9781422279434

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Aluminum

Later chemists and researchers found even better ways to produce aluminum. By 1856, French chemist Henri Etienne Sainte-Claire Dev- ille used electrolysis to actually separate usable amounts of alumi- num, beginning the modern age of aluminum production. (As a side note, Deville was funded by none other than Napoleon III, who, in ad- dition to creating fancy tableware, was hoping to incorporate alumi- num into his military armor.) By the 1880s, chemists Charles Martin Hall, an American, Paul L.T. Heroult, a Frenchman, and Karl Joseph Bayer, an Austrian, had perfected similar processes that are still used to this day to produce aluminum. Many famous writers of the time took note of the rise of alumi- num and helped popularize its growth. The French science fiction au- thor Jules Verne wrote his famous From the Earth to the Moon about a space capsule made of aluminum, a material which no doubt added to the fantasy of actually flying to the Moon. Even famous British nov- elist Charles Dickens had this to say about the burgeoning aluminum industry: “Aluminum may probably send tin to the right about face, drive copper saucepans into penal servitude, and blow up German silver sky-high into nothing.” And J.W. Richards, one of the first au-

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