Hamilton Castner

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Hamilton Castner

Hamilton Young Castner (born September 11, 1858 in Brooklyn , † October 11, 1899 in Saranac Lake , Franklin County (New York) ) was an American chemical industrialist.

Life

He attended the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and then the Columbia University School of Mines , which he left without a degree in 1879 to join his brother EB Castner as a consulting chemist.

In 1884 he left the business to develop a process for producing aluminum by reducing aluminum chloride using soda . Soda was relatively expensive at the time, and he developed a significantly cheaper process for reducing caustic soda using carbon. Since he failed to interest American industrialists in it, he went to England in 1886.

In 1887 his practice helped found the Aluminum Crown Metal Company (along with the Webster Crown Metal Company) in Oldbury , of which he was Technical Director, which produced high purity aluminum and lowered aluminum prices. In 1886, however, the Hall-Héroult process was invented, which made its aluminum production process obsolete in 1889. So he looked for new uses for his cheap soda, such as the production of sodium peroxide as a bleach and sodium cyanide for gold mines. A process for obtaining sodium cyanide is known as the Castner-Kellner process (like the amalgam process for chlor-alkali electrolysis ). A process for the production of articles from graphite and a process for the production of sodium from sodium hydroxide by electrolysis are also named after Castner.

In 1890 he and his chief chemist Harry Baker (1859-1935) developed a process for the production of high-purity caustic soda by electrolysis of brine in a membrane cell ( rocking cell ) with mercury ( Castner-Kellner process ). The sodium hydroxide then served as the starting point for the production of alkali metals by electrolysis. When he wanted to patent his process, he learned that Karl Kellner had already patented an identical process in 1894, which he had transferred to Solvay in Belgium. In order to avoid legal disputes, Castner's Aluminum Company was combined with the Solvay Company in 1895 to form the Castner-Kellner Alkali Company , which took over the British Aluminum Company in 1897 and built the largest plant for chlor-alkali electrolysis in Runcorn . Production according to the method began in Great Britain in 1896. Castner and Kellner divided the sales areas.

In 1895 he became Vice President of Niagara Electrochemical Co., where his process was used in the United States. Production there began in 1897. Castner also developed a method of graphitizing carbon in 1896, resulting in longer-life electrodes for electrolysis, and in 1894 he developed methods of extracting pure cyanides for gold extraction (one of the methods had sodium carbonate, coal and ammonia as Starting materials).

Castner died of tuberculosis. Due to the illness, he returned to the USA in 1898.

In 1900, under the direction of a son of Friedrich Ernst Roessler with Castner's patents, the Castner Electrolytic Alkali Company was founded near Niagara Falls in the USA as a subsidiary of the Mathiesen Alkali Works .

literature

  • Fifty Years of Progress 1895-1945 of the Castner Kellner Alkali Company
  • David Platt: A History of The Castner Kellner Alkali Company (Celebrating 100 Years of Production 1897)
  • Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 80f

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fred Aftalion: A History of the International Chemical Industry . University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1991, ISBN 0-8122-8207-8 , pp. 89 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  2. ↑ Alan E. Comyns, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Named Processes in Chemical Technology, CRC Press, 4th edition 2014, p. 58. There the sodium cyanide process is referred to only after Castner, for example in Holleman-Wiberg, Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry, De Gruyter 2007, p. 912, after both. George Beilby introduced a similar procedure around the same time.
  3. ^ Alan E. Comyns, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Named Processes in Chemical Technology, CRC Press, 4th Edition 2014, p. 58
  4. ^ E. Otho Glover, RC Gale, Isidor Joseph, HH Dale, CEL Livesey, Harold King, RH Hopkins, WAH Naylor, WM Gathorne Young, CA Browne: Obituary notices: Harry Baker, 1859-1935; Kendall Colin Browning, 1875-1936; William Frederic Butcher, 1867-1936; Harold Ward Dudley, 1887-1935; Charles Richmond Featherstone, 1885-1936; George Aleck Crocker Gough, 1902-1935; Max Henius, 1859-1935; Francis Ransom, 1859-1935; William Charles Young, 1849-1935; Samuel Cox Hooker, 1864-1935 . In: J. Chem. Soc. 1936, p. 539-553 , doi : 10.1039 / JR9360000539 .
  5. ↑ cavemanchemistry.com: Hamilton Castner
  6. ↑ logo.at: From End-of-Pipe Technology to Clean Technology: (PDF; 2.1 MB)
  7. ^ The Electrochemical Industry and Niagara Falls: Castner Electric Alkali Company ( Memento August 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Castner, Hamilton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Castner, Hamilton Young (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemical industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn
DATE OF DEATH October 11, 1899
Place of death Saranac Lake , Franklin County (New York)