While he was still a schoolboy, Herbert Dow invented a "blowing-out" method of extracting bromine from the brine. Instead of boiling the treated brine solution, he trickled it over a burlap curtain and blew a current of air through it. "By passing the bromine-laden air through a body of iron turnings," Dow said in his patent, "the bromine and iron will chemically unite, forming a bromide of iron known as ferric bromide." Because the air was moist, the ferric bromide was in a solution that was an "article of commerce."

Not content with this improvement, Dow tried to use an electric current instead of a chemical treatment to free the bromine from its combined form in the brine. After many failures, he succeeded in obtaining bromine by this method, but he still used the blowing-out technique to transform the elemental bromine into a salable product. Since the original ferric bromide solution was not the form desired by most customers, Dow then converted the bromine into solid products such as zinc, sodium, and potassium bromides. Herbert Dow thus became a late-19th-century successor to the 18th-century pioneers who had established electrochemistry--among them Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, Humphry Davy, and Michael Faraday. His electrolytic cell was the earliest devoted specifically to chemical manufacture, although numerous other such cells were developed in the 1890s, mostly in the Niagara Falls, New York, area where low-cost electricity became available.

Dow became the world's most efficient bromine manufacturer through his successful application of electrochemistry. By 1897, when he established The Dow Chemical Company, he had sufficient experience and financial backing to enter the world market for bromine. However, he soon was in competition with the German master chemists who found it difficult to believe that an American could produce bromine in the backwoods of Michigan more cost-effectively than they could.

In 1905, alarmed by The Dow Chemical Company's intrusion on their markets, the German chemical community determined to crush this newcomer through the Deutsche Bromkonvention, the worldwide bromine cartel. The Dow enterprise survived this effort only by secretly purchasing the cheaper bromides with which the cartel flooded the U.S. market. Dow repackaged the bromides and sold them in Europe, where the cartel maintained a good price for them. This stratagem worked, and the Germans withdrew from the U.S. bromine market. For the first time, an American chemical firm battled the big German chemical companies and won; and by 1909, Herbert Dow was the leading manufacturer of bromides.