Daily Arizona silver belt., 1907-05-09
FINDS A WAY 0F
 MAKING COPPER
Titled Englishman Announces Process of Manufacturing Red Metal by Con- bining Sodium, Lithium and Potas- sium and Segregation.
A special to the New York Times

A special to the New York Time | from Baltimore says:
 | The Sun says today that, accordin, to advices received at the Johns Hop kins university from England, thu world s source of copper production il to be radically changed within the nex few years:
 At meeting of the chemical semin ary at the university last Saturday morning it was secretly announced tt the members of the department tha' President Ira Ramsen had just received private communication from the dis tinguished English chemist, Sir William
 Ramsay of Cambridge university, that he had succeeded in accomplishing what no other chemist has been able to do-- the segregation of one element from another and the production of copper by the synthetic or combination pro cess from the clements of sodium, lithi um and potassium. A combination oi these elements, when treated with ra dium vapor, gives us product copper sulphate, which is readily broken down into copper. Such is the substance of his experiments.
 Sir William Ramsay has not yet an. nounced his discovery to the public but will give full account of it in q paper which he will read before meet ing of the Royal Chemical society of Great Britain, which will meet in Lon. don Saturday. In his letter to Dr. Ramsen Sir William spoke of his dis covery in q modest way, and earnestly desired that nothing be said of it pub licly until after the reading of his paper in London.
 The chemists at Johns Hopkins are reticent on the subject of this great contribution to science and commercial industry. President Ramsen is absent in the west He delivered a speech at the Western Reserve university at Cleveland last night.
 Professor Harmon N. Morse, subdi. rector of the chemical laboratory at John Hopkins and professor of analyt. ieal chemistry, declined to speak of the matter until after Saturday. The other members of the department are equally silent upon the subject, but one of them even went so far as to intimate that if the discovery of Professor Ramsay were true it would be one of the great. est achievements in the realm of chem. istry.
 Such a discovery would not only be of great value as a purely scientific in vestigation, but it would be of equal value in its application to commerce and the arts. If copper can be made synthetically by such a process as the English scientist will attempt to dem onstrate, it's influence upon the copper mines of the world will be untold. In all probability, the effect would be somewhat similar to that of the artif. eial production of ice by the ammonia process as compared to that of the nat ural method of ice cutting on the rivers in the winter.
 Its effect upon Baltimore will un- doubtedly be highly important, as this city ranks among the foremost in the world in the copper smelting industry, the Baltimore Smelting X Rolling com pany, under the direction of R. Brent Keyser, being the largest in the world
 Considered from the purely scientific viewpoint, the discovery of Professor Ramsay is without a parallel in the field of chemistry. Never have scien- lists been able to pass from one ele. ment to another, although some have imagined that such a thing might be possible. An element is supposed to be irreducible. Although in several eases elements have been resolved into subdivisions, which in their turn have been elassed as clements, it has never been rendered possible to pass from one element to what seemed to be another totally different one.
 Speaking of the practical use to which Sir William Ramsay's experiment might be put, member of the chemical de- partment at Johns Hopkins said;
 "Of course the use of radium vapor
 aff would be far too expensive for immedi- ate commercial use, but it. seems prob able that such device marks but starting point in the synthetic pro luction of copper. In all probability, now that the start has been made, the process will be gradually worked out lntil some substance has been found whose value will render the production if copper by the synthetic method more than the natural method now n vogue"
 With the greatest eagerness scicn- ists all over the world are awaiting he explanation of the experiments which Sir William has been carrying m in his laboratory at Cambridge, and | t seems probable that within a short ime a score of chemists will be busy n different parts of the world develop ng the method which will be outlined | n London tomorrow.