Charles Martin Hall Solves the Aluminum Challenge
From Semiprecious to Abundant
Before 1886, aluminum was a semiprecious metal comparable in price to silver. Although the element had been discovered in 1825 and had been investigated by many European scientists, the only way to prepare the metal was by the complex and difficult process that culminated in reacting metallic sodium with aluminum chloride. When the Washington Monument was completed in 1884, a 6-pound pyramid of this costly aluminum was placed as an ornament at the very top. It also served as the tip of the lightning rod system, a practical application of the high electrical conductivity and corrosion resistance of this remarkable metal. However, economical methods were needed to wrest aluminum from its abundant minerals, which Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, the great French chemist, observed "could be found in every clay bank."

Two men with a common interest in aluminum metal met on the campus of Oberlin College near Cleveland, Ohio, in 1880. Frank Jewett was a world traveler and as well educated in chemical science as any American academic of his day. Charles Hall was a local youth, self-educated in science, who hoped to become a successful inventor and entrepreneur. Their association over the next five-and-one-half years led to the discovery of a practical process for making aluminum from its ore by an electric current. Within three more years, Hall was producing pure aluminum metal on an industrial scale. Aluminum, the curiosity, became a widely used material, and the younger man achieved his goal of a financially successful career in technology and industry.

Professor and Student
Frank Fanning Jewett received his undergraduate education and did some graduate work in chemistry and mineralogy at Yale University. From 1873 to 1875, he continued his chemistry studies at the University of G¦ttingen in Germany. There he became well acquainted with current European science and became interested in the promise of aluminum. He met Professor Friedrich W¦hler, who had isolated aluminum as a metal in 1827 following H. C. Oersted's lead in 1825. Before Jewett returned to America in 1875 to become Oliver Wolcott Gibbs's private assistant at Harvard University, he obtained a sample of aluminum metal. In 1876, he was nominated by the president of Yale to teach science at the Imperial University in Tokyo, where he was one of a small group of Westerners. In 1880 at the age of 36, Jewett became the professor of chemistry and mineralogy at Oberlin College.

Charles Martin Hall first learned chemistry as a serious-minded youth in the town of Oberlin by reading an 1840s textbook he found on the shelves of his minister father's study. He also carried on experiments at home, the beginning of a lifelong enthusiasm for experimental work. An avid reader in many fields, he eagerly followed the popular invention literature in Scientific American. Hall was already intrigued by the romance of aluminum when, as a 16-year-old freshman at Oberlin College in the fall of 1880, he went to the chemistry laboratory to obtain some items for his home laboratory. There he met Professor Jewett.