Hamilton Castner

Hamilton Young Castner was an American industrial chemist.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York and educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, then at the Columbia University School of Mines. He left without a degree and in 1879 joined his brother, E. B. Castner, as a consulting chemist. He 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. He failed to interest American industrialists and travelled to England in 1886.

Source: Wikipedia