Stuff You Should Know - How Alumin(i)um Works

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Humans made it through the Bronze Age and Iron Age, then we dabbled in steel, and now we are living in the Aluminum Age. The metal is so ubiquitous it seems like it’s been around forever, but we’ve only been really using it since the 20th century.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lars that pip in from the Real Housewives of Miami. I'm Marcus Jordan, CEO of Trophy Room. We decided to launch this podcast, separation anxiety. We can't live without each other. We can't. And I think we go through separation anxiety when we're not together. We kind of want to share our stories.

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Hey everybody, we want to remind you we are wrapping up our tour this year with three shows in Orlando, Florida, National Tennessee and Atlanta. Tickets are on sale now, isn't that right? That's right. So go to link tree slash sysk or our website stuffyshedno.com for ticket links info and everything you need. We'll see you guys starting in August. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's lurking

around too, which makes this stuff you should know. One of the first, I think the first. No, I think we talked about Iron before. The second, you know, I'm going saga to do an episode on each element in the periodic table. Yeah, kill me. It's so much fun Chuck. No, this is a good one. Yeah, who killed me. I like it so much. It's so much fun, Chuck. No, this is a good one. Yeah, that's it for me. I'm done.

We'll see about that. But we're talking today about aluminum, which is pretty much ubiquitous. If you think about it, you find aluminum everywhere. I don't even need to rattle off where you find aluminum. You can figure that out yourself because it's just that ubiquitous, right? Agreed. So one of the interesting things about it though, Chuck, is that as much as it's like entered into our world or become so amiss with our world, it is a very, very new invention.

As far as elements go and discovery and use, I mean, we've been using copper forever, iron forever, bronze even longer than iron, remember. Aluminum, we've been using essentially since the 20th century. Is this the aluminum age? Yes, it is. Any people call it that? No, but I think we should start calling it that. I mean, bronze at an age and iron had an age, stone had an age.

Yeah, this is a great idea. Chuck, the aluminum age, that's a wonderful idea. It really gets the point across. It does. And you mentioned that it's ubiquitous in use these days for sure, but it's also abundant. And as Livia pointed this out, because she helped us out with this one. She did a really good job on this one, I think.

8% of the total mass of the Earth's crust has aluminum in it, but it's not like from the beginning we could just go down there and chop out a bunch of aluminum with a screwdriver and a hammer. Because aluminum had a, well not a problem, it just had a quality that it bonds very easily with other elements. So that means it's reactive.

So that means it's in the crust. It is parts of rock and parts of other things and combination with other elements and minerals. And it wasn't just like, oh, look, there's aluminum. We can just go grab it. We had to figure out how to extract usable aluminum from other things, mainly these days and back then, something called boxite. Yeah.

Boxite is kind of like an umbrella term for naturally occurring aluminum ores, basically. Yeah. But the problem with aluminum, like a lot of metals and minerals show up in nature as ores and we can extract them. The difficulty is that aluminum is so reactive. It really, really meshes with the other mineral or the other rock or the other metal. And it's really tough to get apart. Kind of like a poor Wilphor Brimley in the thing.

It's like that amashed. Oh man. I'm peeling better now. So you've got this box I, and we know about it. We know that there's something useful in it, but we didn't know how to get it out. And for a long time, people would notice like, oh, there's something useful in it, but we didn't know how to get it out. And for a long time, people had noticed, like, oh, there's all sorts of stuff you can do with this box site that we'll call Alam, which is a kind of aluminum sulfate made with

potassium. People have been using that for about 7, 8,000 years now. Yeah. All sorts of stuff. Like, of course, the Egyptians, they put all kinds of things in makeup as we've talked about before Aluminum or that that potassium aluminum sulfate is one of them Used often and dies use for dressing wounds I think you can also find aluminum in clay. So yeah for many thousands of years they were using

aluminum strengthened clay to make harder and stronger pottery. Yeah, you can't break it. It's like an unbreakable comb. Unbreakable, what? Comb. Like a hair comb? Yeah, I think it's a brand name, even. Oh, really? I've never heard of it. It just invites you to break it, and it eventually does break, by the way, but it's hard to break. I got you. So yes, people were using it for a while and by the way, as an aside, there's a... I don't want to say famous, but there's a noteworthy artifact that was discovered in the tomb of a general, Zou Shu, who lived in China about 1700 years ago, and it's a belt and it's made

of aluminum, and it's what you would refer to as an out-of-place artifact or upart, which is something that kind of bucks our understanding of history and time. Like that should not exist because this was the third century CE, and it wasn't true. It was a control. Like find a remote control in, you know, the old west or something like that. Exactly. That would be a very significant out of place artifact.

