Salt Quotes (4)
Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry.
Broca's Brain: The Romance of Science (1979), footnote. Except reprinted as 'Can We Know the Universe? Reflections on a Grain of Salt,' in John Carey, Eyewitness to Science (1997), 437.
See also: | Chemistry (87) | Chlorine (6) | Gas (11) | Poison (17) | Property (11) | Sodium (7) | Substance (7) | War (51) | Weapon (24)
From common salt are obtained chemically as primary derivatives chlorine—both a war gas and a means of purifying water; and 'caustic soda.' … [O]n the chlorine side there is obtained chloride of lime, (a bleaching powder and a disinfectant), chloroform (an anesthetic), phosgene (a frightful ware gas), chloroacetophenone (another war gas), and an indigo and a yellow dye. [O]n the soda side we get metallic sodium, from which are derived sodium cyanide (a disinfectant), two medicines with [long] names, another war gas, and a beautiful violet dye. Thus, from a healthful, preservative condiment come things useful and hurtful—according to the intent or purpose.
The Homiletic Review, Vol. 83-84 (1922), Vol. 83, 209.
The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
Quoted in Reader's Digest (Apr 1964). In M. P. Singh, Quote Unquote (2007), 94.
[Professor Bragg asserts that] In sodium chloride there appear to be no molecules represented by NaCl. The equality in number of sodium and chlorine atoms is arrived at by a chess-board pattern of these atoms; it is a result of geometry and not of a pairing- off of the atoms.
In Henry E. Armstrong, 'Poor Common Salt!', Nature, 1927, 120, 478.