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Another important development of the late 19th century was the separation from their ores, on a substantial scale, of aluminum and magnesium. In the earlier part of the century, several scientists had made small quantities of these light metals, but the most successful was Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville, who by 1855 had developed a method by which cryolite, a double fluoride of aluminum and sodium, was reduced by sodium metal to aluminum and sodium fluoride. The process was very expensive, but cost was greatly reduced when the American chemist Hamilton Young Castner developed an electrolytic cell for producing cheaper sodium in ...(100 of 18633 words)