Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Aluminum

Episode Date: December 12, 2020

Hundreds of years ago gold and silver were rare and valuable, and today they are rare and valuable. Iron and tin were cheap and plentiful and today they are cheap and plentiful. However, there is one metal that was once the rarest and expensive metal in the world, and today it is one of the cheapest and most plentiful. Learn more about aluminum, how it was once rare and then became abundant, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hundreds of years ago, gold and silver were rare and valuable, and today they're still rare and valuable. Iron and tin were cheap and plentiful, and today they're still cheap and plentiful. However, there's one metal that was once the rarest and most expensive metal in the world, and today it's one of the cheapest and most plentiful. Learn more about aluminum, how it was once rare and then became abundant on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay.

The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. This episode is sponsored by G Adventures. These are very troubled times. Even though things are starting to get better and more countries are opening up, people are still hesitant to travel, and that is totally understandable.

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The Travel with Confidence tours are available for booking today and we'll be departing from October 2, 2020 to the end of 2021. For more information and to book your tour, click on the link in the show notes. The first thing that you have to know about aluminum is that it is a very common element, at least on Earth. Approximately 1.6% of the entire mass of the Earth is made up of aluminum, and in the crust, which is really what matters for our concerns, it makes up 8.2% of the total mass.

Measure it in parts per million, aluminum is the third most abundant element in the crust beyond only oxygen and silicon. There is more aluminum than there is iron. And that's surprising, because for most of human history, we had almost no aluminum. Humans went through a stone age,

a bronze age, and an iron age, but we never had an aluminum age, even though there is more aluminum than there is iron, copper, or tin. The problem with aluminum is that even though there's a lot of it, it's very difficult to extract. Ancient people were known to use a substance called alum, which is where aluminum gets its name. Alam was found in the Egyptian desert and on certain Greek islands. It was used as a food preservative, as a medicine, and as a fireproofing agent. However, while it contained aluminum, it wasn't anything that could be called a metal.

Metallic aluminum was extremely rare, so rare that through most of history there wasn't even a name for it. Pliny the Elder wrote of a craftsman who presented a cup to Emperor Tiberius that looked like silver, but it was made from a mysterious lighter metal. That metal was almost certainly aluminum. Likewise, the tomb of a Chinese commander, which dates back to the third century, has ornaments that were made out of 85% aluminum. And that was basically the state of aluminum for most of human history. Maybe very small amounts of it would be found in a condition where something could be manufactured from it, But that was it. The amount of aluminum that was used was so small that it was basically an unknown unique metal up until the Industrial Revolution, even though humans were literally surrounded with the stuff. This was the state of affairs for aluminum until the 19th century. The word aluminum was finally given to the metal in 1808 by British chemist Humphrey Davy, although he probably called it aluminum. He showed that you could in theory create aluminum from aluminum oxide, known at the time as alumina, via the application of electricity. While he proved it in theory, there was still no practical way

to make it, and what he had was still not pure aluminum. In 1825, Danish chemist Hans Christian took a step forward with the creation of a metal that he thought was pure aluminum. He said in his notes, quote, aluminum has a metallic luster and somewhat grayish color and breaks down in water very slowly. Unquote. What he probably found was an aluminum potassium alloy, not pure aluminum. It wasn't until 1845 that German chemist Friedrich Voler had isolated the first pure aluminum metal. However, his technique, while superior to anything which came before it, was still expensive and difficult. It was in this period of the mid-19th century that aluminum took on the reputation of being more valuable than gold. People knew what it was and that it was possible to make,

but it was still hard and expensive to make, so there wasn't much of it. French Emperor Napoleon and the third had a set of aluminum plates and utensils created for his banquets. However, it was so expensive to create that not everyone could use the aluminum plates, so they were reserved for himself and honored guests. Everyone else had to make do with plain old gold. You can still see the aluminum dinnerware on display at the Palace of Versailles. When the United States built the Washington Monument, the giant obelisk was to be the tallest structure in the world at the time.

