174 Miracles Ahead! 



spent many years trying to produce the metal at reasonable 

 cost. In 1854 Sainte-Claire Deville, a Frenchman, announced 

 that he had improved the process by which Friedrich Wohler 

 had obtained pure aluminum in 1827. Napoleon III aided 

 Deville's work, because he saw a chance of using this light 

 metal for helmets and armor. Deville cut the cost of alumi- 

 num from five hundred and forty-five dollars per pound to 

 seventeen dollars by 1859. 



In 1886 twenty-two-year-old Charles Martin Hall, who 

 had been graduated from Oberlin College (Ohio) a few 

 months earlier, discovered a cheap process that would pro- 

 duce large amounts of the metal. (In France twenty-two- 

 year-old Paul L. T. Heroult also discovered this process.) 

 Hall had been intrigued by Deville's statement that every 

 claybank was a mine of aluminum, and by his professor's 

 remark that anyone who produced cheap aluminum would be 

 a benefactor to mankind and also make a fortune. 



Instead of using clay in his process, Hall used pure alumi- 

 num oxide obtained from bauxite and cryolite, a mineral 

 found only in Greenland. (We are not necessarily dependent 

 on imports from Greenland, as cryolite can be prepared from 

 fluorine, sodium, and aluminum.) Cryolite's job was to dis- 

 solve the alumina (aluminum oxide), as sugar is dissolved in 

 water. Then the solution was put in an iron crucible or box 

 lined with carbon. An electric current was passed through the 

 solution, the oxygen burned off, and pure aluminum drained 

 from a hole in the bottom. 



Hall's process soon slashed the price of aluminum to two 

 dollars a pound. Today it is around fifteen cents a pound. 

 The world production of aluminum jumped from sixteen tons 

 in 1886 to 270,000 in 1929. In another ten years United States 

 production alone was 400,000,000 pounds and was expected 

 to hit 2,100,000,000 pounds in 1943. Tremendous amounts of 

 electricity are needed to produce aluminum, but new hydro- 



