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Concept
Alfred E. Hunt
Summary
Alfred Ephraim Hunt was a 19th-century American metallurgist and industrialist best known for founding the company that would eventually become Alcoa, the world's largest producer and distributor of aluminum.
Hunt was a New Englander by birth. His parents were Mary Hanchett Hunt (June 4, 1830 - April 24, 1906) and Leander B. Hunt (July 15, 1812 - December 19, 1886). He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1876 with a degree in metallurgy and mining. His first several jobs kept him in New England, first in Boston with the Bay State Ironworks, which was operating the first open hearth steel furnace in the United States. From there, he went on to Nashua, New Hampshire, to work for the Nashua Iron & Steel Company.
His career eventually took him to Pittsburgh, doing metallurgical work for the Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory, which he would acquire in partnership with the young chemist George Hubbard Clapp in 1887. He was working there in 1888 when his acquaintance Romaine C. Cole brought a young man three years out of Oberlin College to meet him.
When Alfred E. Hunt became aware of Charles Martin Hall and his patent awarded two years earlier on a process for separating aluminum from common aluminum oxide through electrolysis, he became very interested. Though aluminum is the most common metallic element in the Earth's crust at about 8%, it is very rare in its free form. ("aluminium", Britannica) At the time of this meeting in 1888, the price of aluminum was $4.86 per pound. This made it strictly a "laboratory metal" with minimal commercial and industrial use.
The process for aluminum separation discovered by Hall, called the Hall-Héroult process because of its near-simultaneous discovery by Paul Héroult, provided a cheap and easy way to extract aluminum as a pure metal. Hunt realized that if he could create a market for this metal and control the patent on the process for extracting it from common materials that he'd have a substantial business on his hands.
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