A SHORT HISTORY OF ALUMINUM

I ntroduction Two young men living an ocean apart discovered the same new process for

reducing aluminum from its ore in 1886. Both men were just 22 years old at the

time. One was an American, Charles Martin Hall, and the other was a

Frenchman, Paul Heroult. These two men were not the usual tinker inventors;

but were educated technical discovers. Hall a chemist and Heroult a

metallurgist. Their process would be the world method for making aluminum for

the next 100 years and beyond, and would propel aluminum and its alloys into

the second major structural metal in use, exceeded only by steel.

The driving force behind the search for low-cost aluminum was not the demand

for the product, but rather the knowledge of the vast resource of aluminum-

containing minerals in easy reach in the earth crust. It had long been known that

large deposits of aluminum-containing clays constituted great quantities of

aluminum, especially in ores called baxuite named after a region in France called

Baux where the ore was first identified. Baxuite is scattered around the globe,

mostly in tropical climates.

These known resources plus the fact that aluminum was only one-third the

weight of steel had intrigued technical people around the world. In 1782 the

famous French chemist, Lavoisier, reported that it is highly probable that alumine

is the oxide of a metal whose affinity for oxygen is so strong that it cannot be

overcome by carbon or any other known reducing agent. The English

researcher, Humphrey Davy, named this metal aluminum. Later the Europeans

spelled it aluminium, but Americans accepted the 1925 decision of the American

Chemical Society and settled on aluminum without the final "i".

Early attempts to extract aluminum from it's ore by H. C. Oersted(1825) and

Frederick Wohler(1827) had very limited success. Later Wohler(1845) produced

a sufficient amount to measure the specific gravity and ductility, and to determine

that it melted at the low temperature of a blowpipe flame. This work alerted the

scientific community to the light-weight of aluminum which is only about one-third

that for steel.

The first minor production of aluminum was in 1854 by the Frenchman Henri

Saint-Claire Deville who improved on Wohler's process by substituting sodium

for the more expensive potassium. He managed to produce marble-sized

aluminum particles. Saint-Claire Deville's work caught the attention of Napoleon

III as a material for military use(this is always a major source of money for most

new material developments). With government funding Deville produced bars of

aluminum which were exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1855. This was

France's first chance, after the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Britain, to show the

world her technical capabilities and the aluminum attracted special attention.

Material from Deville's production was used to form a baby rattler and tableware

to replace gold and silver at royal banquets.

Within a few years Saint-Claire Deville had reduced the price of aluminum from

$90 a pound to $17. This success included the use of fluorspar and cryolite as

fluxes. Sodium was a major cost in Deville's process, and it required three

pounds for each pound of aluminum produced. By 1885 discoveries in sodium

processing reduced this cost to about one-fourth, and a British firm by the name

of Aluminium Company, Ltd. was formed to produce aluminum by Deville's

process. It was producing 500 pounds a day by 1889, but was forced to close in

1891 after a total production of 250,000 pounds. Thus ended the Saint-Clair

Deville process after 40 years, driven out by the new process of Hall and Heroult

which used large amounts of electric current that were unavailable before Edison

and other pioneers developed the new age of electricity. Thus aluminum, which

was previously available in limited quantities for experimental applications at a

very high price, could now be thought of as material for everyday applications

where its physical and chemical behavior would justify its use. It was still

expensive compared with steel, a low cost metal for nearly every use after the

development of the Bessemer converter only a few years earlier.

CHARLES MARTIN HALL

Charles Martin Hall was the son of a Congregational Minister. He was born in

the village of Tompson, Geauga County, Ohio in December, 1863. His father

had studied a college course in chemistry, and Charles as a youngster was

interested in his father's 1841 college textbook. The Hall family moved to

Oberlin, Ohio, about 20 miles southwest of Cleveland, when the children were

old enough for college. Their mother had insisted that they get a satisfactory

education. Even though Oberlin College was a liberal arts school, a number of

science courses were taught, including chemistry by a Professor Jewett, and of

course Hall took his courses. At some point Hall had read DeVille's book on

aluminum. While still a student he tried numerous experiments without success

on finding a cheaper method of reducing aluminum from bauxite.

