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Sulphur, Louisiana

Everything Sulphur is known for

4 songs mention this city 1 artist from here

RoadyGoat plays music like this when you drive through Sulphur. It's free on iPhone, and full songs play through Apple Music.

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Music in Sulphur

Songs About Sulphur

Sulphur
Drown in Sulphur
82%
"TITLE"
Sulphur Song
John Tussey
80%
"TITLE"
Sulphur Song
The Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns
78%
"TITLE"
Texas in Louisiana
Julia Cole
3%
"Can't fit Texas, Texas in Louisiana"

Artists From Sulphur

C
Caden Gillard
country

Rivers & Roads in Song near Sulphur

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Sulphur.

US Route 90 9 songs Interstate 10 36 songs Sabine River 13 songs Neches River 2 songs

History of Sulphur

How Sulphur Got Its Name RoadyGoat

1894

Sulphur is named for the sulfur deposit sitting in the caprock of a buried salt dome right under the town -- not, despite the local joke, for any rotten-egg smell. Sulfur was found about 450 feet down in 1867, but it lay trapped under clay, gravel, and quicksand that flooded every mine shaft from 1867 to 1890. It was simply un-minable. German-American chemist Herman Frasch cracked it in 1894 with what we now call the Frasch process: drill a well, pump superheated water down to melt the sulfur underground, then froth it to the surface with hot compressed air. The first molten sulfur surfaced on December 24, 1894, at ninety-nine point seven percent pure. His Union Sulphur Company, founded in 1896, built the city around it, and commercial-scale production began in 1903.

The Rotten-Egg Smell Isn't Sulfur RoadyGoat

Time to bust the myth this town gets teased about. Pure elemental sulfur is completely odorless. That famous rotten-egg stink everybody blames on sulfur is actually hydrogen sulfide -- a compound of sulfur and hydrogen, not the element itself. And hydrogen sulfide hides a genuinely dangerous trick. At very low concentrations, your nose catches it easily; it's one of the smelliest gases there is. But at high, life-threatening concentrations, the gas rapidly deadens your sense of smell, so it suddenly seems to vanish. The warning smell switches off exactly when the danger is greatest -- which is why workers around it never trust their noses and rely on gas detectors instead. So the town named Sulphur is, fittingly, built on the odorless element, while the smell people joke about comes from a compound that plays a cruel trick on anyone who relies on it.

Sulfuric Acid, King of Chemicals RoadyGoat

That sulfur in the ground feeds one of the most-produced industrial chemicals on Earth: sulfuric acid. The world makes something like two hundred sixty million tonnes of it a year. It's so central to industry that, as recently as 2002, an economist could gauge a country's industrial strength by how much sulfuric acid it produced -- when you build things, you use this acid somewhere along the line. But the biggest single use isn't steel or batteries. About sixty percent of all sulfuric acid goes into making fertilizer, where it's used to turn raw phosphate rock into a form crops can actually absorb. So this acid, quietly and almost invisibly, helps feed the entire world's food supply -- a chemical most people have never thought about, working behind nearly everything that grows.

Everything Near Sulphur

9 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

  • How Sulphur Got Its Name

    Sulphur is named for the sulfur deposit sitting in the caprock of a buried salt dome right under the town -- not, despite the local joke, for any rotten-egg smell. Sulfur was found about 450 feet down in 1867, but it…

  • The Rotten-Egg Smell Isn't Sulfur · 0.3 mi

    Time to bust the myth this town gets teased about. Pure elemental sulfur is completely odorless. That famous rotten-egg stink everybody blames on sulfur is actually hydrogen sulfide -- a compound of sulfur and hydrogen,…

  • Sulfuric Acid, King of Chemicals · 0.4 mi

    That sulfur in the ground feeds one of the most-produced industrial chemicals on Earth: sulfuric acid. The world makes something like two hundred sixty million tonnes of it a year. It's so central to industry that, as…

  • Brimstone, Gunpowder, and Matches · 0.4 mi

    The old word for sulfur is brimstone -- literally meaning burning stone, and the name fits. Sulfur is one of the three ingredients in gunpowder: roughly seventy-five percent saltpeter, fifteen percent charcoal, and ten…

  • Sulfur Is in Every Tire You Drive On · 0.7 mi

    Here's a fact you can feel under your wheels right now. In 1839 Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped a mix of rubber and sulfur onto a hot stove. Raw rubber normally goes soft and gummy when heated -- but instead of…

  • The Mine That Was Really a Kettle · 0.7 mi

    The Frasch process worked less like a mine and more like a giant underground kettle. Sulfur melts at around one hundred fifteen degrees Celsius, so Frasch pumped superheated water -- about one hundred sixty-five degrees…

  • The Pirate's Festival Capital · 9.6 mi

    Lake Charles bills itself as the Festival Capital of Louisiana, and its signature blowout is built on a pirate legend. Local lore holds that buccaneer Jean Lafitte stashed loot along Contraband Bayou here while running…

  • Lake Charles, LA · 10.5 mi · Local history

    Lake Charles, Louisiana, owes its name to an early French settler, Charles Sallier. Sallier arrived in the area in the late 1700s, drawn to the fertile lands along the Calcasieu River. The lake that now bears his name…

  • DeQuincy station · 15.3 mi · Scraped Hmdb

    Pull into DeQuincy, and you're stepping back into the golden age of railroads. This spot was once a bustling hub thanks to the Kansas City Southern Depot. Built in 1903, the depot served passengers and freight for…

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