The Kitimat Story 1 



By Angela Croome 



London, England 



[With 4 plates] 



One hundred and fifty-seven years ago, at the opening of the nine- 

 teenth century, aluminum was unknown. In the 1850's a table serv- 

 ice that Napoleon III had made of aluminum cost more than the 

 price of an identical one in gold. Yet today the only metal of which 

 there is an annual consumption larger than aluminum is steel. Its 

 price naturally reflects its changed status. 



The key to this spectacular expansion was the discovery of a means 

 of cheap production. The ore from which the metal is obtained is 

 not rare — indeed it represents one-eighth of the globe's crust — but 

 releasing the metal from the raw material (bauxite) proved techno- 

 logically so subtle that this fact alone preserved until 1886 the price 

 of aluminum at the level of the precious metals. The result of the 

 success of Charles Marlin Hall, of Oberlin, and Paul Louis Herolt, 

 of Paris, in reducing aluminum oxide by an electrolytic process 

 promptly cut the price by one-fourth. Nevertheless to exploit this 

 discovery fully, and to produce aluminum in huge quantities at the 

 lowest possible cost, required the bringing into conjunction of features 

 not readily found together in nature, namely, the sources of bauxite, 

 massive electric power, and first -class transport facilities. 



The impulse and grand-scale planning of war helped to fuse these 

 elements into the reality of actual development projects. The last war 

 used up most of the aluminum that could be put on the market. 

 The years of cold war since, combined with a period of intensive 

 reconstruction and industrial expansion as well as increased civilian 

 need, have maintained the demand well ahead of supply. But these 

 conditions have quickened engineering imagination, brought into focus 

 parts of the world that have never been thought of together before, 

 and provided the colossal capital sums needed to put through develop- 

 ment schemes of the grandest sweep. 



1 Reprinted by permission from Discovery, vol. 17, No. 4, April 1956. 



355 



