In the early 1890s, pioneers of the U.S. chemical industry had begun to form a technological basis for competing with the European giants. Herbert H. Dow was one of the earliest of these trailblazers. As a college chemistry student in Cleveland, Ohio, he became interested in the brine deposits that underlie much of the American Midwest. Here was an almost inexhaustible pool of chemical materials deposited by the evaporation of prehistoric seas, just waiting, he perceived, to be exploited. In fact, where these deposits lay close to the earth's surface, enterprising scientists had already begun to use crude production methods to mine them for chemicals.

To manufacture bromine, for example, a main component of the patent medicines of the day, brine wells were being drilled near West Virginia and Ohio coal mines. After chemicals such as sulfuric acid and bleaching powder were added to free bromine from other elements in the brine, waste from a neighboring coal mine was used to boil the brine until the reddish-brown liquid bromine came off with the steam. In areas of Michigan where lumbering was done, the same process was used, with waste lumber as the fuel source.