Moissan, Ferdinand Frederic-Henri

Moissan, Ferdinand Frederic-Henri (1852-1907) is known in the field of ceramics for his unsuccessful attempts at diamond synthesis (he actually produced SiC). Moissan was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for isolating fluorine on June 26, 1886. It was in Moissan s laboratory at the University of Paris in France that tungsten carbide was first made. 

Moissan, Ferdinand Frederic Henri (1852-1907) discovered naturally occurring SiC in 1905 in a meteorite from the Diablo Canyon in Arizona. He developed the electric furnace, which he used to make carbides and to prepare pure metals. He received the Nobel Prize in 1906 for successfully isolating fluorine (1886). 

The apparently impossible task was finally accomplished by Moissan in 1886. Ferdinand-Frederic-Henri Moissan was born at 5 Rue Mon-tholon in Paris on September 28, 1852. When he was twelve years old, the family moved to the little town of Meaux in the department of Seine-et-Mame, where he attended the municipal college. His first lessons in chemistry were received from his father, a railroad official (22, 58). 

Many chemists tackled the problem in the nineteenth century, from Davy onward. It was left to the French chemist Ferdinand Frederic Henri Moissan (1852-1907) to succeed. Moissan decided that since platinum was one of the few substances that could resist fluorine, there was nothing to do but prepare all his equipment of platinum, regardless of expense. What s more, he chilled everything to —50° C. to dull fluorine s fierce activity. In 1886, he passed an electric current through a solution of potassium fluoride in hydrofluoric acid in his allplatinum equipment and achieved his goal. The pale-yellow gas, fluorine, was finally isolated. 

In 1886 Ferdinand Frederic Henri Moissan, a student of Fremy, succeeded where his mentor had failed. (Moissan also had his work interrupted a number of times while he recovered from HF and F2 poisoning.) He finally isolated this furiously reactive element by electrolyzing a mixture of anhydrous hydrofluoric acid and potassium fluoride with platinum-iridium electrodes in a platinum vessel. He chilled the apparatus to reduce the activity of the resulting pale-yellow gas. Equation (18.4) summarizes his procedure, which was the only method of preparing fluorine for a century and remains the principal method even today ... 

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