Sulphur, Louisiana

Everything Sulphur is known for

0 songs mention this city 1 artist from here

Music in Sulphur

Songs About Sulphur

No songs reference Sulphur yet.

Artists From Sulphur

C
Caden Gillard
country Pop: 15

Rivers & Roads in Song near Sulphur

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Sulphur.

US Route 90 6 songs Interstate 10 23 songs Sabine River 10 songs

History of Sulphur

How Sulphur Got Its Name RoadyGoat

1894

Sulphur is named for the sulfur deposit sitting in the caprock of a buried salt dome right under the town -- not, despite the local joke, for any rotten-egg smell. Sulfur was found about 450 feet down in 1867, but it lay trapped under clay, gravel, and quicksand that flooded every mine shaft from 1867 to 1890. It was simply un-minable. German-American chemist Herman Frasch cracked it in 1894 with what we now call the Frasch process: drill a well, pump superheated water down to melt the sulfur underground, then froth it to the surface with hot compressed air. The first molten sulfur surfaced on December 24, 1894, at ninety-nine point seven percent pure. His Union Sulphur Company, founded in 1896, built the city around it, and commercial-scale production began in 1903.

The Rotten-Egg Smell Isn't Sulfur RoadyGoat

Time to bust the myth this town gets teased about. Pure elemental sulfur is completely odorless. That famous rotten-egg stink everybody blames on sulfur is actually hydrogen sulfide -- a compound of sulfur and hydrogen, not the element itself. And hydrogen sulfide hides a genuinely dangerous trick. At very low concentrations, your nose catches it easily; it's one of the smelliest gases there is. But at high, life-threatening concentrations, the gas rapidly deadens your sense of smell, so it suddenly seems to vanish. The warning smell switches off exactly when the danger is greatest -- which is why workers around it never trust their noses and rely on gas detectors instead. So the town named Sulphur is, fittingly, built on the odorless element, while the smell people joke about comes from a compound that plays a cruel trick on anyone who relies on it.

Sulfuric Acid, King of Chemicals RoadyGoat

That sulfur in the ground feeds one of the most-produced industrial chemicals on Earth: sulfuric acid. The world makes something like two hundred sixty million tonnes of it a year. It's so central to industry that, as recently as 2002, an economist could gauge a country's industrial strength by how much sulfuric acid it produced -- when you build things, you use this acid somewhere along the line. But the biggest single use isn't steel or batteries. About sixty percent of all sulfuric acid goes into making fertilizer, where it's used to turn raw phosphate rock into a form crops can actually absorb. So this acid, quietly and almost invisibly, helps feed the entire world's food supply -- a chemical most people have never thought about, working behind nearly everything that grows.

Everything Near Sulphur

9 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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