The ancient Greeks and Romans used alum in medicine as an astringent, and in dyeing processes. It is doubtful whether you entered a museum with ancient Greek, Roman or Chinese pottery and you did not see aluminium in use. Aluminium-bearing clays to make pottery, and aluminium salts to make dyes can be found on such ancient pottery of all ancient cutlures contains aluminium. Those cultures of course did not know, or so we suppose, that an element called aluminium gave those special properties to their creations.

In the middle ages aluminium was one of the elements which acquired an alchemical symbol, as alchemist thought that they can use a metal they had not seen in their ancient pursuit concerned with, for instance, the transformation of other metals into gold.

It was not, however until much later that aluminium began to be thought as a metal separate and self contained for use such as other ferrous and non ferrous metals. In 1761 de Morveau proposed the name "alumine" for the base in alum. Later yet, in 1807, Davy proposed the name alumium for the metal, undiscovered at that time, and later agreed to change it to aluminum.

Shortly thereafter, the name aluminium was adopted by IUPAC to conform with the "ium" ending of most elements. Aluminium is the IUPAC spelling and therefore the international standard.

Aluminium was also the accepted spelling in the U.S.A. until 1925, at which time the American Chemical Society decided to revert back to aluminum, and to this day Americans still refer to aluminium as "aluminum".

But lets revert back to history. Aluminium was first isolated by Hans Christian Oersted in 1825 who reacted aluminium chloride (AlCl₃) with potassium amalgam, an alloy of potassium and mercury. Heating the resulting aluminium amalgam under reduced pressure caused the mercury to boil away leaving aluminium metal. The metal was born for uses, which at that time no one could have thought of.

The conquest of space, safe packaging and other forntiers, we know consider everyday life conviences could have not been possible without the use of this metal.

But lets take a detailed look at the history of aluminium, which is celebrating only 190 years since its birth, making it the most recently discovered metal in common use.

Aluminium only exists naturally in combination with other materials – silicates and oxides. These are very stable and it took many years of painstaking research to "unlock" the metal, from natures protective arms.

A short outline of the major dates regarding the birth and amazing growth of the aluminium follows:

• 1808: Sir Humphrey Davy (Britain) established the existence of aluminium and named it.
• 1821: P. Berthier (France) discovered 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) produced 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: Freidrich Wohler (Germany) described a process for producing aluminium as a powder by reacting potassium with anhydrous aluminium chloride. 
• 1845: Wohler established the specific gravity (density) of aluminium, and one of its unique properties – lightness.
• 1854: Henri Sainte-Claire Deville (France) improved Wohler's method to create the first commercial process. The metal was more expensive than gold or platinum.
• 1855: A bar of aluminium, the new precious metal, was exhibited at the Paris Exhibition.
• 1885: Hamilton Y. Cassner (USA) improved on Deville's process. Annual output 15 tonnes!
• 1886: Two unknown young scientists, Paul Louis Toussaint Heroult (France) and Charles Martin Hall (USA), working separately and unaware of each other's work, simultaneously invented a new electrolytic process, the Hall-Heroult 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.
  1888: The first aluminium companies founded in France, Switzerland and the USA  
• 1889: Freidrich Bayer (Austria), son of the founder of the Bayer chemical company, invented the Bayer Process for the large scale production of alumina from bauxite.
• 1900: Annual output 8 thousand tonnes.

In our next view in aluminium's history we will look at the metal's growth in the 20th century, the aluminium century.