After graduating in the spring of 1885, Hall set up his now-famous experiments

with the assistance of his sister Julia, who had also taken chemistry at Oberlin, in

a woodshed behind the family home in Oberlin. In just a few weeks in the winter

of 1886 he developed his method for making aluminum. Years later on the

occasion of his receiving the Perkin Medal from the American Chemical Society,

Hall described his work:

"I had studied something of thermochemistry, and gradually the idea formed

itself in my mind that if I could get a solution of alumina in something which

contained no water, and in a solvent which was chemically more stable than

alumina, this would probably give a bath from which aluminum could be obtained

by electrolysis. In February 1886, I began to experiment on this plan. The first

thing in which I tried to dissolve alumina was flourspar, but I found that its fusing

point was to high. I next made some magnesium flouride, but found this, also,

was to have a rather high fusing point. I then took some cryolite, and found that

it melted easily and in the molten condition dissolved alumina in large

proportions. I rigged up a little battery-mostly borrowed from my professor of

chemistry, Prof. Jewett, of Oberlin College, where I had graduated the previous

summer. I melted some cryolite in a clay crucible and dissolved alumina in it and

passed and electric current through the molten mass for about two hours. When

I poured out the molten mass I found no aluminum. It then occurred to me that

the operation might be interfered with by impurities, principally silica, dissolved

from the clay crucible. I next made a carbon crucible and repeated the

experiment with better success. After passing the current for about two hours, I

poured out the material and found a number of small globules of aluminum. I

was then quite sure that I had discovered the process I was after."

Hall immediately set about applying for patent protection for his invention. This

required finding money and hiring a patent attorney. His patent was formally

filed on July 9, 1886. He next heard from the Patent Office when they notified

him that another application on the same process was filed on April 23, 1886 by

a Frenchman named Paul L. T. Heroult. Thus Heroult's patent application

predated Hall's by some two and a half months. This patent interference was

resolved when Hall could prove that he had reduced his invention to practice on

February 23, 1886, where Heroult had only his filing date of April 23, 1886. Hall,

therefore, became the inventor of record in the United States by a mere two

months.

In the meantime, without knowing when his patent would be issued, Hall set out

to obtain financial supporters to carry his process into production. His first

successful contact was with the Cowles brothers who owned the Cowles Electric

Smelting and Aluminum Company of Cleveland, Ohio. The Cowle's had a

process for making an alloy of copper containing aluminum which was called

aluminum bronze. It was a successful alloy and quite an important invention in

its own right, but their process could not produce the metal aluminum. The

Cowles Company had a plant in Lockport, New York where a tunnel had been

dug to carry water around the five locks of the Erie Canal to provide power for a

variety of industries. Hall joined the Cowles company at this plant with a salary

of $75 a month for three months. If his experiments were satisfactory after that

time he would receive $750 and the company would continue to support his

work. An option for further rewards for Hall never was fulfilled because of

disagreements between Hall and the Cowles brothers. Later litigation revealed

that Cowles were more interested in controlling Hall and his invention in order to

protect their own process. In any case Hall soon parted company with the

Cowles organization before any progress was made in producing aluminum.

Hall worked with a manager at the Cowles plant in Lockport , Romaine C. Cole,

who also was interested in aluminum. In fact Cole had done some work on

aluminum for a testing company in Pittsburgh named Hunt and Clapp. When it

became clear to Hall that the Cowles brothers were not supporting him, Cole

recommended that they contact Captain Alfred E. Hunt who was interested in

aluminum. Cole then traveled to Pittsburgh to sell the idea to Hunt. Hunt

apparently was enthusiastic from the beginning. He arranged a meeting with

Cole and some of Hunt's acquaintances on the last day of July in 1888 to

discuss forming a company to support Hall's experiments in scaling up the

process to pilot production.

