Queer Places:
64 E College St, Oberlin, OH 44074
Oberlin College, 7 N Main St, Oberlin, OH 44074
Westwood Cemetery, 455 Morgan St, Oberlin, OH 44074
Charles
Martin Hall (December 6, 1863 – December 27, 1914) was an American
inventor,
businessman, and chemist. He is best known for his invention in 1886 of an
inexpensive method for producing
aluminum, which became the first metal to attain widespread use since the
prehistoric discovery of iron. He was one of the founders of
ALCOA.[1][2]
Alfred E. Hunt, together with Charles Hall and a group of five other
individuals including his partner at the Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory, George
Hubbard Clapp, his chief chemist, W.S. Sample, Howard Lash, head of the Carbon
Steel Company, Millard Hunsiker, sales manager for the Carbon Steel Company,
and Robert Scott, a mill superintendent for the Carnegie Steel Company, Hunt
raised $20,000 to launch the Pittsburgh Reduction Company which was later
renamed Aluminum Company of America and shortened to Alcoa.
Charles Martin Hall was born to Herman Bassett Hall and Sophronia H. Brooks
on December 6, 1863 in
Thompson, Ohio.[3]
Charles' father Herman graduated from
Oberlin College in 1847, and studied for three years at the Oberlin
Theological Seminary, where he met his future wife Sophronia Brooks. They
married in 1849, and the next ten years were spent in missionary work in
Jamaica,
where the first five of their eight children were born.[4]
They returned to Ohio in 1860, when the outbreak of the Civil War forced the
closing of foreign missions. Charles Hall had two brothers and five sisters;
one brother died in infancy. One of his sisters was chemist
Julia Brainerd Hall (1859–1925), who helped him in his research.[5][6][7]
Hall began his education at home, and was taught to read at an early age by
his mother.[4]
At the age of six, he was using his father's 1840s college chemistry book as a
reader.[8]
At age 8, he entered public school, and progressed rapidly.
His family moved to
Oberlin, Ohio in 1873. He spent three years at
Oberlin High School (Ohio), and a year at Oberlin Academy in preparation
for college.[4]
During this time he demonstrated his aptitude for chemistry and invention,
carrying out experiments in the kitchen and the woodshed attached to his
house. In 1880, at the age of 16, he enrolled at Oberlin College.[9]
In his second term, Hall attended, with considerable interest, Oberlin
Professor Frank Fanning Jewett's lecture on aluminum; it was here that Jewett
displayed the sample of aluminum he had obtained from
Friedrich Wöhler at
Göttingen, and remarked, "if anyone should invent a process by which
aluminum could be made on a commercial scale, not only would he be a
benefactor to the world, but would also be able to lay up for himself a great
fortune."[9]
His initial experiments in finding an aluminum reduction process were in
1881; he attempted, unsuccessfully, to produce aluminum from clay by smelting
with carbon in contact with charcoal and potassium chlorate. He next attempted
to improve the electrolytic methods previously established by investigating
cheaper methods to produce aluminum chloride, again unsuccessfully. In his
senior year, he attempted to electrolyse aluminum fluoride in water solution,
but was unable to produce aluminum at the cathode.[2]
In 1884, after setting up a homemade coal-fired furnace and bellows in a
shed behind the family home, he again tried to find a catalyst that would
allow him to reduce aluminum with carbon at high temperatures: "I tried
mixtures of alumina and carbon with barium salts, with cryolite, and with
carbonate of sodium, hoping to get a double reaction by which the final result
would be aluminum. I remember buying some metallic sodium and trying to reduce
cryolite, but obtained very poor results. I made some aluminum sulphide but
found it very unpromising as a source of aluminum then as it has been ever
since.".[9]
He had to fabricate most of his apparatus and prepare his chemicals, and
was assisted by his older sister Julia Brainerd Hall.[10][11][6]
The basic invention, which he discovered on February 23, 1886, involves
passing an electric current through a bath of
alumina dissolved in
cryolite,
which results in a puddle of aluminum forming in the bottom of the retort.[12][13]
On July 9, 1886, Hall filed for his first patent. This process was also
discovered at nearly the same time by the Frenchman
Paul
Héroult, and it has come to be known as the
Hall-Héroult process.[2]
After failing to find financial backing at home, Hall went to
Pittsburgh where he made contact with the noted metallurgist
Alfred E. Hunt. They formed the Reduction Company of Pittsburgh which
opened the first large-scale aluminum production plants. The Reduction Company
later became the Aluminum Company of America, then
Alcoa. Hall
was a major stockholder, and became wealthy.[2]
The Hall-Héroult process eventually resulted in reducing the price of
aluminum by a factor of 200, making it affordable for many practical uses. By
1900, annual production reached about 8,000 tons. Today, more aluminum is
produced than all other non-ferrous metals combined.
Hall is sometimes suggested to be the originator of the American spelling
of aluminum, but that spelling was used briefly by
Humphry Davy in the early 1800s and was the spelling in
Noah
Webster’s Dictionary of 1828. "Aluminium" was used widely in the United
States until 1895 or 1900, and "Aluminum" was not officially adopted by the
American Chemical Society until 1925.[14]
Hall's early patents use the spelling "aluminium".[15]
In the United Kingdom and other countries using
British spelling, only the spelling aluminium is now used. The
spelling in virtually all other languages is analogous to the -ium
ending.[14]
Hall continued his research and development for the rest of his life and
was granted 22 US patents, most on aluminum production. He served on the
Oberlin College Board of Trustees. He was vice-president of Alcoa until his
death.
Hall died, unmarried and childless, on December 27, 1914, twenty-one days
after he had reached the age of 51, in Daytona, Florida. He was buried in
Westwood Cemetery in Oberlin.[4]
Surprisingly, he died exactly the same year as Héroult; they both were born
the same year.
In his last will and testament, Hall left the vast majority of his fortune
to charity and to his longtime companion. His generosity contributed to the establishment of the
Harvard-Yenching Institute, a leading foundation dedicated to advancing
higher education in Asia in the humanities and social sciences.[16]
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