This one's so pretty significant, so much so that they're like, we think this is an archeological prank, like a joke. Like somebody was like, this is really gonna blow their minds. And it did, but most people are like, this is so inexplicable, there's no way that it's real. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. But still inexplicable. Yes. That's one of the things that makes it awesome. Yeah, sure. But the the upside of my whole point was we knew that there was something useful in there. And as far as the chemistry world goes, it's not enough to just know it's there. They

have to isolate it. They're just fanatics about it and they said that about doing that in the 19th century right? Yeah there was one chemist in particular name Antoine Lavoisier yeah obviously French and he was like hey you know this aluminum oxide or I think you were calling aluminum at that point you, we can probably extract this stuff wasn't able to, but not too long after in 1808, there was a British chemist name, Sir Hempfried Davy, who, and he actually named it, well, we'll get to the naming thing in a second. It goes through some stages. It was, to him, it was a lumeum. That was a strange thing for it.

And then he wrote a book of elements, elemental and chemistry, I'm sorry, chemical philosophy, four years after that. And at that point, it was spelled aluminum. But then later on, like four years later, in the quarterly review, there were a bunch of British chemists who were just like, I don't like the ring of aluminum, it doesn't sound British enough. So they went with aluminium with an extra eye.

And that was basically what people called it for a long time, except for Americans who were like, you know what? We're using both of these terms, we really like aluminum. It's in the dictionary, it's in Webster's Dictionary is aluminum. Can we just settle this? And in 1925, finally, the American Chemical Society said, yes, we are going to say it's aluminum. And so Americans can Canadian, so the only people who call it that for some reason.

Yeah, everybody else calls it aluminum. Yeah, they stuck with it. They really did. They really everybody else calls it aluminum. Yeah, they stuck with it. They really did. They really stuck with it for sure. So that Humphrey Davey going back to him, probably one of the reasons he came up with different spellings was because he was fresh off of his self-experimentation with nitrous oxide.

Oh yeah. He was the guy who called it, oh excellent airbag, remember him. So he was the one who said, there is an elemental, useful metal here in this cruddy ore, and he described it before anyone had ever even isolated it. But in the world of chemistry, you wouldn't call Sir Humphrey Davy the discoverer of aluminum in chemistry to discover something you have to have isolated it in its pure form.

And there was an early attempt to do that. I think there was a guy named Hans Christian Ursted, who in 1825 came very close, but he had an impure isolated aluminum. And then very triumphantly, Friedrich Voeller or Voeller, I think, came up with pure aluminum two years after that. Yeah, it's the old chemistry tradition that in order to be named the discoverer, you have to extract it and then roll up in a ball and hit someone with it. That's right. That's the tradition. That's right. But it was really expensive to do.

So for the first, and it's kind of funny to think about now because they've gotten so good at making aluminum. It's obviously used in so many different things and it's fairly inexpensive, but back then it was a luxury item. So aluminum at first was known as the Medal of Kings and Napoleon loved it. He was like, just think of what we could do with this stuff in the military. It's fairly strong, it's very light.

I think the lightness was such a huge attractive quality for aluminum still is. And he was like, we need this stuff in here. I even want to eat off of it, so make some cutlery for me. And I'll just keep very select sets of this stuff for me and my very special guest, and everyone else will just dine on silver with silver spoons, and we'll use this aluminum. And they were just going crazy for aluminum.

It was very kind of funny to look back at how it was a luxury metal in its earliest days. It definitely was, and one reason why is because even though Volar had come up with a method for extracting pure aluminum, it was really labor intensive, it was really hard to do, and you didn't get very much from it. So that made it a very precious metal, especially when, like you said, you had people like Napoleon III, bankrolling investigations into getting more and more aluminum, right? And one of the reasons why I did not know this, but there's probably people out there who do, that there is an aluminum pyramid capping the Washington monument that was put,

it was installed when the monument was built in 1884, finished, is in part because America was showing off. In 1884, it was still a very luxurious good, and they had the six pound aluminum pyramid placed on the top, and it was so difficult still at that time to extract aluminum, that that represented one quarter of the annual production of all the aluminum in the world that was produced that year, that one six pound pyramid. Yeah, it's pretty funny. Eight inches and six pounds and like get a load of this. Wait all they see this thing. Yes. It's like a bunch of beer cans mashed together.

Exactly. That's the funniest part. This is 1884. They paid like $7,500 bucks in today's money for it, which seems kind of cheap to me. But two years later, we got so good at extracting aluminum, we came up with another process which we'll talk about in a second, that that pyramid went from like, hero to zero almost overnight. Yeah, but you know, it also served a purpose because well, everyone knows aluminum is very anti-corrosive, so that's a nice topper for a monument. And it also served as a lightning rod.

So it served a purpose, but it was for sure a brag. But like you said, it went kind of to a staple thing very quickly once some very smart people got to work refining his process. One was Charles Martin Hall, a nohyen. He's very so high, oh. And I would say Paul Herrell. Herell, how would you pronounce that? Herald.

Herald? I think you might actually say the T in that one. I'm not sure. Herald? H-E-O-R-O-U-L-T, another Frenchman. They independently in 1886 invented this technique that they have now has been codenamed after them as the Hall-Herole process in which you dissolve aluminum oxide and molten cryolite and mineral.

Right. Pass the current through there. We've talked about those kind of processes before. And I believe the Frenchman actually filed the patent about a month and a half before Hall, but Hall proved that he had come up with it previously. And so they worked it out, they shared credit, they even ended up dying in the same year.

