The discovery of the electrical process of making aluminum that displaced the sodium method was due to Charles M. Hall. He was the son of a Congregational minister and as a boy took a fancy to chemistry through happening upon an old text-book of that science in his father's library. He never knew who the author was, for the cover and title page had been torn off. The obstacle in the way of the electrolytic production of aluminum was, as I have said, because its compounds were so hard to melt that the current could not pass through. In 1886, when Hall was twenty-two, he solved the problem in the laboratory of Oberlin College with no other apparatus than a small crucible, a gasoline burner to heat it with and a galvanic battery to supply the electricity. He found that a Greenland mineral, known as cryolite (a double fluoride of sodium and aluminum), was readily fused and would dissolve alumina (aluminum oxide). When an electric current was passed through the melted mass the metal aluminum would collect at one of the poles. In working out the process and defending his claims Hall used up all his own money, his brother's and his uncle's, but he won out in the end and Judge Taft held that his patent had priority over the French claim of Herault. On his death, a few years ago, Hall left his large fortune to his Alma Mater, Oberlin. Two other young men from Ohio, Alfred and Eugene Cowles, with whom Hall was for a time associated, wore the first to develop the wide possibilities of the electric furnace on a commercial scale. In 1885 they started the Cowles Electric Smelting and Aluminum Company at Lockport, New York, using Niagara power. The various aluminum bronzes made by absorbing the electrolyzed aluminum in copper attracted immediate attention by their beauty and usefulness in electrical work and later the company turned out other products besides aluminum, such as calcium carbide, phosphorus, and carborundum. They got carborundum as early as 1885 but miscalled it "crystallized silicon," so its introduction was left to E.A. Acheson, who was a graduate of Edison's laboratory. In 1891 he packed clay and charcoal into an iron bowl, connected it to a dynamo and stuck into the mixture an electric light carbon connected to the other pole of the dynamo. When he pulled out the rod he found its end encrusted with glittering crystals of an unknown substance. They were blue and black and iridescent, exceedingly hard and very beautiful. He sold them at first by the carat at a rate that would amount to $560 a pound. They were as well worth buying as diamond dust, but those who purchased them must have regretted it, for much finer crystals were soon on sale at ten cents a pound. The mysterious substance turned out to be a compound of carbon and silicon, the simplest possible compound, one atom of each, CSi. Acheson set up a factory at Niagara, where he made it in ten-ton batches. The furnace