Ferdinand Frederick Henri Moissan Biography - Nobel Prize Winner (1906)

Ferdinand Frederick Henri Moissan (September 28, 1852 – February 20, 1907) was a French chemist who won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in isolating fluorine from its compounds.

Fluorine's existence had been well known for many years, but all attempts to prepare it had failed - and some experimenters had died in the attempt.

When prepared, it immediately reacted with anything around it and vanished again. Even gold was not impervious to the attacks of elemental fluorine. Moissan eventually succeeded by electrolysing a solution of potassium hydrogen fluoride (KHF2) in liquid hydrogen fluoride (HF). The mixture was needed because hydrogen fluoride is a non-conductor. The device was built with platinum/iridium electrodes in a platinum holder and cooled the apparatus to -50 °C. The result was to completely isolate the hydrogen produced from the negative electrode from the fluorine produced at the positive one. This is essentially still the way fluorine is produced today.

Nickel can be used for apparatus handling elemental fluorine. A protective layer of nickel fluoride develops on the surface - like oxide layers for example on aluminium.

Moissan went on to study fluorine chemistry in great detail, contributed to the development of the electric arc furnace and attempted to use pressure to synthesize diamonds from the more common form of carbon. In 1893, Moissan began studying fragments of a meteorite found in Meteor Crater near Diablo Canyon in Arizona. In these fragments he discovered minute quantities of a new mineral and, after extensive research, Moissan concluded that this mineral was made of silicon carbide. In 1905, this mineral was named Moissanite, in his honor.

He died suddenly in Paris in February 1907, shortly after his return from receiving the Nobel Prize in Stockholm. It is not known whether his experiments with fluorine contributed to his early death.