Journal of the American Chemical Society Author:American Chemical Society Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: reduce the oxide, at least only by being itself destroyed. Bunsen -and Playfair held (p. 18) that cyanogen in the upper part of the iron furnace acted as a reduc... more »ing agent and was itself destroyed in reducing oxides of iron. The theory of Berthelot (p. 16) is interesting in this connection. He holds that a direct compound of potassium and carbon (CjK2) is formed and that this compound absorbs nitrogen, forming with it potassium cyanide. The theory is in perfect accord with the preceding one. Delbrnch (p. 10) has also showmthat cyanogen is formed when a mixture of nitrogen or ammonia with carbon dioxide is brought in contact with fused potassium. It is possible also, that potassium or other metal, under these conditions, unites directly with nitrogen to form nitrides which then combine with carbon, yielding cyanides. The observation of JBrieglied and Geuter, already referred to (p. 19), that magnesium nitride, when heated with carbonic oxide or carbonic acid evolves cyanogen, lends color to this view. 6. The Nature of the Base to be Used. As far as experiments have gone, potash seems to be the base best suited. Its great chemical energy and ready fusibility and redu- cibility in presence of carbon give it advantages over all other buses. Soda, besides being somewhat less powerful as a base, fuses at a higher temperature and therefore involves increase of wear and cost in apparatus. On the other hand it is cheaper, weight for weight, than potash, and, in addition, its lower molecular weight enables it to do more work for a given weight than potash in the proportion of 138.2 to 106. The facility with which ammonium cyanide is formed when ammonia is passed over hot charcoal indicates that ammonia, like the fixed alkalies, combines very readily with cyanogen. It has the a...« less