Aluminum: The Metal Extraordinaire

Aluminum: The Metal Extraordinaire

Aluminum (or aluminium) is the world’s most common metal by crustal abundance, making up 8.2% of mass. It’s more common than iron (5.6%) and a whopping 1200x more abundant than copper.

Despite its prevalence, aluminum was not isolated all the way until 1827. This is because it occurs only in compounds, and never in a free form. It also turns out that removing aluminum from these compounds is quite difficult, and an inexpensive process wasn’t discovered until 1886 by a college student in the United States. Charles Martin Hall was interested in the problem, and ran an electric current through a molten mixture of cryolite and aluminum oxide in a wood shed behind his house.

That dropped the price of aluminum drastically, and it became a household metal. Behind iron, aluminum is now the second most used metal in the world. Aluminum can now be found in everything: transportation (planes, cars, and more), buildings, machinery, consumer durables, packaging, and electrical uses.

Original graphic from: GutterMasters