United States—before 1895, the Cowles Electric Smelting and Aluminum Company Cowles Syndicate Company, Limited, Staffordshire, England
The Electric Smelting and Aluminum Company, founded as Cowles Electric Smelting and Aluminum Company, and Cowles Syndicate Company, Limited, formed in the United States and England during the mid-1880s to extract and supply valuable metals. Founded by two brothers from Ohio, the Cowles companies are remembered for producing alloys in quantity sufficient for commerce. Their furnaces were electric arcsmelters, one of the first viable methods for extracting metals.
The businesses of the era dramatically increased the supply of aluminium, a plentiful resource not found in nature in pure form, and reduced its price. The Cowles process was the immediate predecessor to the Hall-Héroult process—today in nearly universal use more than a century after it was discovered by Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult and adapted by others including Carl Josef Bayer. Because of the patent landscape, the Cowles companies found themselves in court. Judges eventually acknowledged their innovations many years after the companies formed, and one brother received two separate settlements.[1]
The family had purchased a copperzinc mine on the Pecos River in New Mexico in 1883. Eugene that year designed a furnace to extract zinc from the mine's ores. Two young employees were testing four furnaces in a Cleveland laboratory by 1885.[4] Their first plant was built to extract aluminium, in 1886 using hydropower from a tailrace of Niagara Falls on the Niagara River.[5]
Adolphe Minet wrote a sympathetic assessment twenty years later in 1905 from the perspective of Paris. The Cowles furnace was electrochemical, one of two kinds of processes applied to producing aluminum during the 19th century, and belonged to the electrothermic group that includes Héroult (alloys), Brin, Bessemer, Stephanite and Moissan (carbide). Minet thought Cowles was the first great advance in electrometallurgy at least for many years, calling it a "practical" furnace yielding alloy up to 20 percent aluminum. The first was begun in 1884 and the best was tested in Cleveland in 1886. Minet gave the real credit though to other chemists who saw how to produce "pure aluminum".[6]
Design of a Cowles furnace
William Frishmuth, who as the sole aluminium supplier in the United States built the Washington Monument's aluminum cap in 1884, was one among those who worried that "foreign capitalists" were about to control the world aluminium market.[7]
Charles Martin Hall was a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio who had discovered in February 1886 an electrolytic process for aluminum extraction. His patent application in July collided with Paul Héroult's application for the same idea, "electrolysis of alumina in cryolite" and for which Héroult had received the patent in France in April. Hall proved his February date and was awarded the patent in the U.S.[3] Hall made a licensing agreement and worked with the Cowles at the facility in Lockport with the hopes of moving his ideas from the laboratory into production.
Cowles did not choose to use the Hall patent.[8] Their reason is unclear—some in Lockport remember it as disagreement about "external heat and copper electrodes" and "internally heated furnace and carbon electrodes",[9] and Alcoa culture remembers it as an attempt to "suppress his new process by buying him out".[10] Hall left after one year, in July 1888, to found the Pittsburgh Reduction Company which today is named Alcoa.[8]
Later years
In 1891 after Cowles began to advertise "pure aluminum" they were sued by the Pittsburgh Reduction Company. The judge announced his decision in January 1893, finding them to be infringing the patent of Hall and having gained knowledge of his process by hiring away a chemist named Hobbs who was the foreman in Pittsburgh.[8][11] In 1903 the Cowles won a countersuit.[citation needed] The surviving brother Alfred chose to stop work on aluminum and Cowles received royalties and a US$1.35 million payment in settlement. The appeal said the patent application of Charles S. Bradley which Cowles had acquired in 1885 and Alcoa had acquired from Cowles in 1904[citation needed] hinted at an internally rather than externally heated furnace.[12][13]
The Cowles facility in England became part of British Aluminium in the late 1880s.[citation needed] In 1893, after Eugene's death, Maybery questioned a presentation that to him indicated the Cowles patents were infringed by the carborundum process of Edward Acheson (Acheson process). In 1900 Cowles received a $300,000 payment from the carborundum company.[12] The judges' decision gave "priority broadly to the Messrs. Cowles for reducing ores and other substances by the incandescent method".[14]
Influence
The achievements of Hall in the U.S. and of Héroult in Europe, and their influence on aluminum companies, some through Héroult's Société Electrometallurgique Française, have been called one of the greatest events in metallurgy.[5] Over ten years, aluminum output in the U.S. increased by 100,000 times and its price dropped to about 2% of its cost before their discovery.[15][16] Cowles engineered a separate venture and did not share that glory, but sometimes the brothers are credited with envisioning and promoting what was the beginning of electrical smelting on a large scale.[5]
↑ USpatent 324658,Eugene H. Cowles and Alfred H. Cowles,"Electric process of smelting ore for the production of alloys, bronzes, and metallic compounds",issued 1885-08-18 and USpatent 324659,Eugene H. Cowles, Charles F. Mabery and Alfred H. Cowles,"Process of electric smelting for obtaining aluminium",issued 1885-08-18 and USpatent 464933,Charles S. Bradley,"Process of Obtaining Metals From Their Ores or Compounds by Electrolysis, acquired by Cowles",issued 1891-12-08
↑ Minet, Adolphe (1905). The Production of Aluminum and Its Industrial Use. Translated by Waldo, Leonard. New York, London: John Wiley and Sons, Chapman & Hall, via Internet Archive scan of University of Wisconsin - Madison copy. pp.1+22–27+65+79+116 (Héroult speaking)+149. Retrieved 2007-10-28.
