Charles Martin Hall

On December 6, 1863, American aluminum king Charles Martin Hall was born.

Charles Hall is the son of the Rev. Herman Bassett Hall and Sophalonia H. Brooks. He had one brother and three sisters, one of whom died in an early age. The Hall family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, in 1873, and Charles attended Oberlin High School. He entered Oberlin College in 1880 and received a bachelor's degree five years later. Major is natural sciences.

Encouraged by chemistry professor Frank Fanning Jewitt, Hall became a materials science expert. What interested college students most at that time was that because of the high price of aluminum, those who discovered ways to reduce the cost of aluminum production could become rich overnight.

Hall always thought around David's fusion analysis method. The fusion method requires melting alumina at higher temperatures and separating pure aluminum from it. Hall tried a simpler way to melt alumina. He began his first experiment the first year after graduating from college. He had to prepare most of the instruments and chemicals himself, when Hall's sister Yulia funded him. In his experiments, Hall found that adding cryolite to alumina could reduce the melting point of pure alumina from 2050°C to 950°C. Therefore, the basic idea of his invention was to use a current of electrons to pass through an electrolytic cell containing alumina and cryolite, thereby forming an aluminum depression to some extent at the bottom of the distillation tube. After several years of complex work, Hall obtained his first specimen on February 23, 1886. At first, he could only prepare spherical aluminum, but later he continued to work hard and finally got aluminum ingots. On July 9, 1886, Hall applied for the first patent for his method.

In 1911, Hall's brilliant achievements won him the Perkin Medaille, the highest award in the American chemical industry.