Carl Josef Bayer (also Karl Bayer, 4 March 1847 – 4 October 1904) was an Austrian chemist who invented the Bayer process of extracting alumina from bauxite, essential to this day to the economical production of aluminium. Bayer had been working in Saint Petersburg to develop a method to provide alumina to the textile industry that used it as a fixing agent in the dyeing of cotton. In 1887, he discovered that aluminium hydroxide precipitated from an alkaline solution which is crystalline and can be filtered and washed more easily than that precipitated from an acid medium by neutralization. In 1888, Bayer developed and patented his four-stage process of extracting alumina from bauxite ore. In the mid-19th-century, aluminium was so precious that a bar of the metal was exhibited alongside the French Crown Jewels at the Exposition Universelle in Paris 1855. Along with the Hall–Héroult process, Bayer's solution caused the price of aluminium to drop about 80% in 1890 from what it had been in 1854. Personal life and education Carl Bayer was born on 4 March 1847 in the Duchy of Upper and Lower Silesia in the Austrian Empire, which is now Poland. He attended Heidelberg University in Germany where he studied chemistry under Robert Bunsen from 1869-1871, the namesake of the Bunsen burner. At Heidelberg, Bayer received his doctorate degree in 1871 with a dissertation on the chemistry of indium which was discovered recently in 1863. After obtaining his doctorate, Bayer lectured for two years at Technische Hochschule in Brno, and then left to establish his own research company. Bayer then moved to St. Petersburg in 1885 where he flourished as an inventor. At age 45 he married the daughter of a Russian politician, Alma Von Witte and settled in Rietzdorf (modern day Rečica ob Paki, Slovenia). Together they had six children, and in 1904 at the age of 57, Bayer died. His wife would survive him until 1962, when she died at the age of 94. Aluminum ore processing prior to Bayer Bauxite was discovered in 1821 by Pierre Berthier who named it after a village named Les Beaux where he found it. To obtain the alumina from the bauxite ore, a process was developed that used acid to dissolve aluminium but resulted in a product that contained large amounts of iron and titanium dissolved within which were difficult to remove. Due to these impurities, the process