Pittsburgh Reduction Company

Hall s process was first operated by the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, a predecessor of ALCOA, in 1889. Heroult s process was first operated by the Societe Metallurgique Suisse at Neulaissen, Switzerland, in 1887, using electric power generated at the Rhine Falls. 

Hall s next move in his quest to bless humanity and make a fortune for himself was to make aluminum production commercially feasible. Upon receiving the financial backing of local industrialists, the Pittsburgh Reduction Company was formed, and Hall and his employee Arthur Vining Davis... 

They may not have given sufficient weight to the significance of Charles Martin Hall s invention just at this time of a method of producing aluminum by the electrolysis of aluminum oxide in molten cryolite, which by 1889 was being exploited by the Pittsburgh Reduction Company. 

This picture changed in the 1886 when an American chemist, Charles Martin Hall (1863— 1914), and a French chemist, Paul Louis-Toussaint Heroult (1863—1914), both discovered, at about the same time, a new process for extracting aluminum from molten aluminum oxide by electrolysis. (It might be noted that both discoverers have the same birth and death dates as well as the same date of discovery.) Hall was inspired by his teacher to find a way to inexpensively produce aluminum metal. He wired together numerous wet cells to form a battery that produced enough electricity to separate the aluminum from the melted aluminum oxide (mixed with the minerals cryolyte or fluorite), by the process known as electrolysis. Hall formed the Pittsburgh Reduction Co., which is now known as the Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa. His company produced so much aluminum that the price dropped to about sixty cents per kilogram. 

Hafslund was very much the achievement of the Norwegian engineer Knud Bryn, who led the company from its inception until he retired in 1928. Bryn originally intended to start aluminium production in 1895, and had close contacts with the American aluminium company Pittsburgh Reduction. But in the end Pittsburgh and the Swiss aluminium company at Schaffhausen made a deal to keep Hafslund out of this business. Bryn then used his German connection Schuckert - he had been their... 

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