Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the book The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean (©2010 by Sam Kean).

Aluminium is the British spelling of aluminum.

A number of brilliant chemists devoted their careers to aluminium throughout the 1800s, and it's hard to judge whether the element was better or worse off afterward. A Danish chemist and a German chemist simultaneously extracted this metal from the ancient astringent alum around 1825. (Alum is the powder cartoon characters like Sylvester the cat sometimes swallow that makes their mouths pucker.) Because of its luster, mineralogists immediately classified aluminium as a precious metal, like silver or platinum, worth hundreds of dollars an ounce.

Twenty years later, a Frenchman figured out how to scale up these methods for industry, making aluminium available commercially. For a price. It was still more expensive than even gold. That’s because, despite being the most common metal in the earth’s crust—around 8 percent of it by weight, hundreds of millions of times more common than gold—aluminium never appears in pure, mother lode-al form. It’s always bonded to something, usually oxygen. Pure samples were considered miracles. The French once displayed Fort Knox–like aluminium bars next to their crown jewels, and the minor emperor Napoleon III reserved a prized set of aluminium cutlery for special guests at banquets. (Less favored guests used gold knives and forks.) In the United States, government engineers, to show off their country’s industrial prowess, capped the Washington Monument with a six-pound pyramid of aluminium in 1884. A historian reports that one ounce of shavings from the pyramid would have paid a day's wages for each of the laborers who erected it.

Aluminium's sixty-year reign as the world's most precious substance was glorious, but soon an American chemist ruined everything. The metal's properties—light, strong, attractive—tantalized manufacturers, and its omnipresence in the earth's crust had the potential to revolutionize metal production. It obsessed people, but no one could figure out an efficient way to separate it from oxygen. At Oberlin College in Ohio, a chemistry professor named Frank Fanning Jewett would regale his students with tales of the aluminium E1 Dorado that awaited whoever mastered this element. And at least one of his students had the naïveté to take his professor seriously.

In his later years, Professor Jewett bragged to old college chums that "my greatest discovery was the discovery of a man"—Charles Hall. Hall worked with Jewett on separating aluminium throughout his undergraduate years at Oberlin. He failed and failed and failed again, but failed a little more smartly each time. Finally, in 1886, Hall ran an electric current from handmade batteries (power lines didn’t exist) through a liquid with dissolved aluminium compounds. The energy from the current zapped and liberated the pure metal, which collected in minute silver nuggets on the bottom of the tank. The process was cheap and easy, and it would work just as well in huge vats as on the lab bench. This had been the most sought-after chemical prize since the philosopher’s stone, and Hall had found it. The "aluminium boy wonder" was just twenty-three.

Hall's fortune, however, was not made instantly. Chemist Paul Héroult in France stumbled on more or less the same process at the same time. (Today Hall and Héroult share credit for the discovery that crashed the aluminium market.) An Austrian invented another separation method in 1887, and with the competition bearing down on Hall, he quickly founded what became the Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa, in Pittsburgh. It turned into one of the most successful business ventures in history.

Aluminium production at Alcoa grew at exponential rates. In its first months in 1888, Alcoa eked out 50 pounds of aluminium per day; two decades later, it had to ship 88,000 pounds per day to meet the demand. And while production soared, prices plummeted. Years before Hall was born, one man’s breakthrough had dropped aluminium from $550 per pound to $18 per pound in seven years. Fifty years later, not even adjusting for inflation, Hall's company drove down the price to 25 cents per pound. And thanks to Hall, aluminium became the utterly blasé metal we all know, the basis for pop cans and pinging Little League bats and airplane bodies. (A little anachronistically, it still sits atop the Washington Monument, too.) I suppose it depends on your taste and temperament whether you think aluminium was better off as the world's most precious or most productive metal.