10 Facts About Hamilton Castner

Hamilton Young Castner was an American industrial chemist.

Hamilton Castner was born in Brooklyn, New York and educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, then at the Columbia University School of Mines.

Hamilton Castner left without a degree and in 1879 joined his brother, E B Castner, as a consulting chemist.

Hamilton Castner left this business around 1884 and worked to devise a process for manufacturing aluminium by reducing aluminium chloride with sodium.

Sodium was relatively expensive at that time and Castner devised a process of producing it by the reduction of caustic soda with carbon, a much cheaper process.

Hamilton Castner failed to interest American industrialists and travelled to England in 1886.

In 1890 Hamilton Castner devised a new method for producing very pure caustic soda by the electrolysis of brine in a rocking cell containing mercury.

When Hamilton Castner came to patent his process he found that a similar patent had been lodged by Karl Kellner in Germany and that this had been made over to the Solvay Company in Belgium.

Hamilton Castner suffered from tuberculosis and died in 1899 in Saranac Lake, Franklin county, New York state.

Hamilton Castner left his estate to his wife, Cora Marion Richter, and his sister, Mary Albaugh.