It is thanks to these products, the fruit of the chloralkali process, that we can expect clean drinking water and clean living conditions. It’s still easy to lose sight of just what a revolution it was when, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, soaps and detergents went from being expensive, artisanal creations to mass-produced items. The availability of cheap soaps and sanitary items arguably helped increase life expectancy more than any other innovation over the past couple of centuries. And at the very heart of this revolution was salt.
