History
In 1783 Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered that gold dissolved in aqueous solutions of cyanide. He had earlier discovered cyanide salts. Through the work of Bagration (1844), Elsner (1846), and Faraday (1847), it was determined that each atom of gold requires two cyanide, i.e. the stoichiometry of the soluble compound. Cyanide was not applied to extraction of gold ores until 1887, when the MacArthur-Forrest Process was developed in Glasgow, Scotland by John Stewart MacArthur, funded by the brothers Dr Robert and Dr William Forrest. In 1896 Bodländer confirmed that oxygen was necessary, something that was doubted by MacArthur, and discovered that hydrogen peroxide was formed as an intermediate.
Read more about this topic: Gold Cyanidation
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