Aluminium is the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust and constitutes 7.3% by mass. In nature however it only exists in very stable combinations with other materials (particularly as silicates and oxides) and it was not until 1808 that its existence was first established. It took many years of painstaking research to "unlock" the metal from its ore and many more to produce a viable, commercial production process.

Key dates

1808 Sir Humphry Davy (Britain) established the existence of aluminium and named it.

1821 P. Berthier (France) discovers a hard, reddish, clay-like material containing 52 per cent aluminium oxide near the village of Les Baux in southern France. He called it bauxite, the most common ore of aluminium.

1825 Hans Christian Oersted (Denmark) 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 Wöhler (Germany) describes a process for producing aluminium as a powder by reacting potassium with anhydrous aluminium chloride.

1845 Wöhler establishes the specific gravity (density) of aluminium, and one of its unique properties - lightness.

1854 Henri Sainte-Claire Deville (France) improves Wöhler's method to create the first commercial process. The metal's price, initially higher than that of gold and platinum, drops by 90% over the following 10 years. The price is still high enough to inhibit its widespread adoption by industry.

1855 A bar of aluminium, the new precious metal, is exhibited at the Paris Exhibition.

1885 Hamilton Y. Cassner (USA) improves on Deville's process. Annual output 15 tonnes!

1886 Two unknown young scientists, Paul Louis Toussaint Héroult (France) and Charles Martin Hall (USA), working separately and unaware of each other's work, simultaneously invent a new electrolytic process, the Hall-Héroult process, which is the basis for all aluminium production today. They discovered that if they dissolved aluminium oxide (alumina) in a bath of molten cryolite and passed a powerful electric current through it, then molten aluminium would be deposited at the bottom of the bath.