June 15, 2023 • 51 mins
Humans made it through the Bronze Age and Iron Age, then we dabbled in steel, and now we are living in the Aluminum Age. The metal is so ubiquitous it seems like it’s been around forever, but we’ve only been really using it since the 20th century.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we want to remind you we are wrapping
up our tour this year with three shows in Orlando, Florida,
and Nashville, Tennessee and Atlanta. Tickets are on sale now,
isn't that right?
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right? So go to link tree, slash sysk or
our website Stuff youshould know dot com for ticket links,
info and everything you need. We'll see you guys starting
in August.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's lurking around too, which makes this stuff
you should know. Uh, one of the first I think
the first, No, I think we've talked about iron before
the second in our ongoing saga to do an episode
on each element in the periodic table. Oh kill me,
(00:56):
it's like so much fun, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
No, this is a good one.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah, that's it for me. I'm done.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
We'll see about that. But we're talking today about aluminum,
which is pretty much ubiquitous. If you think about it,
you find aluminum everywhere. I don't even need to rattle
off where you find aluminum. You can figure that out yourself.
Because it's just that ubiquitous, right, agreed. So one of
the interesting things about it, though, Chuck, is that as
(01:23):
much as it's like entered into our world or become
like so enmessed with our world, it is a very
very new invention as far as elements go and discovery
and use. Yeah, I mean we've been using copper forever,
iron forever, a bronze even longer than iron. Remember, aluminum
we've been using essentially since the twentieth century.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Is this the aluminum age, Yes, it is an people
call it that, no, but I think we should start
calling it then.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I mean, bronze had an age, and if iron had
an age, stone had an age.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Yeahs a great idea, Chuck, the aluminum age. It's a
wonderful idea. It really gets the point across.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
It does.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
And you mentioned that it's ubiquitous in use these days
for sure, but it's also abundant. And as Libya Livia
pointed this out because she helped us out with this one,
she did a really good job on this one. I
think eight percent of the total mass of the Earth's
(02:26):
crust has aluminum in it. But it's not like from
the beginning we could just go down there and chop
out a bunch of aluminum with a screwdriver and a hammer,
because aluminum had a well, not a problem, it just
had a quality that it's it bonds very easily with
other elements, so that means it's reactive, so that means
(02:47):
it's in the crust. It is, you know, parts of
rock and parts of other things in combination with other
elements and minerals. And it wasn't just like, oh, look
there's aluminum, we can just go like, we had to
figure out how to extract usable aluminum from other things.
Mainly these days and back then something called box site.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, boux site is it's kind of like an umbrella
term for naturally occurring aluminum ores.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Basically, yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
But the problem with aluminum, like a lot of metals
and minerals like show up in nature's ores and we
can extract them. The difficulty is that aluminum is so
reactive it really really meshes with the other mineral or
the other rock or the other metal, and it's really
tough to get apart. Kind of like poor Wilfrid Brimley
(03:41):
in the thing. It's like that ameshed.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Oh man, I'm feeling better now.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
So you've got this box site and we know about it.
We know that there's something useful in it, but we
didn't know how to get it out. And for a
long time people had noticed like, oh, there's all sorts
of stuff you can do with this box site that
we'll call alum which is a kind of aluminum sulfate
made with potassium. People have been using that for about
(04:10):
seven eight thousand years.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Now, Yeah, all sorts of stuff like oh, of course,
the Egyptians they put all kinds of things in makeup,
as we've talked about before. Aluminum or that potassium aluminum
sulfate is one of them used often, and dyes used
for dressing wounds. I think you can also find aluminum
in clay. So yeah, for many thousands of years they
(04:34):
were using aluminum strengthened clay to make harder and stronger pottery.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, you can't break it. It's like an unbreakable comb.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Unbreakable what comb? Like a hair comb?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah, there's a I think it's a brand name even.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Oh really, I've never heard of it.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
It just invites you to break it, and it eventually
does break, by the way, but it's hard to break.
I got so yes, people were using it for a while.
