In 1855, aluminum was more precious than gold. Napoleon III served it to royalty while others ate off gold plates. Then a teenager in a backyard shed changed everything.
In the mid-1800s, aluminum was the world's most precious metal. Not gold. Not silver. Aluminum.
It sounds absurd now — aluminum, the stuff wrapped around your leftover pizza, the material of cheap soda cans. But in 1855, when the grand Exposition Universelle opened in Paris, aluminum bars were displayed next to the French crown jewels like treasure from another planet.
Napoleon III, Emperor of France, was obsessed with the metal. He commissioned a set of aluminum cutlery reserved exclusively for his most distinguished guests — heads of state, visiting royalty, the absolute elite of European society.
Everyone else at his banquets? They had to settle for gold and silver.
Yes. Gold was the consolation prize.
The problem wasn't that aluminum didn't exist. The element makes up eight percent of Earth's crust — it's one of the most abundant metals on the planet. But it never appears in pure metallic form. It's always locked inside compounds, bonded so tightly that separating it required processes so expensive that only tiny amounts could be produced.
In the 1850s, aluminum cost $1,200 per kilogram. More expensive than gold.
Chemists tried for decades to produce aluminum cheaply. The few who succeeded in extracting even small amounts became celebrities in scientific circles. But industrial-scale production? Impossible.
Napoleon III funded research hoping to create lightweight aluminum armor for his army. When that failed, he had his limited supply melted into famous cutlery — if he couldn't arm soldiers with it, he'd at least dazzle dinner guests.
In 1884, the United States capped the Washington Monument — the tallest structure in America — with a six-pound aluminum pyramid. That small cap was worth more than most workers earned in a year.
Aluminum was called "the metal of the future." But most believed that future would never arrive.
Then, at sixteen years old, a boy named Charles Martin Hall sat in a chemistry lecture at Oberlin College in Ohio.
His professor, Frank Fanning Jewett, held up a small aluminum sample. He told the class: "If anyone should invent a process by which aluminum could be made on a commercial scale, not only would he be a benefactor to the world, but would also be able to lay up for himself a great fortune."
Charles Hall looked at that sample and thought: I'm going to do it.
Nobody would have taken that seriously. Hall was a preacher's son from a modest family. He had no laboratory, no funding, no connections. The greatest chemists in Europe had failed for decades.
But Hall had something they didn't: stubborn determination and a brilliant older sister.
For the next five years — through the rest of college and beyond — Hall worked on the problem relentlessly. He experimented in Professor Jewett's laboratory, then after graduating in 1885, he set up a makeshift workspace in a woodshed behind his family's home in Oberlin.
His sister Julia, who had also studied chemistry, became his assistant, his collaborator, and his witness.
Hall built his own equipment. He constructed homemade batteries to generate electricity. He experimented with every chemical combination he could think of, trying to use electrolysis — passing electric current through materials — to separate aluminum from its compounds.
For months, nothing worked.
He tried aluminum fluoride in water. Failed.
He tried high-temperature carbon reduction. Failed.
He tried sodium metal to reduce cryolite. Failed.
Then, on February 23, 1886, Hall tried something different. He dissolved aluminum oxide in molten cryolite — and passed electric current through the mixture using carbon electrodes.
And there, in the bottom of his crude clay crucible, were small silvery globules.
Aluminum. Pure aluminum.
Hall was twenty-two years old.
The next day, he repeated the experiment so Julia could witness and verify the results. It worked again. Julia's careful records of that moment would later prove critical in the patent battles to come.
Charles Martin Hall had just solved one of the great industrial challenges of the nineteenth century — in a backyard shed, with equipment he'd built himself.
But here's the remarkable part: At almost the exact same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, a twenty-three-year-old Frenchman named Paul Héroult was conducting similar experiments.
Héroult's father was a tanner, and Paul had been kicked out of mining school for spending too much time thinking about aluminum instead of studying. After his father's unexpected death in 1883, Héroult converted the family tannery into a laboratory. His mother gave him her life savings to buy the dynamo he needed to power his experiments.
In April 1886 — just two months after Hall's breakthrough — Héroult made the same discovery using essentially the same method.
Two young men, on different continents, speaking different languages, with no knowledge of each other's work, solving the same problem at the same time.
The process became known as the Hall-Héroult process. It's still the foundation of aluminum production today, nearly 140 years later.
Hall filed for his patent in July 1886. Then came the hard part: finding someone to fund industrial production.
He approached investors in Ohio. They passed.
He tried Boston. They gave him money but quickly backed out when initial tests had problems.
Finally, in 1888, Hall traveled to Pittsburgh and met Alfred E. Hunt, a metallurgist who believed in aluminum's potential. Together, they founded the Pittsburgh Reduction Company with $20,000 in startup capital.
The pilot plant opened in September 1888. Hall and the company's first employee, Arthur Vining Davis, worked 12-hour days together for months. On Thanksgiving Day, 1888, they poured the first commercial aluminum.
The results were spectacular. The price of aluminum collapsed.
By 1888, aluminum cost about $4.86 per pound. By 1893 — just five years later — it had fallen to 78 cents. Eventually it dropped to under a dollar per kilogram.
Napoleon III's precious metal suddenly became affordable for everyone.
And the world changed.
Suddenly, aluminum could be used for everything. Airplanes — the Wright Brothers used an aluminum alloy engine block in 1903 to reduce weight for their first flight. Power cables. Building materials. Train cars. Tools. Cooking pots. Eventually, packaging, electronics, automobiles.
The Pittsburgh Reduction Company became the Aluminum Company of America — Alcoa — one of the world's largest corporations.
Charles Martin Hall became a major stockholder. He became wealthy, just as his professor had predicted. In 1911, he received the prestigious Perkin Medal for his discovery.
But Hall never stopped working. He continued researching, filing new patents, improving the process. He became generous with his wealth, becoming a major benefactor of Oberlin College.
On December 27, 1914, Charles Martin Hall died at age fifty-one. He left over five million dollars to Oberlin — about $150 million in today's dollars.
Paul Héroult died the same year, in May 1914, at age fifty-one.
Both men transformed the world and neither lived to see just how thoroughly aluminum would reshape modern civilization.
Today, more aluminum is produced annually than all other non-ferrous metals combined. Over sixty million tons per year. It's in your phone, your car, your home, your food packaging.
The metal that was once more precious than gold is now so common we throw it away without thinking.
And it all started because a sixteen-year-old chemistry student in Ohio refused to accept that the problem was unsolvable.
Charles Martin Hall didn't have fancy laboratories or wealthy backers or advanced equipment. He had a woodshed, a sister who believed in him, batteries he built himself, and the stubborn conviction that there had to be a way.
Sometimes the most important revolutions happen quietly. No wars. No manifestos. No dramatic declarations.
Just a young person in a backyard shed, experimenting until something finally works.
From Napoleon's royal dinner plates to the foil in your kitchen drawer — that's the distance aluminum traveled in less than forty years.
All because Charles Martin Hall looked at an impossible problem and thought: I can solve this.
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