Washington Monument

Twenty-five years after its discovery, aluminum was a precious metal. Then a French chemist developed procedures for reducing aluminum compounds using sodium metal. The price of the metal dropped 100-fold. Even so, in 1885 aluminum was a semiprecious metal used for esoteric purposes such as a prince s baby rattle and the cap for the Washington Monument. 

Oh no Down you plunge. A windy sound fills your ears. Below, you think you see the Washington Monument, ominous, powerful, looming up like a bleached bone. But no. It is only your difficulty of adjusting to the new way of perceiving. 

When it was first isolated, aluminum was a rare and expensive metal. During the nineteenth century, it so symbolized modern technology that the Washington Monument was given an expensive aluminum tip. That rarity and expense was transformed by electrochemistry. Aluminum metal is now obtained on a huge scale by the Hall process. In 1886,... 

When completed in 1884, the Washington Monument was capped with a pyramid of pure aluminum, a precious metal at the time. 

Aluminum, the most abundant metal in the earth s crust at 8.3%, takes its name from alum, KAIJSO 12 H20, a salt that has been used medicinally since Roman times. In spite of its abundance, the metal nevertheless proved difficult to isolate in pure form. It was such a precious substance in the midnineteenth century, in fact, that aluminum cutlery was sometimes used for elegant dinners, and the Washington Monument was capped by a pyramid of pure aluminum. Not until 1886 did an economical manufacturing process become available. 

The fact that position and motion can only be specified relatively to some arbitrarily selected body is of course not new. It has been known for hundreds of years. The body selected is usually the earth, and the position of a point on the earth can be specified by giving its distance north and west of some known point and its height above sea level. For example, if we know that a place is one hundred miles north of the Washington monument, thirty miles west, and one thousand feet above sea level, we can say that we know where it is. This information does not fix the position in any absolute sense because the earth is moving rapidly through space, but it does fix the position relative to the earth. 

The capstone placed at the top of the Washington Monument in 1884 is a 22.86-cm pyramid of pure aluminum. Until an inexpensive purification process was developed, aluminum was considered a rare and precious metal. 

They next spent 35 seconds on the nut who threatened to blow up the Washington Monument four years ago. Patrolman Jim Powell, first officer to examine the truck believed to have been filled with explosives, said of such manuals ... 

Setting the aluminum cap on the Washington Monument in 1884. At that time, aiuminum was regarded as a precious metai. 

Not until 1855 did a French chemist, Henri Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville (1818-81), work out an adequate method for preparing reasonably pure aluminum in moderate quantities. Even then, it was far more expensive than steel, so that it was used for ostentation, as, for instance, for the rattle of Napoleon Ill s infant son, or the cap at the top of the Washington Monument. 

The US quarter has a mass of 5.67 g and is approximately 1.55 mm thick, (a) How many quarters would have to be stacked to reach 575 ft, the height of the Washington Monument (b) How much would this stack weigh (c) How much money would this stack contain (d) The US National Debt Clock showed the outstanding public debt to be 11,687,233,914,811.11 on August 19, 2009. How many stacks like the one described would be necessary to pay off this debt ... 

The original top of the Washington Monument was aluminum, made in 1884 by the sodium-reduction method. 

The largest in the United States is the Puente Hills Landfill in City of Industry, CA, towering to a height of 500ft (about that of the Washington monument) and coveting a land area of over 700 acres. 

Another well-known tower, the Washington Monument, was completed in 1884. At 555 feet in height, it was the world s tallest tower until the Eiffel Tower, nearly 1,000 feet tail, was completed in 1889. The Washington Monument remains the world s tallest masonry structure. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, is the tallest monument in the United States, at 630 feet... 

During the last two decades of the 19 century, people in Europe and America entertained a great interest in technology and science. The metal aluminum fascinated -the silvery appearance, the low weight and the good corrosion resistance. But it was a semi-precious metal and very costly, used mostly for jewelry and artwork. A demonstration of that was a cap of aluminum placed on the top of the Washington monument in 1884. 

Placing the aluminum cap atop the newly completed Washington Monument (1884). The square pyramidal aluminum apex was part of an elaborate grounding system. Aluminum, an excellent electrical conductor, was still considered to be a precious metal at that time. 

Richmond, Va.— New City Hall, Church Hill Tunnel, bridges across James River at Snowden and Joshua Falls, high bridge at Farmville, Va., Washington Monument foundations, Capitol Square, Richmond, Va. 

Although we know that the universe is asymmetric, we seem more comfortable with objects that are S5unmetric. We see beauty in the Taj Mahal (Figure 9.1), the Washington Monument, the Eifel Tower, and the St. Louis Arch, and we are... 

Production of Aluminum When an aluminum cap was placed atop the Washington Monument in 1884, aluminum was still a semiprecious metal. At that time it cost 1 per ounce to produce, equivalent to the daily wage of a skilled laborer working a 10-hour day. As a result, aluminum was used mainly in jewelry and artwork. But just two years later, all this changed. In 1886, Charles Martin Hall in the United States and Paul Heroult in France independently discovered an economically feasible method of producing aluminum from AI2O3 by electrolysis. 

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