Aluminum - Who Discovered It?

What is the first thing which comes to mind when youthe name of Hans Christian Orsted produced the
think of aluminum? I for once think of foil and mymetal in an impure form. Unfortunately, his metal was
mum's famous roasted pork. Yummy! This metal is andebunked by Friedrich Wohler as potassium.
excellent conductor for heat and electricity; it reflectsBefore a proper production process was invented, it
light and resists corrosion making it a very sturdywas extremely difficult to extract the pure metal
metal. Besides that, it is non-magnetic, non toxic and istherefore making it more expensive than gold once
able to be produced by all metal working processes,upon a time. Charles Martin Hall, an American inventor
making it easy and is cost efficient to produce.and engineer developed the Hall-Heroult process which
Combining it and any kind of metal creates a veryinvolves the production of the metal by dissolving
strong alloy which therefore makes it a very worthyalumina in molten cryolite and electrolyzing it to obtain
metal. So, who discovered aluminum?the pure metal. Charles M. Hall was probably so
This wonderful, useful metal isn't something which hasexcited during his discovery that he even misspelled
been used only in the past 100 years, the ancientthe word on a handbill publicizing his finding, spelling it
Romans and Greeks used it even back then in so"aluminum" instead of "aluminium". This method is
many things from structures, weapons, to dailycarried out to produce this metal on a very big scale
household items and used its salts as dyeing agentstherefore making it a more cost efficient method than
as well as to clean and disinfect wounds, even up untilextracting from its original ore.
today, it is still used as an agent which stops bleeding.As we can see, the discovery of aluminum wasn't as
Up until 1761, that which was used to treat woundsstraightforward and as direct as the discovery of the
was nameless and was only named alumine in 1761 bytelevision or electricity because chemistry isn't as
Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, a French chemist.simple as it may seem. The perfection of the process
He was the first scientist to produce the very firstto produce metals like this and the rest like copper is
systematic method of chemical nomenclature. It wasan ongoing process even up until today. Scientists like
then in 1808 that Humphry Davy discovered the metalCharles Hall are those with devoted time who engrave
base of alum which he finally named it aluminum. It washistory and at the same time brings around that which
only in 1825 when a Danish physicist and chemist bybenefits all of us.