Abstract
CHEMISTS of many lands have contributed to our knowledge of the metal aluminium. Davy, in 1807, tried in vain to reduce alumina by means of the electric current. Oerstedt, the Dane, in 1824 pointed out that the metal could be obtained by treating the chloride with an alkali metal; this was accomplished in Germany by Wöhler in 1827, and more completely in 1845, whilst in 1854, Bunsen showed how the metal can be obtained by electrolysis. But it is to France, by the hands of Henri St. Claire Deville, in the same year, that the honour belongs of having first prepared aluminium in a state of purity, and of obtaining it on a scale which enabled its valuable properties to be recognized and made available, and the bar of “silver-white metal from clay,” was one of the chemical wonders in the first Paris Exhibition of 1855. Now England and America step in, and I have this evening to relate the important changes which further investigation has effected in the metallurgy of aluminium. The process suggested by Oerstedt, carried out by Wöhler, and modified by Deville, remains in principle unchanged. The metal is prepared, as before, by a reduction of the double chloride of aluminium and sodium, by means of metallic sodium in presence of cryolite; and it is therefore not so much a description of a new reaction as of improvements of old ones of which I have to speak.
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Aluminium1. Nature 40, 182–186 (1889). https://doi.org/10.1038/040182a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/040182a0