Foreword
The first edition of “Manufacture of Soda” was written in my home. I count it a privilege, therefore, to be asked by the author, whom I have known for almost thirty years, to write this Foreword to the Second Edition of his valuable contribution to chemical technology.
I know of no person so eminently fitted for writing on the subject as Dr. T. P. Hou. Dr. Hou is not only a scholar by training but also an engineer and technologist with years of experience in building up China's chemical industries. To him China owed the first and one of the largest alkali plants in the Far East. This was located in Tangku near Tientsin. When fighting began at the Marco Polo Bridge in July, 1937, just a short distance from the plant, it had attained a daily production capacity of some three hundred tons of soda ash, which was a good record on the Continent of Asia.
To him China also owed her new Synthetic Ammonia industry. Saving established the alkali industry in North China, Dr. Hou turned to the great Yangtze Valley to erect the first and largest nitrogen fixation plant in China. Dr. Hou personally supervised the building of the four modern chemical plants at Hsiehchiatien near Nanking, which took three years to complete. In the summer of 1937, the plants were producing 150 tons of ammonia sulfate daily, and the Chinese farmers, sold on the new fertilizer, had booked orders a year ahead. Soon the War of Invasion broke out, interrupting the work.
I w as so impressed with the transformation of the farming village of Hsiehchiatien into a humming industrial town, equipped with modern chemical machinery, that on one of my visits to my homeland I had the American Ambassador, Nelson T. Johnson, and the president of the Export-Import Bank, Warren Lee Pierson, accompany me on a tour of inspection. The statesman and the banker were both pleasantly surprised and impressed.
Time marched on . . . When bombs were falling thick and fast, and when his associates urged him to leave the plants, Dr. Hou said: "My duty to the farmer is to stay on the job. I want to see it through." Dr. Hou caught the last boat to leave Nanking with time to save nothing except a roll of blue prints of the plants. Dr. Hou's contributions are continuing, for far into the interior of Free China he is laying the groundwork for a new chemical industry, despite the difficulties of transportation over the tortuous Burma Road.
It is against such a background that the author was requested by his publishers to prepare this Second Edition of "Manufacture of Soda." It is my privilege to say that he has not spared himself one bit in the
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