Yeah. I guess they really wanted to share everything All right, they said let's just die together as well and they both passed away in 1914 and That was at the end of the process though. I think someone else came along and really refined it Yeah, and that was not only not the end That was just the beginning that process is still in use today and then like you said a, a third guy, Carl Yosef Bayer, would you say Yosef? Oh, probably, I think. Yeah. Okay. So with Yosef Bayer in 1987, the next year came up with a way to get aluminum oxide, which was the base form of aluminum that you start out within the hall hurrah

process. The next year somebody came along and figured out a better way to get aluminum oxide from box site. So in the span of a year essentially we went from aluminum being a precious metal to having an industrial process in place that we still use today. That's incredible. That's why we live in the aluminum age today. I just think the timing of the whole thing is so amazing. And I saw it explained in part because people were so well aware that aluminum was light and strong and conductive.

Those are really desirable properties. They wanted this metal really bad. So it was a real target in the chemistry world, which explains why Hall and Heralt both came up with this same process independently, the same at the same time. But the fact that you put that together with bears discovery, it just all congealed all at once rather than over the course of decades and decades. Yeah, I just find that very interesting. Yeah, it's very cool. In fact, Hall in 1888,

helped out on the company that's still around today. Back then it was called the Pittsburgh Reduction Company. And now it's known as the aluminum company of America, Alcoa. I'm sure we have listeners, plenty of listeners in Pittsburgh that work for Alcoa, very big company. And the price of aluminum really went down. So I mean, if you want something to go from a luxury

to like something that you crush against your head from a beer can, you go from almost $5 a pound in 1888 to 78 cents in 1893. And then all the way down to about 20 cents a pound in the 1930s. Yeah, so in today's prices, it's going from $665 a pound to $5.45 a pound in just a few decades. That's how radical and just world-changing that process was. And it is.

I think that is a heck of an intro. All right. Well, it's taking a break then I say. Some podcasts might stop there, you know. Yeah, but we're gonna keep going. All right, we'll be right back. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the U.S. government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town?

From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover--ups from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science. History is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories, and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know

on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam? I'm Brian Ford, artist and baker and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuits. On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to mom's Thanksgiving

dressing. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me as I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Does this podcast come with a therapist? They can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, hola! It's your girl, Cheekies, and I'm back with brand new episodes of my podcasts, Cheekies and Chill and Dear Cheekies. Last season, I shared so many intimate stories

with you guys and had conversations with some of my favorite people. This season, we're picking up right where we left off. We'll talk about everything from spirituality, relationships, women's health, and so much more. And guess what? Dear Cheekies is also back. Segurecum distando to atos peregr también. Seguiré contestando todas tus preguntas.

Me voy a preguntar a tus preguntas y, ¿qué es? No puedo esperar. Así que no te pierdas. Un momento de chiquis y chile. Deja tus chiquis, como parte de mi cultura podcast, Available en el I Heart Radio, Apple Podcasts o wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so one of the things Chuck that we talked about was,

you mentioned that you melt cryolite. I think it melts at a thousand degrees Celsius. And then you melt aluminum so that temperature has to be even hotter than that. Like really, really hot. And then you pass a really strong electrical current through that. And to do all this, it's really, really energy intensive as we'll see. Yeah. So one of the other things that supported the boom in aluminum was that the electrical grid and ways of creating and generating and getting electricity from place to place was also developing simultaneously in the United States as well. That really helped a lot. Yeah, big time.

In fact, a lot of aluminum plants early on were built near dams. They were like, let's just, you know, this really make this efficient instead of camp right next to that dam over there. So, you know, we should probably go over some of the modern uses of aluminum. Aluminum is, like we said, has so many great properties, but it is fairly soft and weak in and of itself. I mean, it makes, and we'll talk about foil and beer. I can't stop talking about beer cans.

And it's great for that stuff. But if you want to use it in, you know, commercial settings, you can make commercial aluminum. You just have to mix in a little iron, maybe a little silicon, and it makes it much stronger. And there are like all kinds of ways that you can alloy if I, is that a word? I think it works. All right, you can alloy if I aluminum to do things like build an airplane.

And in fact, that's the right brothers. You might be thinking that airplane was made of wood. And it was was but the engine and i never knew this was made of 92% aluminum because they needed horsepower they needed a strong enough engine to get that little wooden frame off the ground but they couldn't make it like you would a car engine could be way too heavy so they needed to be less than 200 pounds, produce that eight horses, and German car makers were starting to use aluminum for their engines, and they said, you're onto something. They ended up using 8% copper to the 92% aluminum, and they got that thing

off the ground. Yeah, they turned to their mechanic Charlie Taylor, and it needed to be no more than 200 pounds and produce eight horsepower, like you said. He delivered one from scratch that weighed 180 pounds and produced 12 horsepower. So Charlie Taylor really came through. I know we talked about him in the right brothers episode we did. Was that a two-parter? I don't know.

