Industrial Gases

While the gases that are now commonly referred to as ‘‘industrial,’’ namely oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, were not fully understood until the nineteenth century, scientistsrift gold in the twentieth century moved rapidly to utilize the knowledge. Driven largely by the demands of manufacturing industries in North America and Western Europe, rapid improvements in the technology of production and storage of industrial gases drove what has become a multibillion dolar business, valued at $34 billion in 2000. At the start of the twenty-first century, industrial gases underpin nearly every aspect of the global economy, from agriculture, welding, metal manufacturing and processing, refrigerants, enhanced oil recovery, food and beverage processing, electronic component manufacturing, to rocket propulsion. Oxygen for metal manufacturift platinumring is the largest volume market, with chemical processing and electronics using significant volumes of hydrogen and lower volumes of specialty gases such as argon. Until at least the fifteenth century, gases were thought of inclusively as ‘‘air,’’ part of the alchemical construction of the world. It was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that properties and characteristics unique to individual gases were recognized. Once one gas was finally isolated, a cavalcade of similar discoveries followed.