With this encouragement, Hall joined the group a week later when a second

meeting was held with Hunt presiding. This meeting of Hall, Cole, Hunt and a

small group of Pittsburgh men known to Hunt from the steel industry and from

his testing laboratory, formed the technical and financial support of what would

become the aluminum industry in America. Hunt and the financial supporters

agreed to organize a company to be called The Pittsburgh Reduction Company

and to raise $20,000 to build and equip a pilot plant to demonstrate the value of

Hall's process in producing low-cost aluminum.

ALFRED E. HUNT

Next to Hall himself, Hunt was to be the most important man in developing

aluminum as a commercial business. While Hall and others were primarily

interested in and worked on the technology and production, Hunt carried the

burden of financing, managing, marketing, and selling the products. It was not

that these responsibilities were left to Hunt because the other young individuals

lacked the knowledge and abilities, which they did, but because they were a

natural for Hunt.

Alfred Ephrehem Hunt was born in Mass. in 1856, just eight years earlier than

Hall. He received an engineering education at MIT where he graduated in

Mining and Metallurgy in 1876, just a few years after Henry Marion Howe. Thus,

he was one of the first generation of college-educated metallurgist in America.

His initial employment was at the Bay State Iron Works, where he worked on one

of the first open-hearth melting furnaces in the United States. He then was

employed for two years at the Nashua Iron and Steel Company in New

Hampshire. Hunt joined the Park brothers at their Black Diamond Steel Works in

Pittsburgh in 1880. In 1883 he and George Clapp bought out the owners of The

Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory and they renamed it Hunt and Clapp.

Hunt was a dynamic individual. In 1884 he organized a company of artillery in

the Pennsylvania National Guard, and was elected Captain. A move which later

was to have dire consequences for Hunt and for the Pittsburgh Reduction

Company. In the meantime he developed an interest in aluminum. Probably this

interest came naturally to Hunt as he was well read and a writer on metals

subjects in technical trade publications. Aluminum was available in very small

quantities and was being considered for the cap on the famous Washington

Monument which was finally near completion after several generations of fitful

construction

The next set of circumstances reads like a novel, and the plot and characters

could have come from the fertile brain of a 19th century major writer. A poor

boy, son of a minister, invents what no one else has been able to do. He has no

money to promote his invention which could make him wealthy. His first patrons

attempt to thwart his ambitions if not to steal his invention. He meets another

poor boy like himself who also has an interest in the subject of his invention.

This individual, however, has an acquaintance in a far off city that has an interest

and some money. By getting the poor inventor together with the man with

money, both poor boys start a company, which succeeds beyond their wildest

dreams. And today, after one hundred years, their company is one of world's

greatest producers of the invention and one of the most successful corporations

in America. Many people associated with this company over the years have

been very successful and have become very rich.

While the above paragraph may sound like a turn of the century novel, it fits the

circumstances of the true story of Hall, Cole, and Hunt. Hall had the invention.

Cole provided the contact, and Hunt was the wise investor. Hall's invention,

however, was not a machine like Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Hall's patent was

based on sound chemistry, but the only demonstration of his patents worth was

a few beads of aluminum. Until or unless someone provided the necessary

funds to see if this invention could be scaled up to laboratory production, Hall's

patent was not worth much. At this stage Hall was an unknown, it would be later

that he would become well known as the developer of the most successful

process for manufacturing aluminum at costs that would produce an industry

based on this new metal. Hunt, on the other hand, was not the typical well-

heeled industrialist or a man of inherited wealth. He was a practical metallurgist

with a dozen years experience in making steel and running an independent

testing laboratory that did work for the iron and steel industry. This hardly made

him wealthy, but it did make him knowledgeable in a broad range of metals and

brought him in contact with many other steel makers and clients.

