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Key Dates...
1808- Sir Humphry Davy established the existence of aluminium and named it.
1821- P.berthier discovers a hard, reddish, clay-like material containing 52% aluminium oxide, near the villagea of Les Baux in southern France. He called it bauxide, the most common ore of aluminium.
1825- Hans Christian Oersted produces minute quantities of aluminium metal by using dilute potassium amalgam to react with anhydrous aluminium chloride, and distilling the resulting mercury away to leave a residue of slightly impure aluminium.
1827- Friedrich Woler descirbes a process for producing aluminium as a powder by reacting potassium with anhydrous aluminium chloride.
1845- Wohler established the specific density of aluminium, and one of its unique properties - lightness.
1854- Henri Sainte-Claire Deville improved Wohler's method to creae the first commercial process. The metal's price is high enough to inhibit its widespread adoption by industry.
1885- Hamilton Y. Cassner improved on Deville's process.
1886- Paul Louis Toussaint Heroult and Charles Marin Hall, working separately and unaware of each other's work, simultaneously invented a new electrolytic process, the Hall-Heroult process, which is the basis for all aluminium production today. They discovered that if they dissovled alumnium oxide (alumina) in a bath of molten cryolite and passed a powerful electric current throught it, then molten aluminium would be deposited at the bottom of the bath.
1888- The first aluminium companies founded in France, Switzerland and the USA.
1889- Karl Josef Bayer, son of the founder of the Bayer chemical company, invented the Bayer Process for the large scale production of aluminia from bauxite.
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