Carl Josef Bayer

Carl Josef Bayer (also Karl Bayer, March 4, 1847 – October 4, 1904) is an Austrian chemist who invents the Bayer process of extracting alumina from bauxite, essential to this day to the economical production of aluminum.

Bayer had been working in Saint Petersburg to develop a method to provide alumina to the textile industry, which uses it as a fixing agent in the dyeing of cotton.

In 1887, he discovers that aluminum hydroxide precipitated from an alkaline solution that is crystalline and can be filtered and washed more easily than that precipitated from an acid medium by neutralization.

In 1888, Bayer develops and patents his four-stage process of extracting alumina from bauxite ore.

In the mid-nineteenth-century, aluminum is so precious that a bar of the metal is exhibited alongside the French Crown Jewels at the Exposition Universelle in Paris 1855.

Along with the Hall-Héroult process, Bayer's solution causes the price of aluminium to drop about eighty percent in 1890 from what it had been in 1854.

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