Henry ("Harry"). Livingstone Sulman, a British chemist and metallurgist, was the son of Thomas Sulman and his wife Mary Ann. He studied and graduated at the University of Chicago and published his first paper, "The examination of commercial glycerine", in The Analyst in 1886, with Edward E. Barry as second author. For a number of years he worked as chemist or manager of various chemical plants in Bristol and London. His next paper, "Improvements in gold extraction", appeared in the Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy (Britain) in 1895 and was also issued as a pamphlet (London, 1895, 32 pp). It dealt with the recently introduced McArthur-Forrest cyanide process. That same year Sulman came to South Africa and as a visitor delivered "Notes on the behaviour of the haloid elements in conjunction with the cyanide process" at the May meeting of the Chemical and Metallurgical Society of South Africa in Johannesburg. His paper was published in the society's Proceedings (Vol. 1, pp. 109-122). However, before the paper was even delivered the president of the society, William Bettel*, criticised it in the South African Mining Journal. Unfortunately Bettel could not attend the meeting at which Sulman read his paper, having broken his leg in an accident. Sulman said that he could not understand the reason for Bettel's premature and hostile criticism and the chairman of the meeting called the president's conduct "most unprofessional".
In 1897 Sulman and Frank L. Teed described "The Sulman-Teed (bromo-cyanide) process of gold extraction" in the Journal of the Society for Chemical Industry. At that time he had settled in the Cape Colony. In 1905, with Hugh Kirkpatrick Piccard and John Ballot*, he was working on an improved method of concentrating ores. The next year he and Piccard applied for a patent relating to this process. In collaboration with others Sulman was granted many other patents relating to ore beneficiation, for example a ball grinding mill (1900), the recovery of zinc oxide from zinc ores (1908), ore concentration (1910), a wet process for the treatment of ores (1910), the deposition of metallic salts from solutions (1913), the recovery of nickel from its ores (1914), the extraction of lead from its ores (1918) and the extraction of zinc from its ores (1919). Sulman and Picard later wrote a book on The theory of concentration processes involving surface tension (1920), dealing with the process of flotation and the phenomenon of capillarity. They are credited with the introduction of the froth flotation process for the concentration of ores.
