Note 17 — Chapter II · THE COMPOSITION OF WATER, HYDROGEN

When it is required to prepare hydrogen in large quantities for filling balloons, copper vessels or wooden casks lined with lead are employed; they are filled with scrap iron, over which dilute sulphuric acid is poured. The hydrogen generated from a number of casks is carried through lead pipes into special casks containing water (in order to cool the gas) and lime (in order to remove acid fumes). To avoid loss of gas all the joints are made hermetically tight with cement or tar. In order to fill his gigantic balloon (of 25,000 cubic metres capacity), Giffard, in 1878, constructed a complicated apparatus for giving a continuous supply of hydrogen, in which a mixture of sulphuric acid and water was continually run into vessels containing iron, and from which the solution of iron sulphate formed was continually drawn off. When coal gas, extracted from coal, is employed for filling balloons, it should be as light, or as rich in hydrogen, as possible. For this reason, only the last portions of the gas coming from the retorts are collected, and, besides this, it is then sometimes passed through red-hot vessels, in order to decompose the hydrocarbons as much as possible; charcoal is deposited in the red-hot vessels, and hydrogen remains as gas. Coal gas may be yet further enriched in hydrogen, and consequently rendered lighter, by passing it over an ignited mixture of charcoal and lime.

L. Mond (London) proposes to manufacture hydrogen on a large scale from water gas (see infra, and Chapters VIII. and IX.), which contains a mixture of oxide of carbon (CO) and hydrogen, and is produced by the action of steam upon incandescent coke (C + H₂O = CO + H₂). He destroys the oxide of carbon by converting it into carbon and carbonic anhydride (2CO = C + CO₂), which is easily done by means of incandescent, finely-divided metallic nickel; the carbon then remains with the nickel, from which it may be removed by burning it in air, and the nickel can then be used over again (see Chapter IX., Note 24 bis). The CO₂ formed is removed from the hydrogen by passing it through milk of lime. This process should apparently give hydrogen on a large scale more economically than any of the methods hitherto proposed.