I wanna say it was, but I make a lot of stuff up in my head. So, you know, come World War One, not too long after, they were making full airplanes out of metal. Like, aluminum replaced wood very, very quickly because you had wood and fabric airplanes. Obviously, you know, that was the best they could do at the time, but aluminum is so much stronger and you could go a lot faster and do all kinds of things you could do with wooden fabric yeah uh... and there's even uh... liby found a

a gentleman the national air and space museum the smisone and who was like if it wasn't for aluminum we wouldn't have the planes in spacecraft we have the day kind of period yeah and so they really gets across one of the big prize things about aluminum aluminum. It's strong, but it's also light. It's not quite as strong as steel, but it's much lighter than steel. I think three times lighter. So it's strength to weight ratio is much better, which means it requires a lot less either horsepower in your 12 horsepower engine or a lot less, I guess, solid rocket fuel

to get your rocket off of the ground because you're using aluminum. or a lot less, I guess, a solid rocket fuel to get your rocket off of the ground because you're using aluminum. So that's pretty great. There's another quality of it that's allowed aluminum to really kind of help us as its conductivity. Yeah, if it was equally as conductive as copper,

it would have fully replaced copper at this point because of how much easier aluminum it is to get. But it's about two-thirds as good as copper, which is still great, very conductive, but it's a third is heavy, which is great. The problem there is you're going to need aluminum wire that's about one and a half times the diameter of copper if you want it to perform the same. So it is lighter but that's a lot bigger so they couldn't, they tried to for a little while but they couldn't just like go in and replace copper and households and stuff because the wiring is

too big. They do use it for overhead and underground transmission because you reinforce it with steel and it can be bigger in diameter, it's not that big of a deal. But I think in the 60s and 70s they were trying it in houses because copper was really expensive. I think it worked well, but the connections ended up where you connect it together, ended up being a fire hazard, so they did away with that. Yeah, what happens is where the wiring goes into your outlet, your socket, right, in the back. The aluminum expands and contracts much more than copper does, so it loosens over time,

and when it gets loose enough, it'll arc. An electrical arc is way worse than just an electrical current because the electricity encounters gas, the atmosphere, and it shoots up to like 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit and causes fires. So if you buy a house with aluminum wiring, like from the 60s or 70s, your insurance company's probably gonna be like, if you want insurance on this house, you're going to have to totally rewire it.

That's right. And now we can talk about beer cans. Finally. Because that is what started to happen. All the way back in the late 1950s. The old cans were made of usually 10, sometimes steel. And there was a very forward thinking company in Hawaii called the Hawaii Brewing Company. And they tried it out on their primo beer. And they said shipping this stuff is a lot better.

It's a lot cheaper. We can ship it to the mainland. No problem But the can linings that they were using at the time There was a chemical reaction going on between the beer and the can it ruined the beer bankrupted the company But it did not die there because Cours was right on their heels. They were already working on the same thing and they perfected it just a year later in 1959 and basically said the same thing and they perfected it just a year later in 1959 and basically said the same thing. It's like this is a lot cheaper. It's easier to and you know lighter obviously than glass bottles. It actually helps the beer. I'm deprived

the beer of light and oxygen better than bottles and cores started the whole thing. As far as beer goes followed very quickly by RC Arsicola on the soft drink side. And then it was aluminum can city as far as soft drinks and canned anything goes basically. But if you remember when like we were kids, those same aluminum cans just were felt heavier and thicker. It's because they were. They've refined the process and made it much thinner over the years, but those old cans, because I was like, were those 10? They weren't, they were aluminum. They were just a lot heavier back then.

Right. So today, aluminum cans are so useful that 20% of the entire global supply goes to making aluminum cans, which is pretty amazing. And the other thing about it is it's highly recyclable, as we'll see. It has what's called infinite recyclability, like it doesn't degrade in the recycling process and it requires way less energy, time, and money to recycle aluminum cans. So much so that I read that the can of say like Coke or beer or whatever you're drinking was probably in the exact same form in a different life 60 days before. Each can

has about a 60 day life cycle from sale to use to recycling to reprocessing to repackaging to go and back on the store shelf again. Isn't that amazing? But it's not like they just wash out the same can. It's completely disintegrated. So it's not the exact same can, but it was in some way that same can before. It's like that ship we talked about,

and does your body replace itself? If you slowly replace each part of the ship, when you replace everything, is it still the same ship? Same question applies to aluminum cans that turns out. Yeah, I mean we might as well finish up on recycling and just say that we've tried to beat the recycling drum over the years and we know that there are some problems with the recycling process for a lot of stuff. I know glasses, particularly problematic.

But aluminum is one of those that they have really, really figured out how to do it in a great, efficient way. And it's so recyclable. And it's very easy to recycle, yet only 50% of aluminum, and this just cans, just the cans of people drink. Only 50% of those still are recycled. So just we implore you, we try not to get on the old high horse, but if you're not going

to recycle anything else, please just recycle those cans. It's so easy and it really, really makes a big difference. Yeah, again, it requires 5% of the carbon emissions to recycle aluminum pound for pound, then it does to process it and create it initially. 5%. It's not a scam. It's not just going to some landfill. Like they've really got aluminum recycling down pat.

