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.

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

1884 he left the office, in order to develop a process for the production of aluminum by reduction of aluminum chloride using sodium carbonate. Soda at the time was relatively expensive, and he developed a significantly more favorable process for the reduction of caustic soda by means of carbon. Since he failed to interest American industrialist for it, he went in 1886 to England.

In 1887 his method was helpful in establishing the Aluminum Company in Oldbury, the aluminum produced from high purity. 1886, however, the Hall - Heroult process was invented, what his process for aluminum production in 1889 made ​​redundant. Therefore, he sought new applications for its cheap soda, such as the production of sodium peroxide as a bleaching agent and sodium cyanide for gold mines.

In 1890, he developed and his chief chemist Harry Baker ( 1859-1935 ), a method for producing high purity caustic soda by electrolysis of brine in a membrane cell ( rocking cell) with mercury. When he tried to patent it, he learned that Karl Kellner had in 1894 already patented an identical procedure, which he had transferred Solvay in Belgium. To avoid litigation, Cast Listeners Aluminium Company was founded in 1895 combined with the Solvay Company to Castner - Kellner Alkali Company, which in 1897 the British Aluminum Company took over in Runcorn and built the largest plant for chlor-alkali electrolysis.

Castner died of tuberculosis disease.

1900 Castner Electrolytic Alkali If the Company founded as a subsidiary of Mathiesen Alkali Works under the direction of a son of Friedrich Ernst Roessler with Cast former patents in the United States at Niagara.