A SHORT HISTORY OF ALUMINUM

Introduction
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.