When Cole brought Hall down to Pittsburgh from Lockport, New York, where he

had been working for the Cowles brothers, Hunt was already predisposed to give

favorable recognition to Hall's work. Hunt and his fellow investors raised

$20,000 for the first phase of Hall's work. Hall contributed his invention and his

knowledge of how to proceed in scaling up to laboratory production. With this

$20,000 they built a pilot plant on Smallman Street in Pittsburgh and started to

set up reduction cells and a motor-generator set to provide electricity for the

operation. Their first production after numerous start-up problems was a few

marble-sized particles during a run on Thanksgiving Day, 1888. Thus the

modern world of aluminum was born.

It turned out that Hall and Cole were not compatible as fellow workers in running

the pilot plant so Cole was replaced by a young worker from Hunt's testing

laboratory by the name of Arthur Vining Davis. Davis, a recent graduate of

Amherst College, was like Hall the son of a congressional minister. Hunt had

hired Davis at the request of Davis's father who was the family minister to the

Hunts back in Mass. Thus three young men, one from Ohio and the other two

from the same area of Mass, were to build an aluminum empire in the Pittsburgh

area simply because Hunt had chosen to migrate there to further his career in

steel. Cole was the odd man out. Within a few years he sold his share in the

business, which would have made him wealthy beyond his dreams if he had

remained with the others even as only a stockholder.

Hall and Davis soon had production at the pilot plant at 50 pounds per day which

were selling at $8 a pound. By adding two new dynamos this was increased to

450 pounds per day, and the price had dropped to $2. Realizing the need to

build-up to production levels to obtain economies of scale, and in need of funds

to meet daily obligations the principals of the company approached the Mellon

Bank for a $4000 loan. The Mellon brothers, Andrew and Robert, had inherited

the bank from their father and would eventually build an empire by financially

supporting various industries in Pittsburgh. In turn they acquired a substantial

interest in these firms. The new Pittsburgh Reduction Company became the first

to be supported by the Mellons. They supplied a larger loan, $25000, and later

took a position in the company by buying 60 shares from Hall at $100 per share.

The Pittsburgh Reduction Company soon outgrew the pilot plant on Smallman

Street. The Mellon brothers encouraged them to locate a production plant in

New Kensington, northeast of Pittsburgh. The Mellons had a real estate

development in this area and supplied the land and provided a modest loan to

help finance the move. Local availability of coal and natural gas provided lower

cost energy for reducing the aluminum from the alumina that the company was

buying from outside sources. By now Hall had discovered that by increasing the

size of the reduction pots and therefore the electric current, he could maintain

the heat to keep the molten bath at the necessary temperature without an

outside heat source. Also upon scaling up the operation less energy was

needed per pound of aluminum produced. The Mellons purchased a stock

offering at this time of 500 shares at $60 per share. This allowed them seats on

the board of directors. The Mellons were now insiders not just bankers providing

loans.

The major use for aluminum at this early time was as an addition to steel just

before teeming the molten metal into ingots. It had been found that the large

quantities of oxygen devolved in the molten steel, which formed internal defects

called “blow holes” upon solidifying, could be eliminated by a chemical reaction

between oxygen and aluminum. Hunt was knowledgeable on this subject, which

probably sparked his initial interest in aluminum. Other uses were mostly

experimental. The Scovill Manufacturing Company of Waterbury, Conneticut

was a customer at first to produce novelity items in sheet metal, similar to what

they produced in brass. Scovill was an old-line brass company whose fame

went back to their production of brass buttons for uniforms for the Revolutionary

Army. However, at $2.00 per pound the new, light-weight metal was not in great

demand. As Hall expressed at this time-"People have said we didn’t have 1,000

pounds. They were wrong, but they might have said, that so far as the users of

aluminum were concerned, practically no one wanted 1,000 pounds". This new

venture in aluminum had three of the important ingredients for a successful

business- money(the Mellons), management(Hall, Davis, and especially Hunt),

and monopoly(Hall's patent, which eventually lasted until 1909). The one major

ingredient, which Hunt now faced, was a market. It fell to him to find the

applications for which this new metal would serve in such a way that aluminum

would find a niche within the industrial world.

