You can see the bronze tablet in his honor at
the entrance of Havemeyer Hall. In 1886 he produced metallic sodium by
mixing caustic soda with iron and charcoal in an iron pot and heating in
a gas furnace. Before this experiment sodium sold at $2 a pound; after
it sodium sold at twenty cents a pound.
But although Castner had succeeded in his experiment he was defeated in
his object. For while he was perfecting the sodium process for making
aluminum the electrolytic process for getting aluminum directly was
discovered in Oberlin. So the $250,000 plant of the "Aluminium Company
Ltd." that Castner had got erected at Birmingham, England, did not make
aluminum at all, but produced sodium for other purposes instead. Castner
then turned his attention to the electrolytic method of producing sodium
by the use of the power of Niagara Falls, electric power. Here in 1894
he succeeded in separating common salt into its component elements,
chlorine and sodium, by passing the electric current through brine and
collecting the sodium in the mercury floor of the cell.
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