In 1886, Ferdinand Frederic Henri Moissan (1852-1907) became the first person to isolate fluorine gas, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Six years later, he designed an electric arc furnace with the intention of turning iron and sugar into diamonds by heating them to temperatures of 3500°C. It is doubtful that he ever succeeded in this endeavor; however, he did discover other high-temperature chemical reactions, including a practical method of producing acetylene.
Moissan constructed his furnace using two blocks of limestone with a hollow cavity between them, into which he inserted two carbon rods. The sample to be heated was placed in the cavity and then an electric current of hundreds of amperes was put on the rods, creating an energetic stream—or arc—of vaporized carbon between them that produced temperatures of thousands of degrees. To make acetylene, Moissan mixed limestone and coal at high temperature to create calcium carbide, which he then combined with water. This is still the basic process of manufacturing acetylene, which both fuels high-temperature oxyacetylene welding and is used in industry to produce numerous chemicals.
Although the Moissan furnace was important, his contribution was only part of the story of its development. In 1800, Sir Humphry Davy had used one of Volta's new batteries to produce an arc between two charged carbon rods. In 1878, Sir William Siemens was the first person to develop a practical electric arc furnace, in which he was able to melt steel and platinum. In 1900, Paul Louis-Toussaint Heroult invented an electric arc furnace to smelt high-quality steel out of scrap steel and pig iron.
