Aluminum and Compounds

From its relatively small scale utilization of the order of 1/100th that of copper, lead, and zinc prior to 1900, to its present scale of production of three to five times that of these more traditional non-ferrous metals (Table 10.1), aluminum is a metal that has come of age in the twentieth century. Oersted, in Denmark, is credited with first obtaining impure aluminum in 1825, achieved by the reduction of aluminum chloride with potassium amalgam. Wöhler, two years later, obtained higher purity metal and more fully described its properties. Henri St.-C. Deville put aluminum production into commercial practice in France by 1845 using sodium fusion to reduce aluminum chloride (Equation 10.1).