Alcoa: Charles Martin Hall's Thanksgiving Pour to the Wagerup Gallium Deal

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Aluminum is the most abundant metal in Earth's crust, but its tight bond with oxygen in bauxite resisted fire smelting, and in the 19th century Napoleon III served honored guests with aluminum utensils while others got gold. In 1886 Oberlin College graduate Charles Martin Hall, and independently Frenchman Paul Héroult, found that running electric current through alumina dissolved in molten cryolite released pure aluminum. In 1888 Hall joined metallurgist Alfred E. Hunt and Arthur Vining Davis to form the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, made its first commercial pour on Thanksgiving Day 1888, and opened a hydropower site at Niagara Falls in 1895. Hunt died after contracting malaria in the Spanish-American War, and Davis led the company, renamed the Aluminum Company of America in 1907.

After World War I Alcoa acquired the duralumin patent, supplying the Navy dirigible Shenandoah, and in both World Wars 90 percent of US aluminum went to the military. The Justice Department filed a monopolization suit in 1938. Alcoa sponsored The Alcoa Hour, Alcoa Premiere with Fred Astaire and Edward R. Murrow's See It Now, bought Reynolds Metals, and split in 2016 into Alcoa Corporation and Arconic. It has faced the York Oil Superfund cleanup order, a Rockdale, Texas settlement of about $330 million in pollution controls, and an early 2026 fine of about $39 million for clearing Western Australia's jarrah forests without approvals.

• Aluminum's price fell from nearly $5 a pound to pennies once the Hall-Héroult process scaled up.
• In 1942 a German U-boat sank the SS Alcoa Puritan while it carried bauxite from the Caribbean.
• Every ton of alumina produced leaves roughly a ton and a half of caustic red mud.
• In 2014 Alcoa paid $384 million to settle SEC and Justice Department charges tied to bribing officials in Bahrain.
• An October 2025 deal with the US and Australian governments and Japan's Sojitz targets gallium at the Wagerup refinery, up to 10 percent of world supply.