Saint-Claire Deville, Henri Etienne (1818-1881)

French inorganic chemist who worked on high-temperature reactions and was the first to extract metallic aluminium in any quantity.

Saint-Claire Deville was born on the island of St Thomas, Virgin Islands (then Danish territory), the son of the French consul there. He studied science and medicine in France and in 1845 became professor at Besançon. In 1851 he moved to the Ecole Normale in Paris and from 1859 he was at the Sorbonne.

In 1827, German chemist Friedrich Wöhler had isolated small quantities of impure aluminium from its compounds by heating them with metallic potassium. Saint-Claire Deville substituted the safer sodium. He first had to prepare sufficient sodium metal, but by 1855 he had obtained enough aluminium to cast a block weighing 7 kg/15 lb. The process was put into commercial production and within four years the price of aluminium had fallen to one-hundredth of its former level.