Other Methods
A great deal of time was spent in trying to effect a partial synthesis of cadmium bromide in exactly the same manner as had been used in case of cadmium sulphate. No results were obtained because cadmium bromide is slowly volatile at 150°C, the temperature used, and retained some hydrobromic acid ever after more than 100 hours of drying. Some work was done in trying to establish the ratio between silver and Cadmium by dropping a weighed piece of cadmium into a solution of silver sulphate, the reaction being:
Silver nitrate cannot be used because it becomes reduced to nitrate even at a temperature of 0°C., as was shown by its reducing action on potassium permanganate, and by the reaction with meta-diamido benzene after the reaction had been completed. The main difficulty with the method is that air must be excluded in order to prevent oxidation and solution of some of the precipitated silver. The silver is perfectly free from cadmium if an excess of silver sulphate is used and the precipitated metal digested with it for some time. Since this part of the work was done, a paper by Mylius and Fromm (Ber. 1894, 630) appeared in which one of the reactions studied was that of cadmium on silver sulphate. They also found the resulting silver free from cadmium. The method seems very promising, but the work had to be discontinued for lack of time.