↑ Journal of the Electrochemical Society U.S. (1948) 105 (7) via a single Google Books snippet, "Hall, who, after 1889, gave up external heating of graphite-lined iron pots and used the current alone to keep the bath fused", and Rooney, Bob (ed.). "Lockport's Points Of Pride". Lockport-NY.com. Retrieved 2007-10-28.
1 2 Sackett, William Edgar, John James Scannell and Mary Eleanor Watson (1917–1918). New Jersey's First Citizens. New Jersey: J.J. Scannell via Internet Archive scan of New York Public Library copy. pp.103–105. Retrieved 2007-10-25.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
↑ McMillan, Walter George (1891). A Treatise on Electro-Metallurgy. London, Philadelphia: Charles Griffin and Company, J.B. Lippincott Company, via Internet Archive scan of New York Public Library copy. pp.302–305. Retrieved 2007-10-26.
"Cowles' Aluminium Alloys". The Manufacturer and Builder. New York: Western and Company, via Cornell University Library. 18 (1): 13. January 1886. Archived from the original on 2008-08-06. Retrieved 2007-10-27.
"pintu aluminium". The Manufacturer and Builder. Jakarta: Alumunium depok, via blog info aluminium. Retrieved 2021-08-12.
"kusen aluminium". The Manufacturer and Builder. jakarta: alumunium depok, via web info. Retrieved 2021-08-12.
"aluminium". The Manufacturer and Builder. jakarta: alumunium depok, via blog info. Retrieved 2021-08-12.
Aluminium is a chemical element; it has symbol Al and atomic number 13. Aluminium has a density lower than that of other common metals, about one-third that of steel. It has a great affinity towards oxygen, forming a protective layer of oxide on the surface when exposed to air. Aluminium visually resembles silver, both in its color and in its great ability to reflect light. It is soft, nonmagnetic, and ductile. It has one stable isotope, 27Al, which is highly abundant, making aluminium the twelfth-most common element in the universe. The radioactivity of 26Al is used in radiometric dating.
Paul (Louis-Toussaint) Héroult was a French scientist. He was one of the inventors of the Hall-Héroult process for smelting aluminium, and developed the first successful commercial electric arc furnace. He lived in Thury-Harcourt, Normandy.
Smelting is a process of applying heat and a chemical reducing agent to an ore to extract a desired base metal product. It is a form of extractive metallurgy that is used to obtain many metals such as iron, copper, silver, tin, lead and zinc. Smelting uses heat and a chemical reducing agent to decompose the ore, driving off other elements as gases or slag and leaving the metal behind. The reducing agent is commonly a fossil fuel source of carbon, such as carbon monoxide from incomplete combustion of coke—or, in earlier times, of charcoal. The oxygen in the ore binds to carbon at high temperatures as the chemical potential energy of the bonds in carbon dioxide is lower than that of the bonds in the ore.
The Hall–Héroult process is the major industrial process for smelting aluminium. It involves dissolving aluminium oxide (alumina) in molten cryolite, and electrolyzing the molten salt bath, typically in a purpose-built cell. The Hall–Héroult process applied at industrial scale happens at 940–980 °C and produces 99.5–99.8% pure aluminium. Recycled aluminum requires no electrolysis, thus it does not end up in this process.
Alcoa Corporation is a Pittsburgh-based industrial corporation. It is the world's eighth-largest producer of aluminum. Alcoa conducts operations in 10 countries. Alcoa is a major producer of primary aluminum, fabricated aluminum, and alumina combined, through its active and growing participation in all major aspects of the industry: technology, mining, refining, smelting, fabricating, and recycling.
