James Muspratt - Industry

Industry

Returning to Dublin in about 1814, he came into an inheritance and in 1818 established a chemical works in partnership with Thomas Abbott. Here he began to manufacture chemical products such as hydrochloric and acetic acids and turpentine, adding prussiate of potash a few years later.

Sodium carbonate, also known as soda ash, is an effective industrial alkali. The manufacture of sodium carbonate from common salt was first developed in France in the 1790s and known as the Leblanc process. Muspratt was attracted towards manufacturing it, but could not raise the capital for the relatively expensive Leblanc plant and also considered that Dublin was not a suitable location for this. He perceived Merseyside as better because of the neighbouring coal fields, the proximity to the salt district of Cheshire, and the proximity to glassmaking industry. The glassmakers were the main prospective customer base for the sodium carbonate alkali.

In 1822 he went to Liverpool and took a lease of an abandoned glass-works on the bank of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Though already determined to work the Leblanc process, he did not immediately possess the capital for it, and he therefore continued the production of prussiate of potash, which was profitable, and plough the profits into building the lead chambers and the other necessaries of a complete Leblanc works. Fortuitously in 1823 the duty or tax of £30 per ton was taken off salt. He began to make sodium carbonate alkali by the Leblanc process in 1823.

In 1828 he built works at St Helens, Merseyside, in partnership with Josias Gamble, another Irish-born chemist. But after two years the partnership ended and Muspratt moved to Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside. This factory closed in 1851.

He was repeatedly involved in litigation because of the pollution caused. In 1828 he was cited as causing a public nuisance and fined one shilling. In 1831 he was indicted but was acquitted on this occasion. In 1838 after a trial lasting three days, with 40 witnesses for the prosecution and 46 for the defence, a jury found Muspratt guilty of "creating and maintaining a nuisance". At this time he was employing 120 on the Vauxhall Road site which had two chimneys, one of which was 50 yards high.