So you can feel good about throwing that can in the recycling and knowing that some other jerk next to you will be drinking from almost that same can, what two months later, you said? Yeah, about six to eight weeks. Yeah, that is just a wonderful thing. So recycle that aluminum. There's a very often cited stat that I think goes all the way back to 2001.

I couldn't find a more updated one. But we throw away so many aluminum cans that we could rebuild the entire US commercial air fleet every three months with that aluminum just thrown away. And the other thing talking about is recyclability, if you can just recycle aluminum over and over and over again, eventually we have enough that we've mined and processed that we don't have to mine and process it anymore because it's all getting recycled.

So we could stop. We're close to that now, right? No, now if we're only recycling 50% of our cans, that means we have to supplement the recycled material with another 50% of new cans. Yeah, but about 75% of all aluminum ever used is still being used. Okay, yeah, that's true.

So sure, I guess 25%. There's some missing math in there somewhere. Well, that's so we're talking cans and then we're talking all aluminum. Oh, well, yeah, it's true. Yeah, apparently the building industry has a much higher recycling rate. That's right. It's good for them. Well, you want to take another break?

Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Well, you want to take another break? Yeah, let's do it. OK. Well, here we are, everybody. Take another break. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.

Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI?

What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We've spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries,

conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuit. On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal.

It could be anything from Twinkies to mom's Thanksgiving dressing. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good, because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe

so you can cook and bake alongside me. As I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh. Does this podcast come with a therapist? He can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. With all the chaos and turmoil in the news, it feels like we never get to hear about the good happening in our world. We're on a mission to change that. Welcome to the Good Stuff. I'm Jacob Schick, a third generation combat Marine. And I'm his co-host and wife, Ashley Schick. We believe everyone has a story to tell, not only about the peaks, but the valleys they've been through

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or wherever you get your podcast. Alright everyone, cans are great. We love those cans, but I love and I always have love to limit them foil. I don't know what it is about it. I think it's the, I think it's the foldability of foil. I don't know what it is about it. I think it's the, I think it's the foldability of foil. I just love it. I've had a roommate who used to make eat candy and make little things out of gum wrappers, little swords and things and poke people. And I just, I don't know, I've always loved aluminum foil. I even make the mistakes sometimes still calling it tin foil,

even though I don't think it was at all even around when I was a kid, even. Maybe I just picked it up for my grandmother or something? Probably. I mean, everybody calls it tin foil still. Yeah, I guess so. Even Adam Savage on his Japanese foil ball video called the tin foil.

Did he? Yeah, which we'll talk about in a sec. Adam Savage on his Japanese foil ball video called it in foil. Yeah, which we'll talk about in a sec. But in 1910, there was a manufacturer, an aluminum manufacturer that said, all right, I can figure out how to get this aluminum into these big rolled sheets and we can package candy in it, we can package tobacco in it. And before you know it, in 1913, it hit the US in the form of lifesavers, candy rolls and other kinds of candy bars. And then it didn't take long before like the 1920s when it was used as you know the rolls of foil that very useful. I still try to to not use it because

to not use it because, you know, cutting, like, reducing is the first thing in reduced reuse recycle. So it's not like I'm just like ripping tin foil off all the time just to play with it. But it is a very handy thing to have in the house. If you toss that aluminum foil ball in the recycling, it doesn't matter. You can play with it all day long. Yeah. Because it's infinitely recyclable. I don't know if we said that or not yet. We've a bunch of times, but reducing is still better. Sure. That's why it's number one on the list. But it's so hard, Chuck. To not play with aluminum foil?

Yeah, to reduce. Yeah, it is. So we can't not talk about the tin foil hat, too. Like, think about it. No one ever says the aluminum foil hat. It's a foil or tin foil. Apparently, the Vice Magazine traced it back to a 1927 story by Al-Jewis Huxley's brother Julian. I can't remember what it's called and I knew it. It's a great name to,

sorry, everybody, but he develops this form of mass control, the scientists, the main character. And he uses a cap of metal foil To prevent that mind control being used on him and as far as vice magazines concerned. That's where the whole thing began Whose brother was this? Algy is Huxley the doors of perception guy. I think you added you did the Josh out of owl Algy was yeah, I've always done that. I don't think I've ever said his name other than Al-Jewis Huxley.

Oh, I'm surprised you don't say aluminum because they've added the valve for you. I refuse to because I'm American through and through. I believe red, white, and blue chuck. That's right. All right, so that happened in what, 1927? No, seriously, please call a doctor. My blood is white sometimes.

