1 According to Jefferson Lab, "Scientists suspected that an unknown metal

2 existed in alum as early as 1787, but they did not have a way to extract it until
3 1825. Hans Oersted, a Danish chemist, was the first to produce tiny amounts of
4 aluminum. Two years later, Friedrich Wohler, a German chemist, developed a
5 different way to obtain the metal. By 1845, he was able to produce samples
6 large enough to determine some of aluminum's basic properties. Wohler’s
7 method was improved in 1854 by Henri Deville, a French chemist. Deville's
8 process allowed the aluminum commercial production. As a result, the price of
9 the metal dropped from around $1200 per kilogram in 1852 to around $40 per
10 kilogram in 1859. Unfortunately, the metal remained too expensive to be widely
11 used." Then in 1889, Charles Hall patented an inexpensive method for the
12 production of aluminum, which brought the metal into wide commercial use.
13 Charles Hall had just graduated from Oberlin College (Ohio) in 1885 with a
14 bachelor's degree in chemistry, when he invented his method of manufacturing
15 pure aluminum. Although aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth's
16 crust, it is never found free in nature. All of the earth's aluminum has combined
17 with other elements to form compounds. Two of the most common compounds
18 are alum, such as potassium aluminum sulfate, and aluminum oxide. About
19
8.2% of the earth's crust is composed of aluminum.Pure aluminum was so rare
20
at that time it was considered a precious metal. Charles Hall’s method of
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processing the metal ore was to pass an electric current through a non-metallic
22
conductor (molten sodium fluoride compound was used) to separate the very
23
conductive aluminum. In 1889, Charles Martin Hall was awarded U.S. patent for
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his process. In 1888, together with financier Alfred Hunt, Charles Martin Hall
25
founded the Pittsburgh Reduction Company now know as the Aluminum
26
Company of America. By 1914, Charles Martin Hall had brought the cost of
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aluminum down to 18 cents a pound and it was no longer considered a precious
28
metal.
29
Metal foil has been around for centuries. Foil is solid metal that has been
30
reduced to a leaf-like thinness by beating or rolling. The first mass-produced and
31
widely-used foil was made from tin. However, Tin was later replaced by
32
aluminum in 1910, when the first aluminum foil rolling plant. The plant, owned by
33
J.Neher& Sons (aluminum manufacturers) started in 1886 in, Switzerland, at the
34
foot of the Rhine Falls - capturing the falls’ energy to produce aluminum.
35 Neher's sons together with Dr. Lauber discovered the endless rolling process
36 and the use of aluminum foil as a protective barrier. Since then, began the wide
37 use of aluminum foil in the packaging of chocolate bars and tobacco products.
38 Processes evolved over time to include the use of print, color, lacquer, laminate
39 and the embossing of the aluminum
40