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.

The "real picture" vs. the prettified image — used as an example of the difference between company-paid corporate histories and independent journalism. Reference to slide shown in earlier session.

I was looking for this slide the other day. This is the Alcoa book called From Monopoly to Competition. It wasn't written by Alcoa — it's written by someone in the media, and he interviewed lots of people from Alcoa. Most books written about companies are written by the companies, paid for by the companies, sort of biased. This guy actually goes through and says a lot of things. I showed you the picture of the nice beautiful Pittsburgh Reduction Company and then the real picture. Alcoa wouldn't put that in if they had paid for the book.

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.

Tom contrasts Alcoa's idyllic publicity image of the smelting plant with the actual smoke-and-pollution photograph.

[Tom advances slides.] This is what Alcoa said the Pittsburgh Reduction Company looked like — this idyllic picture. And here's the actual picture. It's not quite as idyllic. There's a lot of pollution in the smelting and refining of aluminum.

Charles Martin Hall's patent victory over Paul Héroult by hours; founding of Pittsburgh Reduction Company → Alcoa; the trust-busters' breakup of the Alcoa-Boeing-Pratt & Whitney combine.

Hall in the United States and Paul Héroult in France both tried putting electricity through molten cryolite that had dissolved aluminum oxide, and they were able to make metal. They had a big patent fight. It's like days or hours apart in terms of their filing at the patent office. Hall won by hours or days. All of a sudden, a new economical way to make aluminum, the price dropped. Charles Martin Hall created a company called the Pittsburgh Reduction Company. He was from Ohio, but he had Andrew Mellon and other people from Pittsburgh as his backers. They started the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, and it later changed its name to the Aluminum Corporation of America, which we now know as Alcoa.