The year 1893 was a year of decision for the fledging company. The move to

New Kensington for the lower cost energy of coal and natural gas had permitted

lower prices but the aluminum was still too costly for mass consumption. In 1893

the Pittsburgh Reduction Company signed the first industrial contract to take

electricity from hydropower at Niagara Falls, New York. A new processing plant

was built there which came on-stream in 1895. A second plant was constructed

at the Falls in 1896 and a third plant, with their own electric power plant, was

built in 1906.

With this steadily increasing capacity to produce aluminum and the attendant

decreasing cost of production, the Pittsburgh Reduction Company expanded

rapidly throughout the rest of the 1890s. Production reached 1,000,000 pounds

in 1896, 2,400,000 in 1897, and 5,000,000 pounds in 1900. The price

decreased during this same period from 78 cents a pound for pig product in

1893 to 48 cents in 1896, 36 cents in 1897 and finally to 33 cents in 1900.

However, this still left aluminum in competition with steel selling at several cents

a pound. Even the advantage in weight of 3 to 1 could not overcome such

disparity in price. Also at 5,000,000 pounds production in 1900, aluminum was

only 2500 tons compared with the 10,000,000 tons of steel production that year.

In fact the steel industry probably consumed a large portion of the total

aluminum produced.

Starting about 1895 a market began to develop in cookware-pots and pans. At

first many producers competing on price by using very thin aluminum sheet to

form the kitchenware poorly served this market. After 1900 the Pittsburgh

Reduction Company enter this market to provide improved products on a

continuos bases. The company products included a line of cast cookware under

the trade name of "Wearever". This product line became so popular when sold

by door to door salesmen that a separate division was formed for it's

manufacture. Wire for electrical conductors was another growing product, and

later with the development of a system of stranded cable, including a steel wire

for strength, aluminum was able to compete with copper for long distance

electrical transmission of high-voltage alternating current.

The need for wire, sheet, plate, and other product forms meant that the company

had to find other mills willing to convert ingot to these products or they would

have to develop the capability themselves. At this early stage in the aluminum

business other metals producers, mainly steel and copper, were not interested in

helping a new competitor get established. In addition the rolling and working of

aluminum present problems that other mills were not interested in solving.

Therefore in the earliest days at the New Kensington plant Hall and Davis

installed equipment and hired specialist to fabricate wire and sheet. When all

the aluminum chemical reduction operations were moved to Niagara Falls under

Hall, all the working of aluminum into other products was concentrated at New

Kensington under Davis.

This first decade of operations saw small annual losses in the early years and

very modest profits until the end of the decade when pretax earnings reached

$181,000 in 1899 and $322,000 in1900. By that point the company had

declared total dividends of $300,000 and had total retained earnings of

$636,000. All this had been accomplished despite a severe recession in the

years between 1893 and 1900. Undoubtedly having the Mellons as partners as

well as bankers was very helpful during these difficult times.

At this critical time in the aluminum business, the Pittsburgh Reduction Company

lost its dynamic leader, Alfred E. Hunt. With his enthusiasm for the military he

had lead his company of men into the Spanish American War. He was posted to

Puerto Rico where he contracted a tropical illness that took his life shortly after

his return to the United States.

Richard Mellon was appointed president to succeed Hunt, but the day to day

managing of the company was under Arthur Vining Davis. This did not represent

a significant change since Davis had been looking after all manufacturing

operations at New Kensington, with aluminum production under Hall at Niagara

Falls. The company continued to be controlled by Hall, Davis, the Mellons, and

the small group of original investors. The family of Alfred E. Hunt inherited his

shares in the company, and Roy Hunt his son came into the company as an

employee after his graduation from college. Roy Hunt would become a key

manager under Davis, and would play a significant role in the future of the

company.

