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E c o n o M i c s
Alcoa celebrates 120 years of innovation
Alcoa, the company that created
the modern aluminium industry,
marked its 120 th anniversary with
the launch of a website (www.
alcoa.com/history) celebrating
the company’s progress since
1 October 1888, the day it was
incorporated as The Pittsburgh
Reduction Company in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania.
The new website features interactive
displays showing how Alcoa has been
inventing the future since 1888. Since
its founding day, Alcoa has grown
from a spark of innovation to become
the world’s largest aluminium company
which today operates some 350
facilities in 34 countries around the
world with some 97,000 employees.
“Alcoa invented the modern aluminium
industry and has been at the
forefront of every major event in the
industry for the past 120 years – from
the first droplets of aluminium from
Charles Martin Hall to helping new
markets such as the aluminium can
emerge”, said Alcoa Chairman Alain
Belda.
Highlights from the website include
an interactive ‘time machine’
reviewing the key aspects of the company’s
history, and an overview of
how Alcoa has evolved to where its
products are used in markets all over
the world – from consumer electronics,
green buildings, aerospace, oil and
gas, ground transportation, packaging
and more.
First commercial process – 1886
The process of creating aluminium
metal from alumina through electrolysis
was discovered in parallel by two
men: Alcoa founder Charles Martin
Hall of Oberlin, Ohio, and Paul L. T.
Héroult of France. Hall’s patent for the
process prevailed in the US and survived
numerous challenges. Though
the Hall­Héroult process has been refined
many times, its basic principles
are still used today to produce nearly
every ounce of aluminium smelted
by aluminium producers worldwide.
The process cut the price of aluminium
dramatically and transformed it
from a precious metal into a strategic
material whose properties of strength,
lightness and durability would open
up a world of new engineering possibilities.
Based on this discovery, a group of
Pittsburgh entrepreneurs, including
Hall, gathered to incorporate the company.
Its original name, The Pittsburgh
Reduction Company, was changed to
the Aluminium Company of America
in 1907, and then to Alcoa in 1999.
Alcoa’s first employee, Arthur Vining
Davis, worked with Hall to start production
in a small plant in Pittsburgh‘s
Strip District. Davis stayed with the
company for 69 years, serving for 29 of
those years as its first Chairman of the
Board. The company’s earliest products
were aluminium pots and pans.
First use of sustainable power
to make aluminium – 1893
Alcoa was the first aluminium company
to harness sustainable hydropower
to drive the smelting process
with a plant built in Niagara Falls in
1893. Hydropower helped the company
further drive down the price
of aluminium. Today,
hydropower is still a
critical part of Alcoa’s
strategy to maximise
its sources of sustainable,
clean energy. It
powers Alcoa smelters
from Tennessee and
Washington in the US
to Brazil, Canada and
Iceland using renewable
hydropower.
First aluminium
to fly – 1903
The Wright Brothers’
historic flight took
off with an Alcoa aluminium
crankcase.
Its lightness helped
tip the balance of
power and weight that
changed the world of
transportation forever.
Since that day, Alcoa
has played a key role
in nearly every major innovation in
aerospace aluminium, including such
milestones as one of the world’s first
passenger planes, the Ford Trimotor;
the first transatlantic flight in 1927;
the overwhelming rollout of American
aircraft aluminium capacity that
helped turn the tide of World War II;
the world’s first passenger jet, Boeing’s
707; and today’s latest breakthrough,
the Airbus A380 super jumbo.
Alcoa aluminium was first in space
as well. Sputnik, the Russian satellite
that shocked the world in 1957 and
began the space race of the 1950s and
1960s, was built in a plant now owned
and managed by Alcoa. And Alcoa
alloys and propellants have helped
make many American space milestones
possible, from the first manned
flight and the first moon landing to today’s
Space Shuttle and International
Space Station programmes.
‘The Laboratories’ – 1930
Alcoa was the first company to formalise
and dedicate resources solely
to the development of new aluminium
technology and applications with the
Alcoa aluminium helped building the Empire State Building
in 1931
Lennart Karow
20 ALUMINIUM · 11/2008