The improvements which the Hodgkinson plant has effected in the open-pan system are: the increased production of from 2 to 7 tons of salt from the combustion of 1 ton of coal, the production of the finest table salt without grinding, and of every grade of salt from the flour-fine table to the coarsest fishery salt, in one and the same operation, and the saving of time that is required in all other processes for scraping and cleaning the pans. Its superiority over the Vacuum system lies in the facts that its initial cost is about £4,000, as against anything from £26,000 to £100,000; that the majority of the work being automatic, the expense of specially trained, skilled labour is dispensed with; that it is operated for 24 hours a day as against 20; requires no grinding process in the manufacture of table salt; and produces every grade of salt simultaneously. Sir Thomas Holland, while studying the Hodgkinson process in operation, is said to have exclaimed: “This is not an improvement, it is a revolution”; and in his subsequent report upon the process, he has declared that it “has an enormous advantage over any known process for the production of salt.” CHAPTER VIII THE SALT MARKET Although no purpose would be served by dealing in detail with other of the many schemes that have been elaborated in the past three hundred years for the improvement of brine salt manufacture, the complete list of patents that have been taken out for the purpose constitutes a record of almost unrelieved failure which would occupy many pages. It has always been obvious to every intelligent investigator outside the little circle of salt proprietors, that the open-pan process was a survival of the dark ages, but the principle governing the precipitation of salt from brine is so simple that the equal difficulty presented itself to the practical salt-men, of either effecting further simplification or of securing further economies by the elaboration of the process. Individuals in every generation recognized that the methods of mediaevalism cried aloud for revision, but the salt trade resolutely and consistently set their faces, and their hands, against every suggested innovation. The salt-men were the avowed enemies of Thomas Lowndes, they drove Chrysel back to Saxony, they loaded Furnival with misfortune and landed him in gaol. In 1890, an official of the Salt Union reflected with grim complaisance that, although no trade had had more patents applied to it than the salt trade, no trade could show so large a percentage of failures in the matter of reformed methods, and since all the companies that had brought forward new plants and processes in competition with the Salt Union had come short of success, he piously concluded that the system which had survived the trial of generations must be the fittest.