Who invented plate aluminium?
The Danish chemist Hans Christian Oersted first generated tiny amounts of pure aluminium back in 1825. In 1845 the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler created a way to make enough of the metal to study it, and later on the French chemist Henri Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville created the process for the commercial production of aluminium. At $40 per kilogram in 1859, it was an extremely expensive and rare metal back then.
In 1888 the Austrian chemist Karl Joseph Bayer created a new process to extract aluminium oxide from bauxite cheaply. In 1889 Charles Martin Hall finally patented a low cost way to produce the metal commercially, and the rest is history. The Hall-Héroult and Bayer methods are still used today. By 2011 the sheet metal industry boasted 4,400 fabrication shops in the United States alone, worth more than $20 billion.