Provost Smith of the University of Pennsylvania, who is the best
authority on the history of chemistry in America, claims for Robert
Hare, a Philadelphia chemist born in 1781, the honor of constructing the
first electrical furnace. With this crude apparatus and with no greater
electromotive force than could be attained from a voltaic pile, he
converted charcoal into graphite, volatilized phosphorus from its
compounds, isolated metallic calcium and synthesized calcium carbide. It
is to Hare also that we owe the invention in 1801 of the oxy-hydrogen
blowpipe, which nowadays is used with acetylene as well as hydrogen.
With this instrument he was able to fuse strontia and volatilize
platinum.
But the electrical furnace could not be used on a commercial scale until
the dynamo replaced the battery as a source of electricity. The
industrial development of the electrical furnace centered about the
search for a cheap method of preparing aluminum. This is the metallic
base of clay and therefore is common enough.
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