9781422279434

Earth has always had its aluminum—sometimes even in close prox- imity to the commonly used gold, silver, and iron—it wasn’t actual- ly discovered until relatively recently. Elemental aluminum was only discovered about 200 years ago, and it was only actually produced starting about 150 years ago! Why wasn’t it found earlier? For such an omnipresent metal, it turns out that aluminum is quite stealthy. In fact, aluminum, in its pure form, doesn’t exist naturally any- where on Earth. All of the aluminum found on Earth is already bonded with other compounds and must be extracted and processed to be iso- lated as the element itself. While the ancients were able to make use of various aluminum compounds, it wasn’t until the modern scientific era that we began to identify, extract, and produce pure aluminum. We can thank a long chain of scientists for their pioneering work in this field: Sir Humphry Davy first identified the existence of a base metal that he called “aluminum” in 1808. Hans Christian Oersted used electro-chemical reactions to isolate aluminum from alum in 1825. German chemist Friedrich Wöhler is credited with isolating the first pure aluminum in 1827.

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The Chemistry of Everyday Elements