Production of aluminum increased from 5,000,000 pounds in 1900 to 35,000,000

pounds in 1909. A major application was still kitchenware, for which aluminum

was best known with the American public. The Pittsburgh Reduction Company

acquired a kitchenware producer in 1901 when it went bankrupt owing a

substantial bill for aluminum. This acquisition brought into the company a pair of

college students who had been selling pots and pans door to door with great

success. A new company was organized to improve the quality and expand this

effort. The resulting kitchenware became known under the trade name

“Wearever” and was widely sold over the next 50 years as high-quality utensils.

A growing demand for aluminum after 1900 was in the infant automobile

industry. It was easier to manufacture the custom made bodies from the more

ductile aluminum than steel. The company became a supplier of fenders and

bodies in this first decade of the 20th century. This application, as with so many

others, was short-lived after mass production of cars required the lowest-cost

material, steel. A market for aluminum cast parts was a substantial part of this

early automobile industry. They were used for transmission cases, rear axle

housings, and other parts. A new casting process where the molten aluminum

was poured into water-cooled steel molds rather than into sand molds opened

the market for aluminum pistons to replace the much heavier cast iron. Of all

these early automobile applications for aluminum only one, the piston, survived

into modern times, when aluminum again looked attractive for auto parts after

the oil shortages of the 1970s when the government required improved fuel

economy.

The expanded production of aluminum metal after 1900 required the Pittsburgh

Reduction Company to seek lower cost raw materials and electrical power. In

addition this search for backward integration was a necessary part of the

company plan to exclude competition after the Hall patents expired in 1909.

Electrical power was the costliest ingredient in aluminum production. At first the

power at Niagara Falls was used. Then the company moved into Canada where

excellent power sites were available. By 1909, when the patents expired, the

company (renamed the Aluminum Company of America or Alcoa for short)

located on water rights along the Little Tennessee River. They built dams,

power plants, and a smelter around a small settlement they called Alcoa,

Tennessee.

Alcoa purchased the partially completed Southern Aluminum Company located

in North Carolina in 1915. The Southern Aluminum Company was the only

attempt to form a competitor for Alcoa until the time of World War II. It was a

French company and they were attempting to break through the high tariffs

imposed on imports by the United States. Unfortunately for them World War I

commenced before they completed construction and funds were not available to

finish the plant.

Bauxite mining started in the United States at Rome County, Georgia as early as

1883. Later the mineral was found in greater quantities in Arkansas where

mining began in 1899. The Pittsburgh Reduction Company’s first entry into raw

material production was with the Georgia Bauxite Company. In the last year of

his life, Hunt traveled to Arkansas to purchase bauxite property. By 1909 the

company acquired the General Mining Company of Arkansas and the Republic

Mining and Manufacturing Company. With this Arkansas bauxite as a secure

source, the company built a large refinery to reduce the ore to alumina at East

Saint Louis, Illinois. From there the alumina was shipped to Niagara Falls,

Massena, New York, and the Canadian plants for processing into aluminum

ingots. Since known reserves of bauxite in the United States were inadequate,

Alcoa, the company name after 1907, searched overseas for all future supplies.

Their largest investment was in the British and Dutch Guianas where vast

reserves were located.

The company began producing a synthetic cryolite to replace the natural mineral

which was used to dissolve the alumina for the electrolytic processing to

aluminum metal. The only available source of the natural cryolite was in

Greenland where it was mined and sold exclusively to the Pennsylvania Salt

Company in the United States.

By the time of increased demand after 1910, especially with the start of World

War one, Alcoa had fully integrated from mine to aluminum metal. They had

also moved forward into production of many finished products. Alcoa became a

major force in the worldwide aluminum industry. There were a number of

overseas competitors, especially in France and Switzerland, but Alcoa was

protected by high tariffs during the prewar years and by the wartime needs after

1915. The company was able to sell its inventory of aluminum to the European

powers allied against Germany in 1915 and 1916. Production then was

purchased for the United States defense use in the remaining years of the war.

