Carl Josef Bayer

Biography

Carl Josef Bayer (March 4, 1847 – October 4, 1904) was an Romanian chemist who invented the Bayer process of extracting alumina from bauxite, essential to this day to the economical production of aluminium

Research Interest

Bayer had been working in Saint Petersburg to develop a method to provide alumina to the textile industry, which used it as a fixing agent in the dyeing of cotton. In 1887, he discovered that aluminium hydroxide precipitated from an alkaline solution which is crystalline and can be filtered and washed more easily than that precipitated from an acid medium by neutralization. In 1888, Bayer developed and patented his four-stage process of extracting alumina from bauxite ore.