It's, no. It can't be healthy. You're fine. You're fine. That was in 1927 and then in World War 2, there was a propaganda broadcaster named William Joyce who talked about tinfoil hats protecting against shrapnel. So that was another use, right? Yeah. that guy was a Nazi propagandist who was trying to undermine the British Morale. He was a real jerk. They hung him named Lord H-Ha-Ha. Yeah, I always want to say Lord H-Ha. Actually, I want to say Lord H-Ha-Ha because I always had an extra vowel, but the the upshot of all this I don't even know if that applies in this case, but how about to wrap up this section, like a piece of aluminum foil, if you've ever watched better

call Saul, the original, I guess the first couple seasons as brother, what's his brother's name? I never seen the show. Oh, okay. Well, Michael McKeein plays his brother very well. He's a big jerk and but he has an electromagnetic sensitivity which they explore in depth and he wraps himself in magnetic foil very any time he wants to get out of the house. But an MIT study in 2005 found that

doing that would actually amplify electromagnetic frequencies rather than prevent them from entering your body or head. No good then. Yeah, Tim Foil Hat does not work everybody. I referenced the Japanese foil ball thing and it's apparently one of these internet challenges from like five years ago that I had never heard of. Me either. So I immediately went and looked it up and you know it's basically you take a big you know crinkly ball of foil

and you start hammering on it until you do it so much that it ends up you know if you just use the hammer you can even get it down to a pretty smoothish aluminum ball. I did see others though that you know then they would get out some grinders and some sandpaper and stuff. That feels like cheating. Well, I mean, it depends on what you want to up with. They could have stopped and just said, all right, here, this is like really cool. But then when you like sand it down and use the grinder and use like polishing stuff, you can literally take it to the point where it's a very, very shiny.

It looks like almost like a solid chrome steel ball. And it's really cool and fun to see, and I think I want to try to do it. I think you shouldn't, you should post it on Instagram. Maybe, I mean, if I'm, well, I'll post it either way, I was going to say if it's a success, but it's even more fun if I screw it up. Exactly, totally. But that gets across how aluminum can be decorative. So like a lot of shiny paper or shiny materials that are just shiny on one side, they're coated

in aluminum because they figured out a technique to flash vaporize it in a vacuum and it goes fump and coats whatever happens to be in there with it. That's the process they use. Flash vaporizing aluminum, you got to feel like some sort of god on earth when you're able to do that. When you press that button, you got to feel like some sort of God on earth when you're able to do that. When you press that button, you know? Yeah. Uh, it's used in all kinds of buildings, kind of starting with in the 1930s, uh, in New York City with the Empire State Building.

Use a lot of aluminum. Uh, it's used a lot in car making. They use about 18% of all aluminum is used in auto making these days. And then, I mean, what else? Like you mentioned the decorative paper, it's in toys, it's in medicine. It can be an anacid, if it's aluminum hydroxide. Yeah, most over the counter anacids are made of that. Yeah, it's still used topically, just like they did back in the old days for burns and wounds and stuff like that. And it still in makeup.

Yeah, and it plugs up your pores and your aniperspirin. Yeah, which we just talked about in, what, history of hygiene. That's right. And apparently, I always thought that that was not good at all, but Olivia pointed out in that podcast. And, you know, we can talk about it some here too,

that it is not been proven decidedly that aluminum is really, really bad for your body and the quantities that you would normally have aluminum. Yeah, there was a scare back in about 2010, 2011, that the aluminum and your antiperspirant was going to give you breast cancer, and apparently that was just made up on the internet, and studies don't actually support that. The new one is that aluminum, and I shouldn't say new, because I think it kind of started

in the 60s and 70s, that there was some sort of correlation between the tau protein tangles and plaques that are associated with Alzheimer's and aluminum consumption. Was it in like mice or rats that they found this in? I think it was mice, but they were, I think they were like injecting mice. And they ended up saying like, humans are never gonna come into contact with this much aluminum.

Just from being on the earth and using aluminum. I think they have found that there's aluminum in the drinking water supply of your town, which has happened and is a real problem. Then if you have Alzheimer's that can accelerate it, but I don't think they have still linked it to causing full stop Alzheimer's. No, but they have identified it as a neurotoxin because remember how it's super reactive, it does the same thing with cells in your body, including your neuron. So it can really mess your brain up and it causes double strand breaks, which messes up your DNA.

So when that cell divides into another one, that's new cells DNA is messed up too, hence tumors too. So there are problems at the aluminum. Like you said, it is in the water supply. It's really in a lot of surprising places and we put those things in our body. Again, want to point out, before the 20th century, this didn't happen. People weren't ingesting aluminum. It just didn't exist in that form on Earth, right? That's a new thing, but it does seem that despite it not being used in any biological process,

despite it being very new, and so that human body is not really encountering this and gotten used to it, our kidneys are supposedly very, very efficient at flushing aluminum right out of the body about as fast as it comes in. Yeah, I think that's impressive. It is, and that's where it stands right now. I don't think anyone is like, close the book and said,

well, we're just not going to study this anymore. Right. But right now, that's where things stand. Yes. One problem with aluminum is that there have been instances, fairly recently, about aluminum hoarding. In the early 2010s, the Goldman Sachs company, they bought a warehouse complex outside of Detroit michigan

and they stored aluminum for uh... producers and for banks and for people who traded aluminum and they said uh... you know at a certain point in the years that followed buyers are trying to get a hold of aluminum and all of a sudden what used to take you know a month a month and a half to get was taking a year or more to get and it was a real problem and there were people like beer companies and soft drink companies were saying what's going on this is costing us millions and billions of dollars waiting on these aluminum delays and Goldman Sachs was