The bulk of all of the aluminum sold in this period went into munitions. As a

powder it was mixed with ammonium nitrate to form a high explosive. Many

other defense applications helped promote postwar uses for the metal. The

most prominent of these was the major selection of aluminum alloys for the

Liberty engine used in most American aircraft built during the war.

Alcoa had pretax earnings of four to six million dollars each of the years between

1909, when the patents expired, and 1914. These earning increased to nine

million in 1915 and leaped to 25 million in 1916, 20 million in 1917, and 15

million in 1918. By 1919 Alcoa had corporate equity, mainly from retained

earnings, of 100 million dollars. Not bad for a company that could not sell 1000

pounds of aluminum in 1890. However, 63 million dollars of this equity was

earned during World War I. Alcoa’s strong position in later years was a direct

result of the enormous profits from the war.

Numerous technical problems arose during the war years for which Alcoa was

unprepared. Castings for the Liberty aircraft motor, for engine pistons, and for

many other applications posed special problems throughout the aluminum

foundry industry. The primary embarrassment for the company was their

inability to replicate the new German alloy called Duraluminum. This alloy was

used on all the zepplins built during the war and it was being made and used by

France and Great Britain in limited aircraft applications.

The delay in undertaking research and development was due to Hall’s reluctance

to employ personnel trained in science. This was his field of expertise and he

jealously guarded it from others, especially outsiders. With his death in 1915,

management could now move to remedy this important deficiency. Before Alcoa

took any action, however, an individual trained in engineering but a self-

educated metallurgist came on the scene to study the problems of a major

aluminum castings company. His name was Zay Jeffries and he was to become

a major player in the metallurgy of aluminum.

Isaiah(Zay) Jeffries was born in Fort Pierre, South Dakota in 1888 to a sometime

farmer turned cattle rancher. Like all his brothers Zay did his share of cattle

punching through high school. He left home to enter the South Dakota School of

Mines in Rapid City in 1906 and never returned to cattle work. A course in

geology in high school, included because of the vast mineral resources in the

state, attracted Jefferies to that field as a career. Once well into the limited

offering in geology he switched to mining engineering and graduated in 1910 in a

class of nine.

After a brief time working in the mining industry, Zay received an invitation to join

his previous college president in a new job as instructor of metallurgy at Case

School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. Among courses that Zay taught

was the new subject of metallography, the examination of polished and etched

metal samples under a special metallurgical microscope. Zay had received

some training in this field while in college under Professor Fulton who in turn had

studied under Henry Marion Howe at the School of Mines, Columbia University.

The field was still so new that teachers with experience were few, mainly

graduates of Columbia University.

Jeffries career as a teacher was soon broadened into a consulting practice in the

metals industry of Cleveland. Two of his early clients were the National Lamp

Works of General Electric Company and The Aluminum Castings Company.

These two associations would become the bases for his technical work of the

next two decades in the metallurgy of tungsten and aluminum. By 1917 he

ended his teaching career to work full time consulting. He applied the

metallurgical knowledge he acquired while teaching, especially in metallography,

and then enrolled in a graduate degree program at Harvard University under the

well-respected Albert Sauveur. During World War I he worked on aluminum

casting problems, mainly with ordinance fuses and the Liberty Aircraft Engine. A

young metallurgical engineer joined him in his aluminum casting work in 1919 by

the name of Robert S. Archer. Archer was born in Colorado in 1895. He

received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of

Michigan in 1916 and a master’s degree in 1917. The team of Jeffries and

Archer would make major contributions to the field of aluminum alloys over the

decade of the 1920s working at the Lynite Laboratories in Cleveland.

Alcoa hired the director of research they had sought for so long in this same

year, 1919. His name was Francis C. Frary, a chemist from the University of

Minnesota. He would oversee Alcoa research for the next 33 years and was

highly regarded throughout American industry. In 1946 he received the Perkin

Medal from the American Chemical Society which Hall had received in 1912. As

corporate Director of Research, Frary took control of the Lynite Laboratory in

Cleveland in 1920 when Alcoa acquired the Aluminum Casting Company in

return for the debt for aluminum metal purchases made during the war. Thus

Jeffries and his coworkers came into Alcoa.

