“Aluminum’s sixty-year reign as the world's most precious substance was glorious, but soon an American chemist ruined everything”
When you think of valuable elements, what comes to mind? Gold? Silver? Platinum? Aluminum? That's right, aluminum, the element you might find your sandwich wrapped in was at one point in time more expensive than gold. It was so valuable that Napoleon III would provide his most important guests with aluminum cutlery and provided silver to the less esteemed guests. So why was it so expensive and why is it no longer expensive? To understand why this was we have to understand what factors contributed to the price of aluminum. Normally the price of metals like aluminum was dependent on the cost of production and demand for the metal.
We can begin by ruling out the supply and demand as being a contributing factor to the exuberant cost of aluminum as aluminum is abundant on Earth. This adds to the mystery. Aluminum has always been abundant, but was once more expensive than gold. Based off this, we can conclude that the cost of making aluminum is the sole reason it was expensive. Aluminum requires a lot of processing. It begins as ore from the ground, called bauxite. The bauxite is not very concentrated and has to be refined significantly in order to have workable concentrations of aluminum. This is a lot of work, but gold is significantly more scare and requires even more refining than aluminum.
The real cost comes from turning the concentrated bauxite into the elements themselves. Concentrated gold ores can be heated and turned into gold due to gold's chemical properties; that is why it has been around for so long. Fire, crucial to the gold refining process, has been around for a long time. However, a primary ingredient behind the mechanism, electricity, is relatively new. It took an American chemist, by the name of Charles Martin Hall, to crack the code, and utilize the electricity. The process begins with the bauxite which has to be turned into aluminum oxide; then intense heat must be applied so that the oxide can go through electrolysis. During the time aluminum came into fashion as a valuable metal, electricity was new. Furthermore, the process required significant amounts of electricity. The high price of the new electricity and its limited availability made the production costs soar through the roof. However, as electricity production went up, it became more accessible. Electricity, paired with the new advancements in the refining process, resulted in the price of aluminum taking a nosedive. The change was so drastic that it went from a metal of high society to a ubiquitous household product.