like hey you know we don't have enough forklift drivers and trucks and that's the problem. It's not us telling everyone to hold on to that aluminum to make a false supply issue so we can charge more for it. But the New York Times came along and said, now that's exactly what's going on. You're just increasing profits by creating a false supply. Yeah, what's interesting is the aluminum market, as a commodity is in like the supply is track so closely that you know Just little instances of hoarding like that if it happens like enough times it can it can affect like the price Pretty easily the supply can just stop people do that when it's really cheap They'll do a Goldman's exit It just buy up supply and sit on it until it goes up in price because in part, you're

sitting on the supply and then you just kind of slowly reintroduce it to the market so that you don't drop that high price while you're still raking in the dough by selling the aluminum you have. And to be fair, Goldman Sachs was far from the only investment bag doing this, running these kind of warehouses. But this is the early 2010s, fresh off of the financial meltdown that Goldman Sachs got bailed out for,

so everybody was, they were just pointing out Goldman Sachs alone. Yeah, that was fair. I think so. That's as fair as it could be. That's called tip for tat, buddy. In this case, even just a couple of years ago in 2021 they found aluminum

hoarding going on in Vietnam to the tune of about up to five billion dollars worth of aluminum. They said this may be the largest aluminum hoard that's ever been and like you said people are just you know doing the wrong thing and the prices really fluctuated quickly I think. It was a low of about $1500 a ton during the pandemic shutdown and then they went to about $3,500 a ton just a couple of years later. Yeah, it's very big diff. Very sensitive. The price is very sensitive. China is a big producer now and they've figured out that when they throttle or dial back supply, they can change the price pretty easily themselves too.

So it's a strange market, especially if we stop mining it, I want to know what's going to happen to the price when we just say, okay, we have our aluminum supply and now we're just circulating it throughout the economy. Like is that going to make it more expensive, less expensive? I'm curious what will happen to that. Well, the cynical human in me thinks that they will then find a way to maximize profits there by doing something untoward. Probably.

You don't have much faith in commodity traders, huh? I know. So one other reason Chuck to make it to the circular economic status for aluminum where we've mined everything that we need and we're just reusing the stock is because box-ite mining is really, really bad for the environment. Most mining is, but any kind of strip mining is really bad because it just completely depletes the land

of everything it needs to keep itself going. Boxite also really pollutes water supplies to with other heavy metals. And then also, because it's so energy intensive, just the boxite mining produces 3% of the world's direct CO2 emissions. That's the mining. Not processing it into aluminum, just the mining alone does that.

Yeah, that's 3% is a small number, but we're talking about all of the CO2 emissions on planet Earth coming from one single process that's staggering. Yeah, and so start looking around. If you're like, just ask yourself before you throw something away. Is this aluminum? If the answer is yes, throw an embersyclingman. Yeah, and, you know, World War II, there were kids turning in their gum wrappers for the more effort to get aluminum recycled. Yes, okay. for the more effort to get aluminum recycled. So be more like World War II kids. Someone apparently suggested melting down the Washington

monument cap during that time, but everybody just kind of didn't say anything about it. Just let it die. I did that really? Yeah, somebody did. And people are like, how do you even know that? Right. That's a really arcane piece of trivia.

Yeah. Okay, well, that's it for aluminum everybody. And that means, of course, it's a really arcane piece of trivia. Yeah. Okay, well that's it for aluminum everybody. And that means of course it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this airplane etiquette. Did you read this one yet? I don't think that one did. This is fresh off the presses, but I'm also gonna call it, am I the A-hole because this is sort of what this

person is asking a little bit With this airplane situation that this gentleman's on recently and it is asking for advice and like did I do the wrong thing? Oh boy, so I'm gonna read sort of a shorter version, okay But needless to say Frank is really into the show and very thankful for it. So Frank and his wife were on a comfort plus flight from our good friends at Delta recently. And they were in the aisle seat and the middle seat. I believe Frank was on the aisle, he's tall.

So wife took the middle seat and they were boarded and seat belted when a passenger assigned to the window seat arrived. As a courtesy, my wife and I turned her like sideways, so he would have an easier time sliding past us, but he said that he doesn't feel comfortable sliding past people like that and asked us to get up and let him in. I mentioned there was plenty of room for him to slide past since we were in comfort plus,

but he insisted we get up. So we unbuckled, we got up and we let him in. When we were preparing to land, about 10 minutes out, and same passenger decided they needed to use a restroom. He asked my wife and I had to get up again to slide out. I was watching a movie at the time, so I had to pause the movie. Oh my god. Fold the arm that holds the screen back into the seat, you know, sometimes it comes out of the arm there. And then fold up my tray, holding my drink into the seat so he could key it out. I did this, turn my leg sideways so we could slide out. And this angered him, and he showed his displeasure by sliding past us angrily and shaking his head in an exaggerated manner.

