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Aluminum Quotes (15 quotes)
Aluminium Quotes

Engineering, too, owes its most useful materials to the achievements of chemists in identifying, separating, and transforming materials: structural steel for the framework of bridges and buildings, portland cement for roadways and aqueducts, pure copper for the electrical industries, aluminum alloys for automobiles and airplanes, porcelain for spark plugs and electrical insulators. The triumphs of engineering skill rest on a chemical foundation.
In Fundamental Chemistry, and Elementary Textbook for College Classes (1936), 8.
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Aluminium’s sixty-year reign as the world’s most precious substance was glorious, but soon an American chemist [Charles Hall] ruined everything.
Sam Kean
In The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements (2010), 235.
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Aluminum has … a kind of “glamor” associated with it, due to two facts, the first being that it is really useful, durable and beautiful, combined with the other fact, which has little to do with its commercial importance, that its ores are more abundant than of any other metal and constitute a large portion of the earth’s crust.
In article by Chas. M. Hall, 'The Properties of Aluminum', Western Electrician (30 May 1891), 8, No. 22, 312.
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Aluminum has been called the sustainability nutrient of the world, and for good reason. Consider that 75% of all the aluminum made since 1886 is still in use. So from a sustainability standpoint alone, yes, [Charles] Hall really did become that benefactor to humanity—big time.
As quoted in 'Alcoa Co-Founder Charles Hall Smelt Success' (20 Jul 2012), article on investors.com website.
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Aluminum is at once as white as silver, as incorrodible as gold, as tenacious as iron, as fusible as copper, and as light as glass. It is easily worked; it is widely spread in nature, alumina forming the bases of most rocks; it is three times lighter than iron; in short, it seems to have been created expressly to furnish material for our projectile!
Planning a spacecraft to be fired from a cannon to the moon. In From the Earth to the Moon (1865, 1890), 38.
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As the world has seen its age of stone, its age of bronze, and its age of iron, so it may before long have embarked on a new and even more prosperous era—the age of aluminium.
Concluding remark in uncredited 'Topics of the Day' article, 'The Future of Aluminium', The Spectator (15 Jul 1893), 77.
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Believe me, this planet has put up with much worse than us. It’s been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, solar flares, sun-spots, magnetic storms, pole reversals, planetary floods, worldwide fires, tidal waves, wind and water erosion, cosmic rays, ice ages, and hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets, asteroids, and meteors. And people think a few plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
In Napalm and Silly Putty (2002), 97.
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I read about Deville’s work in France, and found the statement that every clay bank was a mine of aluminum, and that the metal was as costly as silver. I soon after began to think of processes for making aluminum cheaply.
In 'The Perkin Medal Award', The Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry (Mar 1911), 3, No. 3, 146.
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Some months ago we discovered that certain light elements emit positrons under the action of alpha particles. Our latest experiments have shown a very striking fact: when an aluminium foil is irradiated on a polonium preparation [alpha ray emitter], the emission of positrons does not cease immediately when the active preparation is removed: the foil remains radioactive and the emission of radiation decays exponentially as for an ordinary radio-element. We observed the same phenomenon with boron and magnesium.
[Co-author with Irène Joliot-Curie. This one-page paper reported their discovery of artificial radioactivity for which they were awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.]
Letter to the Editor, 'Artificial Production of a New Kind of Radio-Element'(10 Jan 1934) published in Nature (1934), 133, 201-2. Cited in Mauro Dardo, Nobel Laureates and Twentieth-Century Physics (2004), 187.
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The idea formed itself in my mind that if I could get a solution of alumina in something which contained no water, and in a solvent which was chemically more stable than the alumina, this would probably give a bath from which aluminum could be obtained by electrolysis.
In 'The Perkin Medal Award', The Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry (Mar 1911), 3, No. 3, 147.
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The world has been centuries in learning to use other metals; in learning to roll, draw, temper and polish them. Aluminum is new. but we are learning how to deal with it, how to secure the qualities of strength, hardness, ductility, lustre, etc., when required, much more rapidly than has occurred in the history of the other metals.
Conclusion of article, Chas. M. Hall, 'The Properties of Aluminum', Western Electrician (30 May 1891), 8, No. 22, 312.
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There's antimony, arsenic, aluminium, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.
There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.
There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium,
And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.
There's sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,
And chlorine, cobalt, carbon, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discarvard.
[To the tune of I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.]
Song, 'The Elements' (1959). In Tom Lehrer,Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer: With Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle (1981), 151.
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We bombarded aluminum with alpha rays … then after a certain period of irradiation, we removed the source of alpha rays. We now observed that the sheet of aluminum continued to emit positive electrons over a period of several minutes.
Describing the crucial experiment made in 1934 that discovered artificial radioactivity. As quoted in John Daintith and Derek Gjertsen, A Dictionary of Scientists (1999), 287.
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We do live in a conceptual trough that encourages such yearning for unknown and romanticized greener pastures of other times. The future doesn’t seem promising, if only because we can extrapolate some disquieting present trends in to further deterioration: pollution, nationalism, environmental destruction, and aluminum bats. Therefore, we tend to take refuge in a rose-colored past ... I do not doubt the salutary, even the essential, properties of this curiously adaptive human trait, but we must also record the down side. Legends of past golden ages become impediments when we try to negotiate our current dilemma.
…...
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When first discovered, [aluminum was a precious metal that] cost about 270 dollars a pound; then it fell to 27 dollars, and today a pound of aluminum is worth about nine dollars.
Answering the question, “Is not aluminum rather expensive?” to a fictional moon shot committee. In Jules Verne, Aaron Parrett (ed.) and Edward Roth (trans.), From the Earth to the Moon (1865, 2005), 50. In the original French edition, the costs were given in francs as about 1500, 150 and 48.75, respectively.
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Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
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