Reynolds Aluminum foil manufacturing

Reynolds founded an aluminum company to produce foil for packaging cigarettes — wanted moisture control for the tobacco product. Used as the why-foil-matters framing for pack rolling.

Foil can get to be very expensive — except, what's the most widely used foil in the world? Reynolds Wrap. Why is it called Reynolds Wrap? A guy named Reynolds. But he also had a bigger company. He started an aluminum company called Reynolds Aluminum because he needed aluminum foil to package his cigarettes. They're all in Richmond, Virginia, folks. Reynolds Aluminum was started by the guy who was making the cigarettes and wanted to have something that wouldn't lose or pick up moisture — he needed a sort of hermetic seal, not completely hermetic, but he wanted to keep the cigarettes at just the right moisture.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco needed something to wrap tobacco in, so started making aluminum foil around 1900; the aluminum business eventually grew separate from tobacco. Used to teach the historical breadth of the aluminum industry beyond Alcoa.

There are hundreds of steel companies. How many aluminum companies can you think of? You can think of one — Alcoa. There are other aluminum companies. You've heard of Kaiser Aluminum, maybe — if you're from the West Coast you would have heard of Kaiser Aluminum. You've heard of Reynolds Aluminum. You might know how Reynolds Aluminum got started: it's the same Reynolds as Reynolds Tobacco. They needed something to wrap their tobacco in, so they started making a little foil around 1900 and they grew the aluminum business separate of the tobacco. It's the same R.J. Reynolds family out of Richmond, and that's the headquarters of Reynolds. There's Alcan, a little company of Canada, which is actually a spinoff — trust busters broke up Alcoa. I told you how Alcoa, Boeing, and Pratt & Whitney were all once together, and at some point they broke them up, and they also broke off the Aluminum Company of Canada, Alcan. Alcoa just had a monopoly. Charles Martin Hall was the founder of Alcoa, but Paul Héroult in France had also discovered the same thing and just got to the patent office a little bit too late. Hall beat him. Héroult's company was Pechiney in France, and Pechiney was just bought by somebody else. You can't even name very many aluminum companies. I can't name more than a dozen, and I've been in this business longer than you've been alive. But I could rattle off the names of dozens of steel companies.