Charles Martin Hall was an American inventor, businessman, and chemist. He is best known for his invention in 1886 of an inexpensive method for producing aluminum, which became the first metal to attain widespread use since the prehistoric discovery of iron. He was one of the founders of Alcoa, along with Alfred E. Hunt; Hunt's partner at the Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory, George Hubbard Clapp; Hunt's chief chemist, W. S. Sample; Howard Lash, head of the Carbon Steel Company; Millard Hunsiker, sales manager for the Carbon Steel Company; and Robert Scott, a mill superintendent for the Carnegie Steel Company. Together they raised $20,000 to launch the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, which was later renamed Aluminum Company of America and shortened to Alcoa.
Industrial processes are procedures involving chemical, physical, electrical, or mechanical steps to aid in the manufacturing of an item or items, usually carried out on a very large scale. Industrial processes are the key components of heavy industry.
Edward Goodrich Acheson was an American chemist. Born in Washington, Pennsylvania, he was the inventor of the Acheson process, which is still used to make silicon carbide (carborundum) and later a manufacturer of carborundum and graphite.
Carl Josef Bayer was an chemist from Austria-Hungary who invented the Bayer process of extracting alumina from bauxite, essential to this day to the economical production of aluminium.
Aluminium recycling is the process in which secondary aluminium is created from scrap or other forms of end-of-life or otherwise unusable aluminium. It involves re-melting the metal, which is cheaper and more energy-efficient than the production of aluminum from raw bauxite via electrolysis of aluminum oxide (Al2O3) during the Hall–Héroult and Bayer processes.
Aluminium carbide, chemical formula Al4C3, is a carbide of aluminium. It has the appearance of pale yellow to brown crystals. It is stable up to 1400 °C. It decomposes in water with the production of methane.
British Aluminium was an aluminium production company. It was originally formed as the British Aluminium Company Ltd on 7 May 1894 and was subsequently known as British Alcan Aluminium plc (1982-1996).
Alfred Ephraim Hunt (1855-1899) was a 19th-century American metallurgist and industrialist best known for founding the company that would eventually become Alcoa, the world's largest producer and distributor of aluminum.
Alclad is a corrosion-resistant aluminium sheet formed from high-purity aluminium surface layers metallurgically bonded to high-strength aluminium alloy core material. It has a melting point of about 500 °C (932 °F). Alclad is a trademark of Alcoa but the term is also used generically.
Aluminium smelting is the process of extracting aluminium from its oxide, alumina, generally by the Hall-Héroult process. Alumina is extracted from the ore bauxite by means of the Bayer process at an alumina refinery.
Zinc smelting is the process of converting zinc concentrates into pure zinc. Zinc smelting has historically been more difficult than the smelting of other metals, e.g. iron, because in contrast, zinc has a low boiling point. At temperatures typically used for smelting metals, zinc is a gas that will escape from a furnace with the flue gas and be lost, unless specific measures are taken to prevent it.
The Hoopes process is a metallurgical process, used to obtain aluminium metal of very high purity. The process was patented by William Hoopes, a chemist of the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), in 1925.
Julia Brainerd Hall was the sister of American scientist Charles Martin Hall. She supported him in his discovery of the Hall process for extracting aluminium from its ore. She was also a still-life painter who exhibited at the Edgar Adams Gallery in Cleveland.
Aluminium metal is very rare in native form, and the process to refine it from ores is complex, so for most of human history it was unknown. However, the compound alum has been known since the 5th century BCE and was used extensively by the ancients for dyeing. During the Middle Ages, its use for dyeing made it a commodity of international commerce. Renaissance scientists believed that alum was a salt of a new earth; during the Age of Enlightenment, it was established that this earth, alumina, was an oxide of a new metal. Discovery of this metal was announced in 1825 by Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, whose work was extended by German chemist Friedrich Wöhler.
Ferroaluminum (FeAl) is a ferroalloy, consisting of iron and aluminium. The metal usually consists of 40% to 60% aluminium and applications of ferroaluminum include the deoxidation of steel, hardfacing applications, reducing agent, thermite reactions, AlNiCo magnets, and alloying additions to welding wires and fluxes. The alloy is also known for the ability to manufacture low melting point alloys and its ability to carry out aluminothermic welding. Ferroaluminum does not currently have a CAS Registry Number. The presence of iron in aluminum helps in the decrease of casting defects, improves tensile, yield, hardness, and maintains strength at high temperatures.
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