Gay-Lussac in 181q, is usually obtained in the form of its barium salt by suspending freshly precipitated hydrated manganese dioxide in water and passing sulphur dioxide into the mixture until all is dissolved; the barium salt is then precipitated by the careful addition of barium hydroxide.
Now, however, the mottled soaps, blue and grey, are produced by working colouring matter, ultramarine for blue, and manganese dioxide for grey, into the soap in the frame, and mottling is very far from being a certificate of excellence of quality.
Oxidation may be effected by the addition to the glass mixture of a substance which gives up oxygen at a high temperature, such as manganese dioxide or arsenic trioxide.
A certain proportion of soda ash (carbonate of soda) is also used in some works in sheet-glass mixtures, while " decolorizers " (substances intended to remove or reduce the colour of the glass) are also sometimes added, those most generally used being manganese dioxide and arsenic. Another essential ingredient of all glass mixtures containing sulphate of soda is some form of carbon, which is added either as coke, charcoal or anthracite coal; the carbon so introduced aids the reducing substances contained in the atmosphere of the furnace in bringing about the reduction of the sulphate of soda to a condition in which it combines more readily with the silicic acid of the sand.
It is also obtained by the action of hydrogen peroxide on hydrocyanic acid, or of manganese dioxide and sulphuric acid on potassium cyanide.
