CORROSION COMMENTARY Available to Purchase

ALUMINIUM CENTENARY. A HUNDRED years ago, at the Paris Exposition of 1855, Prof. Ste. Claire Deville exhibited samples of aluminium which he had extracted from clay by a chemical process. It was not until a generation later, in 1886, that the electrolytic process for extracting aluminium from its oxide was patented simultaneously by Charles Martin Hall in America and Paul Hérault in France. Today, using basically that same method of extraction, 30,000 tons a year of pure aluminium are produced in Britain alone at the hydroelectric plant in the Scottish highlands, and world production in 1954 has probably exceeded 3 million tons a year.