# Sulfuric acid production > The industrial acid made by burning sulfur - Date: c. 1500 - Era: Renaissance - Domain: [Materials & Chemistry](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/materials/) - Rebuild stage: IV (Science & industry) - Difficulty: 4/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/sulfuric-acid-production/ Sulfuric acid is a strong acid made in industry from sulfur, at first in lead chambers and today by the contact process with a solid catalyst. It became a base of the chemical industry, and most of it now goes into phosphate fertilisers. It was already being prepared in Europe by the sixteenth century, and from the 1740s Joshua Ward's works near London made it on a commercial scale by burning sulfur. ![Sulfuric acid production · The industrial acid made by burning sulfur](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.BpzNxXxx_1Fxb2E.webp) ## Legend 1. Sulfur burners 2. Lead chamber in its timber frame 3. Glover tower 4. Gay-Lussac tower 5. Chimney ## What it is Sulfuric acid is a dense, oily, colourless liquid made of sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen. It was long called oil of vitriol, because it was first obtained by heating vitriols, the crystalline sulfates of metals such as green vitriol, a sulfate of iron. Since the eighteenth century it has been made on a large scale from sulfur itself. ![A small stoppered glass bottle of clear, oily liquid standing beside a few pale blue-green crystals on a wooden board](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.D63GAQIA_2oRIYN.webp) _Oil of vitriol and green vitriol, the iron sulfate from which it was first obtained._ Few industries do without it. Its largest single use is making phosphoric acid for fertilisers. It is also used to refine oil, to dissolve metals out of their ores, to clean steel before coating, to make detergents and wood pulp, and as the acid of the [lead-acid battery](/en/inventions/lead-acid-battery/). Sulfuric acid burns the skin and eyes, and its mist harms the lungs; mixed with some household cleaners it gives off strong heat and acid vapour. Its manufacture is heavy chemical industry, run in licensed plants under strict control, and it is not a process to try anywhere else. ## How it works Industrial sulfuric acid is made from sulfur. The difficulty is getting the sulfur to take up enough oxygen, a reaction that runs only very slowly on its own, and the two industrial processes differ in how they speed it up. In the lead-chamber process, nitrogen oxides carry the oxygen. The process is named after the large rooms lined with sheet lead in which the reaction took place, as lead was the only common metal that stood up to the acid for long. Chamber acid was fairly weak. ![A lump of bright yellow native sulfur crystals next to a cluster of brassy, cube-shaped pyrite crystals on a slab of rock](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.Duur2g66_Z1oI8Iz.webp) _Native sulfur and pyrite, two raw materials of the acid works._ In the contact process, the work is done by a solid catalyst, a substance that speeds the reaction without being used up: platinum at first, later mostly vanadium oxide. The contact process gives strong acid and oleum, a fuming acid that the chamber process could not make. The sulfur first came as brimstone. Later, works also used the sulfurous gases given off when smelters roasted pyrite and the sulfide ores of metals such as copper and zinc. Today most sulfur is recovered from oil and natural gas during refining, and metal smelters still turn part of their waste gas into acid. ## History and evolution Alchemists obtained oil of vitriol from vitriols, and in Europe the acid was being prepared by the sixteenth century at the latest. For centuries Nordhausen, in the Harz, supplied the German lands with a fuming acid made from vitriol, which took the town's name. Chemists also knew that burning sulfur could give the same acid. Joshua Ward, a London seller of patent medicines, was making the acid by burning sulfur at Twickenham in the 1740s. In 1746, in Birmingham, John Roebuck and Samuel Garbett replaced Ward's fragile glass vessels with chambers of wood lined with sheet lead, which could be built far larger and greatly reduced the cost of the acid. They later opened a bigger works at Prestonpans, near Edinburgh. Their acid was sold above all to bleachers of linen, who used it to sour their cloth. ![Lumps of grey phosphate rock and a few broken bones lying beside an open sack of grey powdered fertiliser](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.B-VvBQT5_ZLBTwa.webp) _Bones and phosphate rock, early raw materials of superphosphate fertiliser._ New industries then took ever more acid. The Leblanc process, patented in France in 1791, used the acid to make soda from salt. In 1842 John Bennet Lawes patented superphosphate, a phosphate fertiliser made with the acid; in 1843 he opened a factory at Deptford to make it. The tower of the French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac recovered the nitrogen oxides leaving the chambers, and in the 1860s the tower of John Glover spread through British works and sent them back into the process. Peregrine Phillips, of Bristol, patented the contact process with a platinum catalyst in 1831, but for decades the method found no industrial use. In 1875 Clemens Winkler, at the mining academy of Freiberg in Saxony, took it up to make oleum, which the new dye industry needed to produce artificial alizarin, a red dye made from coal tar. Rudolf Knietsch then developed it at BASF in Ludwigshafen, where gas purification and cooling made it reliable. In time the contact process replaced the lead chambers almost