All right. So this is where we are so far. He returned from the restroom and then asked again if we would get up this time and let him in. I mentioned to him that he slidpats us getting out quite easily, so can't you just do that sliding back in? Oh my goodness. He said, no, I feel uncomfortable sliding past. He called the flight attendant to come over. And the flight attendant arrived and was fairly puzzled.

I think he was, the flight attendant was confused as to what was going on. And the situation was beginning to stress my wife out and quite frankly me as well. Not wanting to cause any more stress issues because we were landing. I relented and buckled and stood up again in my wife to the same. So before we get into this, just may finish this last part, which is, what bothers me is he kept saying he's not comfortable doing so. He never said why he was uncomfortable and that he just insisted that people unbuckle and stand.

What about my comfort and my wife's comfort? What if we weren't comfortable unbuckling and getting up? Because you're supposed to remain seat belted all times in case of turbulence. What if my wife was nine months pregnant? What if I was an 80-year-old man with bad knees? What if I had anxiety about unbuckling? So the wife, I'm sorry the flight attendant never said anything and my question to you guys is what is the proper etiquette that a lot of internet searches couldn't find an answer passengers in its 20s my wife and I in her mid 50s were in good shape so it wasn't a health issue but I thought this man was an entitled young man who's never been told no one is like yeah whoo all right that's from Frank okay so what do you say? I mean, Frank, I think yes, you were the a-hole

in this instance. Oh, for sure. Well, here's what I'll say. Wait, wait, no, I have to explain. I can't just be like, yeah, there you go. That's my joy. Yeah, go ahead, Joe. It sounded like you were done.

No, so like the, it seems like you were put out because you were being asked to do something you didn't want to do. It didn't have anything to do with your comfort level. And the examples that you came up with for that man intruding on your comfort level were just made up. Like you're not 80, your wife is impregnate. You were just annoyed. That guy sounded like he had like a real thing about pushing past people's knees, maybe touching other people, physical contact.

Sounds like he was not into that at all. Some people are not into that to a clinical degree. And I feel like whoever's more put out, you should just defer to him. It just makes things so much more pleasant than saying no to somebody who's asking you to do something for them that really is no skin off of your back at all. So I don't think you are in a whole like necessarily, but I think in this case, if there was in a whole, it was you. Okay, Chuck check now I'm done well I I agree in that my philosophy is is two part one is you know you're all on this plane together everyone's crammed in there and it's just one of those social situations where I think everyone should just do their best to just work it all out and get along while you're done in that short time that you're forced to

be rammed in there together. You know, like, just tell each other out, it's just a lot easier, a lot less friction, no one likes to be on those planes anyway. And then the second part is, I think there's an implicit thing where if you're an aisle seat person, I'm an aisle seat person, you, you know that you're gonna have to get up and let people out. Like, I like an aisle seat at a concert and at a sports game. And you're gonna get up and down a lot and let people in who have to use the bathroom or get their beer or whatever. And it's the same on a plane.

Like, you know what you're getting into with an aisle seat that's, if you want it, I love the aisle seat, but you gotta, you know what's coming. Uh, otherwise you could sit by the window. I'll see that's if you want it. I love that I'll see it but you gotta you know it's coming Otherwise you could sit by the window and that's what you do if you you know like I'm just I'm gonna sleep I know I don't pee on airplanes. I don't want to be bothered so I'll just take that window see So that's my thing is you know what you're getting into if you're in an aisle seat You're gonna have to get up. I think people should always get up. It's just easier I don't like sliding my crotch or my butt past somebody's face. What? At all. Ever. So like it's a reasonable thing, I think, to say, you know,

would you mind just standing up and letting me in and that's what I think. Yeah, there was one other red flag that caught my attention was when Frank suggested that this guy was just an entitled young man who no one had said no to in his life. That sounds then that you were doing this out of hostility, not just because you felt like you're being put out, but because you wanted to be an obstacle in this man's life, be the person who said no to him. And again, that's just hostile. And I agree with you.

It flies in the face of just going along and getting along while we're on this flight together so everybody can get off and never see each other again. Yeah, and we weren't there. So kid may have been very sarcastic and nodded and acted like sort of a jerk, but he may have thought that you drew first blood. True. You know, so that's where we stand in Frank, you're certainly not an A-hole.

You're, you're, it sounds like a sweet guy who listens to the show and it means a lot to you. So we're not, we're not calling you out for that. But he literally wrote in and asked, but you did ask in, uh, and that's our stance is just get out, let the guy out. Yeah, live and let live. And if you see that same 20 year old kid asking some old person who has bad knees, like, then that's a different situation. Totally different. We were responding strictly to the situation

as it was presented. Okay. All right. We could have a whole other show where we did this. We could, I think we would routinely get ourselves into trouble though. Yeah, instead listen to the ultimate judge, our friend Judge John Hodgman. On what the Max Fun Network?

That's right. Nice. Well, since we shouted out the Max Fun Network and I already ended the episode and now listen to Mills Over, if you want to be like Frank, Frank, by the way, thank you for being brave and putting yourself out there like that. If you want to put yourself out there like that, you can give a shot, maybe we'll answer it. Who knows?

Either way, you can give it a try by sending an email to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. So, there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups,

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