Author: Sainte-Claire-Deville, Henri Etienne [1818-1881] ; & Debray, Henri
Title: De la métallurgie du platine et des métaux qui l'accompagnent
Description: Paris, Imp. de Mallet-Bachelier, 1861. 1/4-cloth. 22x13cm, 144,(2) pp. Contemporary binder's quarter-cloth. "Extrait des Annales des mines, 3e série, t. LXI".. Foxed. Spine rubbed and chipped. Good. ¶ Includes 2 folding plates. ["The centenary of the death of Henri Sainte- Claire Deville, teacher, chemist and technologist, is a reminder of the quite exceptional part he played in laying the foundations of the modern platinum industry. Pasteur said of him that throughout thirty years 'he bore aloft in France and in Europe the sceptre of Mineral Chemistry'; the Academie des Sciences, in honouring his memory with the posthumous award of its Prix Jean Reynaud, described his work on dissociation as 'one of the purest gems in the Crown of French Science'; he and Michael Faraday visited each other back and forth over a period of 30 years, and in 1877 George Matthey wrote that 'the great bond of sympathy between us, beyond that of personal friendship, has been the advancement of a special branch of science which so greatly interests us - the treatment and separation of the platiniferous group of metals for scientific purposes'. He set off to master the problems of inorganic chemistry at high temperatures and on the way he revolutionised the platinum industry..,. Deville followed up his researches on the production of aluminium by studying the metallurgy of the platinum metals. In 1857 he and Jules Debray devised the lime-block furnace fired by a mixture of oxygen and coal gas which for the first time made it possible to melt platinum and its alloys on a large scale. Their method remained in use until the development of the induction furnace in the 1920s..." -J.C. Chaston in 'Platinum Metals Review', Vol. 25, 1981].

Keywords: History of Science, Platinum, Mineral Chemistry, Inorganic, Metallurgy, , , ,