everywhere. ## Key facts - Prepared in Europe: By the 16th century - First lead chambers: Roebuck and Garbett, Birmingham, 1746 - Contact process patented: Peregrine Phillips, Bristol, 1831 - Main use today: Phosphate fertilisers ## Requires - [Glass](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/glass/): Melted sand you can see through (c. 2,500 BCE) - [Lead Smelting](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/lead-smelting/): Lead from galena, and the silver hidden in it (c. 4,200 BCE) - [Distillation](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/distillation/): Separating liquids by boiling and condensing (c. 300) ## Leads to - [Hydrogen fuel cell](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/hydrogen-fuel-cell/): Electricity from hydrogen and oxygen (1838) ## Sources - [Vitriole: Verbindungen zwischen Alchemie und Chemie (Mitteilungen 27, 2023, pp. 22–41)](https://en.gdch.de/fileadmin/downloads/Netzwerk_und_Strukturen/Fachgruppen/Geschichte_der_Chemie/Mitteilungen_Band_27/2023_27_3_karpenko.pdf), Vladimír Karpenko, Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, Fachgruppe Geschichte der Chemie - [Sulfuric Acid (Chemical Compounds)](https://www.encyclopedia.com/science-and-technology/chemistry/compounds-and-elements/sulfuric-acid), Gale, via Encyclopedia.com - [Sulfur: History, Technology, Applications and Industry (G. Kutney), publisher's description](https://shop.elsevier.com/books/sulfur/kutney/978-1-895198-67-6), ChemTec Publishing, Elsevier - [Joshua Ward](https://twickenham-museum.org.uk/?p=2311), Twickenham Museum - [Joshua Ward 1684–1761](https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/cp119760/joshua-ward), Science Museum Group - [Die Schule der Chemie (1881), § 207: Rauchende Schwefelsäure oder Vitriolöl](https://digital.ub.uni-paderborn.de/download/pdf/8020734.pdf), Julius Adolph Stöckhardt, via Universitätsbibliothek Paderborn - [Roebuck Develops the Lead-Chamber Process](https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/roebuck-develops-lead-chamber-process), EBSCO Research Starters - [John Roebuck](https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Roebuck), Encyclopaedia Britannica - [Roebuck, John (Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography; Oxford Companion to British History)](https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/technology-biographies/john-roebuck), Encyclopedia.com - [Sulphuric Acid (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, 1911)](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Sulphuric_Acid), Wikisource - [Das Kontaktverfahren: Eine Innovation aus dem sächsischen Hüttenwesen (Mitteilungen 25, 2017)](https://gdch.de/fileadmin/downloads/Netzwerk_und_Strukturen/Fachgruppen/Geschichte_der_Chemie/Mitteilungen_Band_25/2017-25-08_neu.pdf), Mike Haustein, Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, Fachgruppe Geschichte der Chemie - [Towering chemist: John Glover](https://heatonhistorygroup.org/2024/09/20/towering-chemist-john-glover/), Heaton History Group - [Making the Process (Distillations)](https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/making-the-process/), Science History Institute - [Leblanc Develops Soda Production](https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/leblanc-develops-soda-production), EBSCO Research Starters - [A visual history of Rothamsted](https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pages/history-heritage/visual-history-of-rothamsted.pdf), Rothamsted Research - [Sir John Bennet Lawes (Nature 62, 1900)](https://www.nature.com/articles/062467a0.pdf), Nature - [A brief history of Rothamsted Experimental Station](https://www.harpenden-history.org.uk/harpenden-history/topics-cms/farms-and-farming/a_brief_history_of_rothamsted_experimental_), Harpenden Local History Society - [Sulfuric Acid Supply Chain: Full Profile (EPA 817-F-22-052)](https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-03/Sulfuric%20Acid%20Supply%20Chain%20Profile.pdf), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - [Chemical Economics Handbook: Sulfur (abstract)](https://www.spglobal.com/content/dam/spglobal/ci/en/documents/products/pdf/CI_0825_Global_CEH_Sulfur_Abstract.pdf), S&P Global Commodity Insights - [Chemical Economics Handbook: Sulfuric Acid (abstract): phosphate fertilisers as the largest share of world consumption](https://www.spglobal.com/content/dam/spglobal/ci/en/documents/products/pdf/CI_0325_Global_CEH_Sulfuric_Acid_Abstract.pdf), S&P Global Commodity Insights - [Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025: Sulfur](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-sulfur.pdf), U.S. Geological Survey - [The Most Important Industrial Chemical in the World… and a Lesson Learned](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/technology-history/most-important-industrial-chemical-worldand-lesson-learned), McGill University Office for Science and Society - [ToxFAQs: Sulfur Trioxide and Sulfuric Acid](https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/ToxFAQs/ToxFAQsDetails.aspx?faqid=255&toxid=47), Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (CDC) - [Evolution of catalysts design and synthesis (W. Y. Teoh), chapter 1, sample](https://application.wiley-vch.de/books/sample/3527344152_c01.pdf), Wiley-VCH - [Superphosphate (Technology in Australia 1788–1988)](https://austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/603.html), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering Fact-checked on 2026-10-22. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/sulfuric-acid-production/ · © The Last Codex. Texts, plates and figures: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.