At the age of 24 he took out his first
patent which was a portable alarm to attach to clocks and watches. The purpose of this was to wake his French tutor to begin his lessons early. After working for a time as manager at Ardwick Bridge in a factory owned by the
Tennant Company, During this time Gossage experimented with a method of absorbing the
hydrochloric acid gas released as a result of the
Leblanc process of manufacturing alkali. He filled a derelict windmill with gorse and brushwood, introduced the gas at the bottom, and water at the top, and found that little or no fumes remained at the top. He developed this technique into the
Gossage tower, using a deep bed of
coke in a high tower to absorb the gas. The Gossage condensing towers were eventually used almost universally by the Leblanc factories. From 1841 to 1844 Gossage was in
Birmingham manufacturing
white lead and from 1844 to 1848 he was in
Neath,
Wales, experimenting with
copper smelting. Following another experiment, consisting of adding
sodium silicate to
soda ash, he discovered he could produce soap at a much lower cost than by the methods existing at the time and in 1855 he gave up making alkali to set up his soap works. Two years later he started to add
pigments to his soap, producing mottled soap, his 'blue mottled' soap being famous both in the UK and abroad. This became extremely successful commercially under the
brand name of
Gossage. The soap was exhibited at the International Exhibition of 1862 in London where it won a prize medal for "excellence in quality". Gossage continued to experiment throughout the rest of his career and his patents totalled over 50. One of his patents was an attempt to make alkali by the
ammonia-soda process and another to recover sulphur from alkali waste. ==Personal and political==