Overview

Aluminium was first obtained impure by Hans Christian Oersted in 1825 and prepared more convincingly by Friedrich Wohler in 1827. Its name comes from alum, the astringent double sulfate (Latin alumen) known and used since antiquity as a mordant in dyeing and a styptic in medicine. Despite being the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust, aluminium is so tightly bound in its ores that it long resisted extraction, and until the electrolytic Hall-Heroult process of 1886 it was a rare and costly curiosity. Extracted cheaply ever since, it is now the most widely used metal after iron, prized for being light, strong and corrosion-resistant in everything from cans and foil to window frames and aircraft; it is the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust.

The Hall-Heroult process that finally made aluminium cheap was discovered independently and almost simultaneously in 1886 by Charles Martin Hall in the United States and Paul Heroult in France, each only twenty-two years old and unaware of the other's work; by a further coincidence, both men died in the same year, 1914. Bauxite, the ore from which aluminium is extracted, takes its name from Les Baux-de-Provence in France, where it was first identified in 1821. Aluminium is now the most recycled of common metals in practice, since recycling it uses only about five per cent of the energy required to refine it from ore, a saving that has made can and scrap recycling one of the aluminium industry's central economic facts.