Electrolysis

When William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle first passed electric current through water in 1800—just weeks after Volta invented the battery—they watched bubbles form at each electrode and realized they'd torn apart what had been considered a fundamental element for millennia. Water, the primordial substance philosophers from Thales to Lavoisier debated, was actually composite. This wasn't just chemistry; it was the moment humanity gained the power to unmake nature's most essential molecule.

Armed with the most powerful battery ever built, young chemist Humphry Davy went on an unprecedented discovery binge between 1807-1808, using electrolysis to isolate six previously unknown elements: sodium, potassium, calcium, strontium, barium, and magnesium. He literally shocked compounds into revealing their secrets, watching metals that had never existed in pure form suddenly appear at his electrodes. In just two years, this theatrical showman increased humanity's elemental catalog by almost 15%—all by running current through molten compounds.

Here's the paradox keeping engineers up at night: electrolysis can produce perfectly clean hydrogen fuel, but it consumes enormous amounts of electricity—roughly 50 kilowatt-hours to generate just one kilogram of hydrogen. Despite two centuries of refinement, we're still fundamentally doing what Nicholson did in 1800, just more efficiently. The race to make electrolysis cheap and efficient enough for mass hydrogen production is essentially a race to solve a problem we've known about since the technology's birth.

Every time you get a splinter from a steel fence or leave a piece of jewelry on too long, you're witnessing unintended electrolysis in action. The iron or metal in contact with your slightly salty, electrically conductive tissue creates a microscopic battery, slowly corroding the metal and releasing ions into your skin. This same electrochemical principle is why surgical implants must be carefully chosen—your body is essentially a warm, salty electrolyte solution waiting to decompose poorly chosen metals.

Michael Faraday discovered something profound in 1833: the amount of substance produced at each electrode during electrolysis is precisely proportional to the electric charge passed through. This wasn't just a useful formula—it was early evidence that electricity and matter are quantized, that charge comes in discrete packets. Decades before anyone knew atoms existed, Faraday's electrolysis experiments were revealing that matter has a granular structure, with his constant pointing directly to the fundamental unit we'd later call the electron.

That aluminum phone in your hand? It exists only because two 22-year-olds independently discovered electrolytic aluminum production in 1886, the same year. Before Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult's breakthrough, aluminum was more precious than gold—Napoleon III reserved aluminum utensils for his most honored guests. Electrolysis transformed this rare curiosity into the world's most abundant metal, dropping prices by 99% within a decade and literally reshaping modern civilization from aircraft to architecture.