`Pittsburgh Reduction Company / Alcoa environmental pollution`

Used historically — Hall founds Pittsburgh Reduction Company, which becomes Alcoa, broken up by trustbusters in the 1910s–'20s. The environmental dimension is not the focus here; the patent priority story is.

Héroult beat Hall to the patent office. Hall filed his patent in June or July; Héroult had filed one in April for the exact same thing, and the patent office said Héroult has priority. But then Charles Martin Hall showed that he had actually reduced it to practice in February, and so he won in the courts and founded a company called Pittsburgh Reduction Company that eventually was funded by the Mellons of Mellon Bank, and later became Alcoa, the largest aluminum company in the world by far. Which was broken up into Alcan by the trustbusters in the 1910s and '20s. And Héroult started a company in France called Pechiney, which is still in existence. Alcoa is still in existence, so far as that goes.

Brief — Jamaica's bauxite economy, Sam from Novelis. Mostly used to name the ore (bauxite) and to make a sidelong point that aluminum-producing regions have specific economic dependence on the resource. Not the deep version of this cluster.

Student: Bauxite.