ELECTROCHEMISTRY—RICHARDS. 174 
Magnestum.—This is a wonderfully light metal, whose chief use is 
in flashlight powders. Its compounds are abundant in nature, but 
its manufacture by any other than the electrolytic method is almost 
impracticable. The operation consists in simply passing the decom- 
posing current through a fused magnesium salt—a chloride of 
magnesium and potassium found in abundance in Germany. 
Aluminium.—The most useful of the light metals; an element more 
abundant in nature than iron, yet which costs by chemical methods 
at least $1 per pound to produce; electrochemistry enables the 
makers to sell it at a profit at $0.25 per pound. This is probably the 
most useful metal given to the world by electrochemistry. Although 
the French chemist Deville obtained it by an electrolytic method in 
1855, yet he had only the battery as a source of electric current, and 
the process was too costly. This very city of Pittsburgh was the real 
eradle of the electrolytic manufacture of aluminium, when in 1889 
Mr. Charles M. Hall, with the financial assistance of the Mellons and 
the business assistance of Capt. A. E. Hunt, commenced to work his 
process up at Thirty-third Street on the West Side. The principle of 
the process is here again one of beautiful simplicity—when it is once 
made known. Aluminium oxide, abundant in nature, is infusible in 
ordinary furnaces, but easily melts and dissolves, like sugar in water, 
im certain very stable and liquid fused salts—double flourides of alu- 
minium and the alkali metals. On passing the electric current 
through this bath, the dissolved aluminium oxide is decomposed, 
appearing at the two electrodes as aluminium and oxygen, respec- 
tively. When all the oxide is thus broken up, more is added, and 
the operation continues. One of the most difficult problems of 
ordinary chemistry is thus simply, neatly, and effectively solved by 
electrochemistry. The lower cost of power at Niagara Falls drew the 
industry away from Pittsburgh in 1893, and it is now run on an 
immense scale at several places where water power is cheap and 
- abundant. Mechanical power is, however, being produced cheaper 
every year; gas engines have halved the cost of such power, steam 
turbines on exhaust steam may even do better; there is no inherent 
impossibility in the return of the aluminium industry to the Pitts- 
burgh. district. Many other factors besides cost of power bear on 
the question—cost of labor, abundance of labor, cost of carbon, coal 
for heating, various supplies, railroad freights, nearness to the con- 
sumers, and many other considerations must be taken into account. 
Aluminium is certainly destined to become the most important metal 
next to iron and steel, and, as far as one can now foresee, will always 
be produced electrochemically. To have accomplished the estab- 
lishment of this one single industry would of itself have proved the 
usefulness of electrical methods and their importance to chemistry 
and metallurgy. 
