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We believe that aluminum was formed by successive collisions of hydrogen atoms at high temperatures and under strong pressure during the birth of the Solar System. However, aluminum as we know it today has a recent history. It appeared when Alcoa was founded, in 1886, with the first mass aluminum processing process. Over 7 thousand years ago, Persian ceramists made their vessels from a type of clay that contained aluminum oxide - which is currently known as alumina. Thirty centuries later, Egyptians and Babylonians used a different type of aluminum in their cosmetics and medicine production. Until then, no one knew anything about aluminum. No one had ever seen it. Although it is the most abundant metal over the earth crust, it was not found naturally in the metal form.
Finally, in 1808, Humphrey Davy proved the existence of aluminum, giving it this name. Immediately afterwards, the German physicist Hans Christian Oersted started to produce small amounts of the metal.
Others improved the process until 1869, when two tons of aluminum were produced. This lowered its cost from $ 545 to $ 17 per gram, almost the same value of silver. A reasonable price. So much so that the metal was used to adorn the table of the French court, the crown of the King of Denmark and the cape of the Monument to Washington.
However, it took the production in large amounts, at a very low price, to place aluminum in the position of a top category metal. It was then, in 1886, that Alcoa was started. By mid-1880, aluminum was a semi-precious metal, even rarer than silver. At the Oberlin College of Ohio, professor Frank Jewett showed his chemistry students a small piece of aluminum and told them that whoever was able to find an economic way to produce the metal would become rich.
One of his students, Charles Martin Hall, was already experimenting with different types of ore since he was 12 years old, in an improvised laboratory. After graduation, he continued with his experiments. He learned how to produce aluminum oxide - alumina. In 1886, he placed in a container a cryolite bath containing alumina and passed an electrical current. The result was a frozen mass that he worked on with a hammer. This was when several particles of pure aluminum were formed, originating one of metals most used in the industry.
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