1880s Hall-Héroult process commercialization

Hall (1886) cuts aluminum price in half. Tom uses this to land his materials-economics rule: cut the price in half and quantity used goes up four times.

Aluminum in 1852 was $545 a pound. If you divide by sixteen, it was more expensive than gold, which was about $25 an ounce. The price came down. By 1854, Napoleon thought this would be great armor for his soldiers, so he funded the development of aluminum in France. At the time they were using either sodium or potassium to reduce aluminum chloride — still a very intensive process. It wasn't until the 1880s in the United States, the Hall process dropped the price — 1886 I think it was. Hall cut it in half. Remember what happens if you cut the price of a structural material in half? You go up four times in the quantity used. They kept dropping the price. By 1897 it was thirty-six cents a pound.