Excerpt from Technology Quarterly, Vol. 4 The metal aluminum has certainly not been damned by faint praise On the contrary, from my experience as the president of an aluminum manufacturing company which has been endeavoring for the past two years and over to sell the commercially pure metal in the markets, and to introduce it into the arts and manufactures of the country. I have to state to you as my conviction that one of the two chief difficulties encountered, and which today retards and restricts the wider use of the metal, is the extravagant, erroneous, and in many cases mischievously misleading, statements which have been made as to the properties of the metal, which have received wide circulation, not only through the daily newspapers, but, I am sorry to add, through many technical and scientific journals as well. The other difficulty is the almost equally widespread, and, so far, equally extravagant and misleading, series of claims made by the inventors of processes for the manufacture of aluminum at remarkably low prices. I shall endeavor in this lecture to correct some of these fallacies as to the properties of the metal, and also, in describing the minerals in which the metal occurs and the methods of reduction which have been practiced, to explain the principal difficulties which have thus far been encountered. I shall also venture a prophecy as to the success of cheaper methods of manufacture of aluminum in the future. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.