| | AAS Biographical Memoirs - Ian William Wark 1899-1985 |
 | | and Electrolytic Zinc Co. of Australia Ltd. The mining companies of Broken Hill had pioneered the use of flotation (particularly differential flotation) processes in ore-dressing and had accumulated much practical experience without a great deal of scientific understanding of why or how the process worked. |
 | | He did not succeed in isolating any pure solid compounds from reactions between sodium hydroxide and copper lactate, but was able to establish the presence of a complex copper-containing anion in alkaline solutions containing excess sodium lactate by using the Nernst formula to obtain the Cu*2+ ion concentration from single electrode potential measurements. |
 | | It was a well-executed academic chemical study, but the conclusion that the bases of the complexes were 5-membered rings, while certainly correct, could not be established unequivocally at that time, even though the existence of complex anions of this class in the monobasic monohyroxy acids, mandelic and salicylic, left little alternative to this structure. |
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