboss]

I saw the size of the 'cut out strip' and that told me all I needed to know