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Explanation: A brilliant fellow by the name of John Doughty during the US Civil War suggested getting a head start on the atrocity carousel by initiating mass chemical warfare about 50 years early. This is by no means a concerning idea, and Mr. Doughty was doubtlessly a wholly sane and stable individual. Luckily, the suggestion was not adopted.
Funny enough, the Lieber Code adopted by the Union during the Civil War, dealing with the rules of warfare, DOES actually prohibit the use of poison, so this idea would have been illegal even at the time.
The first recorded modern proposal for the use of chemical warfare was made by Lyon Playfair
Hmmm..
Playfair? I think he's lyon'.
What was the cost of chlorine at this point? Were they doing chloralkali at any reasonable scale? If so, this would plausibly have changed the entire evolution of warfare in the late 19th century.
Quick wiki search suggests that they knew about the process at this point, but it wouldn't be done on a commercial scale for another 30 or so years.
Shoot, I probably should have just searched it myself. I guess I was trying to start a conversation.
Depending on how successful chemical warfare hypothetically would have been, it may have helped the process get going faster. To do electrolysis you need DC electricity. At first, the only real source was primary-cell batteries, which are at least as expensive as the materials they're made out of, but Micheal Faraday built the first homopolar generator in 1831 and practical industrial-scale dynamos appeared (simultaneously from multiple inventors) right around the time in question.