The literal capstone of this great achievement was a pyramid set at the top, made of 100 ounces of the most precious metal known at the time, aluminum. These ornamental uses were pretty much all aluminum was used for. It replaced gold and silver as a setting for some jewelry items. In 1852, the price of aluminum was $34 per ounce, and the price of gold was only $19 per ounce. It was almost twice as expensive. In 1855, a dozen ingots of pure aluminum were put on display at the Paris Universal Exposition.

People began speculating on how this new metal could be used, including military and industrial applications, as well as more mundane things such as cookware. When Jules Verne envisioned going to the moon, he imagined the ship would be made out of aluminum. The exposition popularized aluminum and put more resources into perfecting techniques for its extraction. Production slowly went up and prices started slowly coming down, but it still wasn't enough to start an aluminum revolution. The big change in aluminum happened in the 80s. 1980s. There were two developments that radically changed the amount of aluminum that could be produced.

In 1886, a student from Oberlin College, Charles Hall, and a French engineer named Paul Harrow, simultaneously developed a technique to affordably extract aluminum from aluminum oxide using electricity. They made practical what Humphrey Davy theorized 80 years earlier. In 1887, Austrian Carl Joseph Baer developed a chemical process to separate aluminum from the common aluminum ore boxite. Both of these processes are still used today. With these techniques in place and the development of large scale electrical production, everything was in place for aluminum production on a large scale. And that is exactly what happened. Aluminum production skyrocketed over its previous tiny amounts and the price plummeted. The price of aluminum had already dropped to $2 per

pound by 1889 and fell to half a dollar per pound in 1894. In 1891, the total global production of aluminum was almost 200 tons, which was equivalent to the entire amount produced on Earth in the 33 years between 1856 and 1889. By 1899, there were 6,000 tons produced globally. As production went up and costs went down, the number of uses for aluminum began to grow. Aluminum has many properties that make it attractive for use. First, it's very lightweight compared to other metals, especially iron. Second, it doesn't rest, at least the same way iron does. Aluminum actually does oxidize, but when raw aluminum is exposed to the air, a single molecule layer of aluminum oxide will form in the surface, which prevents further oxidation. It's also

a good electrical conductor, not as good as copper or gold, but pretty good and much cheaper. Aluminum was critical for the growth of aviation in the early 20th century. The Wright brothers used aluminum in their early planes. The lightweight nature of the metal made it perfect for aircraft. It was the first metallic replacement for the wood frames of early biplanes. In 1910, the first aluminum foil was created. It quickly replaced tin foil, which was less malleable and left an aftertaste in food. However, the term tinfoil was still used in English even after aluminum foil almost totally replaced tinfoil after World War II. In fact, if you do a search for tinfoil on Amazon or Google, all of the results will actually be aluminum foil.

Jules Verne's prediction that a ship would be sent to the moon made of aluminum turned out to be true. Aluminum was a major component of the lunar lander during the Apollo missions. It was also the material that made up Sputnik, the first satellite. In the 1970s, aluminum cans were brought into widespread adoption. I'm old enough that I can actually remember when aluminum cans first came out, and they were a big deal. Everything before that was made of tin. One of the other properties which makes aluminum so good is that it's very easy and cost-effective to recycle. The high energy, which goes into separating aluminum out of its constituent ore,

isn't necessary when recycling. So using recycled aluminum will always be more efficient. That is why all over the world you'll see plastic bottles as litter, but never usually aluminum cans, because they have value and someone will pick them up. In 170 years, humanity's relationship with aluminum has changed dramatically. In 1852, the price of aluminum was double that of gold. Today, having just checked, for the cost of one gram of gold, you can buy approximately 61,000 grams of aluminum. So the next time you toss an aluminum can into a recycling bin, realize that back in the 19th century, you would have been throwing away one of the most valuable items in the world. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAla. The associate producer is Thor Thompson.

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