Brin process

The reaction was discovered by Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis-Jacques Thenard in 1811 and Jean-Baptiste Boussingault tried to use this reaction to establish a process to produce oxygen in 1852.

Removing the carbon dioxide with sodium hydroxide solved this problem.

In 1884 they opened a factory producing oxygen by their improved process.

This allowed a faster change between the capture and release phases, which would last one to two hours.

Before the end of the 19th century electrolysis of water and fractional distillation of liquefied air became economically cheaper methods to produce oxygen and the process slowly faded out.