Alcoa now built two teams of researchers during the 1920s. The one they

inherited in Cleveland and one Frary started in New Kensington, Pennsylvania.

Jefferies continued as Director of the Cleveland laboratory until 1923 when he

became a consultant. During this time he and Archer along with other

researchers hired by Jeffries developed numerous alloys. One of the first alloys

developed by Jeffries and Archer was a non-heat treatable casting alloy

containing 5% silicon (43). This alloy is still used in many applications for its

ease in processing. Another version of the 5% silicon alloy which could be heat-

treated became alloys 355 and 356. They too are in major use at the present

time. Jeffries and Archer developed the earliest American heat-treatable casting

alloy(195) with additions of copper to aluminum. This alloy could be

strengthened by the new precipitation hardening treatment discovered in

Germany by Wilm. Other heat-treatable alloys developed during this period

included a forging alloy (2025) which found a major use in aircraft propellers and

an all-purpose aircraft structural alloy (2014). They produced the first American

alloy containing magnesium and silicon for precipitation hardening (6051), and a

new cast piston alloy for automotive and aircraft engines (132) which is still used

in several modified forms.

Other developments by researchers at Alcoa during the 1920s included a

method by Edgar H. Dix for protecting aluminum sheet alloys from corrosion,

especially from sea water. Dix’s solution, which is the major method in use

today, is the bonding of surface layers of a more corrosion-resistant aluminum to

both sides of the sheet. This bonded layer is much lower in alloys and thus less

susceptible to corrosion. The higher-alloyed heat treatable alloys are usually

more prone to corrosion and stress-corrosion cracking that the unalloyed

material. The penalty for this improvement in corrosion is a reduction in strength

because of the lower clad surface. In recent years special alloys have been

developed for cladding the higher-strength aerospace alloys.

Edgar H. Dix and other researchers who joined Jeffries at the Cleveland

laboratory performed valuable work throughout the 1920s which strengthened

Alcoa’s position in being the only American primary producer of aluminum. By

1930 when Alcoa published a technical book on the properties and processes of

their aluminum products, the list of authors contained 25 employees in research,

product development, and engineering. Many of these individuals would

continue to serve Alcoa in technical capacities through the 1930s and 1940s.

Some would pursue their careers in other industrial laboratories and still others

went into universities as well-known teachers in metallurgy. Archer was an

example of the former. He left Alcoa after 10 very productive years to perform

research at A. O. Smith, where promising technical challenges were underway in

fields other than aluminum. Later he went with Republic Steel Corporation, and

finally he finished his career at Climax Molybdenum Corporation in Michigan.

Zay Jeffries remained at Alcoa until 1936, when he left to assume full-time duties

at the General Electric Company. All through the years that he had worked at

Alcoa, it was a part-time assignment. He had continued to serve as a consultant

at General Electric. It is interesting that Zay continued to receive a fee of $500 a

month from Alcoa long after he left their formal employment. This dual

arrangement of working seems to have provided him with an income well above

most engineers of the time. Jeffries career at General Electric included a

primary responsibility in forging a commercial business in tungsten carbide tools.

This was an area of technology that had interested him after Dr. Samuel Hoyt

had shown he and Archer that the new field of tungsten carbide tooling could

solve their problem machining the recently developed high-silicon piston alloy

(132). In fact this machining problem was so severe that the success of the alloy

was threatened. Tungsten carbide would later become a tool material that would

take its place in severe machining applications and Jeffries would play a large

role in promoting the business into a major industry.

Jeffries was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and served as a

consultant to Arthur Compton on the World War II Manhattan Project. He

became a member of the boards of several universities and a research

institution. During his whole active career he played a leading role in several

technical organizations; including the American Society for Metals, the American

Institute of Metallurgical Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical

Engineers, and others. Among his peers Jeffries was considered the Dean of

American Metallurgist.