This salt may be prepared by digesting flowers of sulphur with sodium sulphite solution or by boiling sulphur with milk of lime.
Ashland has large saw-mills, iron and steel rolling mills, foundries and machine shops, railway repair shops (of the Chicago & NorthWestern railway), knitting works, and manufactories of dynamite, sulphite fibre, charcoal and wood-alcohol.
Oxy-salts of gold are almost unknown, but the sulphite and thiosulphate form double salts.
The manufacture of alcohol from the sulphite lyes of the wood-pulp industry was contemplated, but carbide, although produced in increasing quantities, was not considered as a possible raw material owing to its greater importance as a source of the fertilizer cyanamide.
In Sweden, where wood pulp is made in enormous quantities, the manufacture of alcohol from the waste sulphite lyes is carried on, and it was estimated that in 1920 the probable capacity was in the neighbourhood of 8,000,000 gal.; the actual production, however, amounted to about 2,750,000 gal.