Comment by mplanchard
4 days ago
This is because of what the comment you’re replying to was saying. Aluminum was a scarce resource prior to the electrolytic process being invented that made it “distillable from common rocks.”
The cap on the washington monument is aluminum, because at the time it was still a precious metal.
The guy who figured out how to electrolyze it out of ore went on to create the main company in the US that produced it, and chose to call it aluminum instead of aluminium, thus leading to the split in spelling. That story may be apocryphal though.
The History Guy did a video on "The History of Aluminum": https://youtu.be/Nx16c6SB4kQ?si=jqaObtbTp3uNNjj3
From what I recall of the video, two people independently worked out the chemistry for cheaper aluminum. (I believe the video also mentions the source of the aluminum/alumininium name difference.)
>This is because of what the comment you’re replying to was saying. Aluminum was a scarce resource prior to the electrolytic process being invented that made it “distillable from common rocks.”
Sure, but it also said "it could have gone the way of aluminum", which is mostly where my point rests: I don't really see how. The disparity of volume seems to explain it to me fully.
Sure, I guess just “disparity of accessible volume” being the key thing.
If we found a way to extract gold from seawater[0], for example, it would change the accessible volume of gold quite a bit.
[0]: https://www.discovermagazine.com/6-times-we-tried-to-extract...