There is a metal in your kitchen right now that an emperor once reserved for the guests he liked best. Everyone else at his table had to make do with gold.
You crush it after lunch and drop it in the recycling bin. You tear it off the roll and wrap a sandwich in it. Aluminum. The cheapest, most forgettable metal in the house.
For most of the 1800s, it was the most exclusive substance on Earth.
The metal that was everywhere and nowhere
Here is the strange part. Aluminum is not rare. It is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust, roughly eight percent of the ground under your feet. There is more aluminum in an ordinary hillside than there is gold in every vault on the planet.
The problem was never finding it. The problem was getting it out.
Aluminum clings to oxygen with a grip that nothing in the 19th-century chemist’s toolbox could break. It sits in the dirt as aluminum oxide, locked up, useless, invisible. Chemists knew it was there. They could describe it. They just couldn’t hold it.
So when they finally did prise a few grams loose, using processes so costly and finicky that a laboratory could produce a handful a week, the result was a soft silvery metal that cost more per ounce than gold or platinum. Not because there wasn’t enough of it. Because there was no cheap way to reach it.
Aluminum was the world’s first luxury made entirely out of difficulty.
Forks for the favorites
France went the hardest for it. At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855, bars of aluminum went on display in glass cases beside the crown jewels, and nobody thought that was odd. It belonged there.
The story that everyone repeats about Napoleon III is that he had a set of aluminum cutlery made, and that the emperor and his most honored guests ate with it while the rest of the table was handed gold. Historians treat that one as more legend than ledger. What is documented is that the French court was genuinely enchanted by the metal and paid enormous sums to get it.
Think about what that means for a second. Gold was the consolation prize.
A pyramid for the tallest thing in America
Which brings us to Washington, in 1884, and a monument that had been sitting unfinished for decades.
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lincoln Casey needed something to put on the very top of the Washington Monument. It had to do two jobs at once. It had to carry the lightning-rod system, and it had to look like the crown on the tallest structure in the country. His first thought was bronze or brass, plated in platinum.
Then a Philadelphia chemist named William Frishmuth made him a different offer.
Frishmuth was a German immigrant who had spent something like 28 years and $53,000 of his own money chasing methods of refining aluminum. His pitch was practical. Aluminum wouldn’t tarnish. It conducted electricity beautifully. And it happened to be a precious metal, running at about $1.10 an ounce, roughly twice the price of silver at the time.
Casey took the deal. The two men agreed on a price of $100.
In November 1884, Frishmuth cast it: a solid aluminum pyramid, 8.9 inches tall, weighing 100 ounces. Tests later put it at 97.75 percent pure aluminum, with faint traces of iron and silicon. It was the largest single piece of aluminum that had ever been made by anyone, anywhere.
Then he handed Casey a bill for $225.
Stepping over the top of the monument
Frishmuth wasn’t finished being a nuisance. Before shipping the thing to Washington, he took his little pyramid to New York and arranged for it to go on display at Tiffany’s. He did not ask anyone’s permission.
For a stretch of days in late November, the polished tip of the Washington Monument sat in a jewelry-store window in Manhattan, laid out like a gemstone. Thousands of New Yorkers filed past to look at it. The best part is that Tiffany’s placed it on the floor, so that people could step over the top of the Washington Monument and go home able to say so.
Casey, in Washington, was writing increasingly cold letters demanding that Frishmuth stop showing off and send the apex.
It arrived. On December 6, 1884, superintendent P. H. McLaughlin climbed to the top and set the pyramid in place. The tallest structure in America was now crowned with a lump of one of the most expensive metals on Earth.
Sixteen months
Roughly 500 miles away, in Oberlin, Ohio, a 22-year-old named Charles Martin Hall was working in a woodshed behind his family’s house.
Hall had graduated from Oberlin College the year before with a chemistry degree. A professor had told his class that whoever cracked a cheap method of producing aluminum would make a fortune, and Hall took that personally. He rigged up his own equipment in the shed and kept failing.
On February 23, 1886, he passed an electric current through aluminum oxide dissolved in molten cryolite, and metal came out. Little silvery buttons of it, sitting at the bottom of his crucible.
That was it. That was the whole spell broken. A Frenchman named Paul Héroult worked out virtually the same process at virtually the same moment, which is why it carries both their names, and the price of aluminum fell off a cliff.
In 1885, aluminum cost $11.13 a pound. By 1892 it was 57 cents. By 1914 it was going for about 19 cents a pound, and Hall’s company in Pittsburgh had made him $27 million.
Sixteen months. That is the gap between the government of the United States buying 100 ounces of aluminum as a display of wealth, and a kid in a woodshed making the whole idea obsolete.
The pyramid is still up there, by the way. It has been on top of the Washington Monument for more than 140 years, doing its job, quietly holding the lightning rods.
It was once one of the most valuable objects in the country. Now you could buy an equivalent lump of aluminum for the price of a sandwich, and wrap the sandwich in the leftovers.