And by the way, as an aside, there's a I
don't want to say famous, but there's a noteworthy artifact
that was discovered in the tomb of a general zoo
Chu who lived in China about seventeen hundred years ago.
(05:17):
And it's a belt and it's made of aluminum, and
it's what you would refer to as an out of
place artifact or oop art, which is something that kind
of bucks our understanding of history and time like that
should not exist because this was the third century CE,
and it.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Wasn't Lomo control in you know, the Old West or
something like that exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
That would be that would be a very significant out
of place artifact. This one's pretty significant, so much so
that they're like, we think this is an archaeological prank,
like a joke. Like somebody was like, this is really
going to blow their minds, and it did. But most
people are like, this is so inexplicable, there's no way
that it's real.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Oh that's awesome, yeah, but still an explicit Yes.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
That's one of the things that makes it awesome.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
But the upside of my whole point was we knew
that there was something useful in there, and as far
as the chemistry world goes, it's not enough to just
know it's there. They have to isolate it. They're just
fanatics about it. And they said that about doing that
in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Right, Yeah, there was one chemist in particular name Antwin Lovoisier.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Yeah, very nice.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, obviously French, and he was like, hey, you know
this aluminum oxide or I think you were calling ilumina
at that point, you know, we can probably extract this
stuff wasn't able to. But not too long after an
eighteen and oh eight there was a British chemist name
Sir Humphrey Davy who and he actually named named it. Well,
(06:50):
we'll get to the naming thing in a second. It
goes through some stages. It was to him it was illuminium,
and then he wrote a book of elements elemental in
chemistry I'm sorry, Chemical Philosophy four years after that, and
at that point it was spelled aluminum. But then later on,
(07:11):
like four years later in the Quarterly Review, there were
a bunch of British chemists who were just like, I
don't like the ring of aluminum. It doesn't sound British enough,
so they went with aluminium with an extra eye, and
that was basically what people called it for a long time,
except for Americans who were like, you know what, we're
(07:32):
using both of these terms. We really like aluminum. It's
in the dictionary, It's in Webster's dictionary.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Is aluminum? Can we just settle this?
Speaker 1 (07:40):
And in nineteen twenty five, finally the American Chemical Society said, yes,
we were going to say it's aluminum. And so Americans
and Canadians are the only people who call it that's
for some reason.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah, everybody else calls it aluminium. Yeah, they stuck with it,
They really did. They really stuck with it for sure.
So that Humphrey Davy, going back to him, probably one
of the reasons he came up with different spellings was
because he was fresh off of his self experimentation with
nitrous oxide. He was the guy who called the O
excellent airbag, remember him. So he was the one who
(08:15):
said there is an elemental useful metal here in this
cruddy or and he described it before anyone had ever
even isolated it. But in the world of chemistry, you
wouldn't call Sir Humphrey Davy the discoverer of aluminum in chemistry,
to discover something, you have to have isolated it in
(08:36):
its pure form, and there was an early attempt to
do that. I think there was a guy named Hans
Christian Ursted who in eighteen twenty five came very close,
but he had an impure isolated aluminum, and then very
triumphantly Friedrich Vohler or Vuler i think, came up with
pure aluminum two years after that.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Yeah, it's the old chemistry tradition that in order to
be named the discoverer, you have to extract it and
then roll up in a ball and hit someone with it.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
That's right, that's the tradition.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
But it was really expensive to do so for the
first And it's kind of funny to think about now
because they've gotten so good at making aluminum. It's obviously
used in so many different things and it's fairly inexpensive,
but back then it was a luxury item. So aluminum
at first was known as the Medal of Kings, and
(09:34):
Napoleon loved it and he was like, just think of
what we could do with this stuff in the military.
Like it's fairly strong, it's very light, I think, you know,
the lightness was such a huge attractive quality for aluminum
still is. And he was like, we need this stuff,
and here I even want to eat off of it.
So make some cutlery for me, and I'll just keep
(09:57):
very select sets of this stuff for me and my
very special guests, and everyone else will just dine on
silver with silver spoons and will use this aluminum. And
they were just going crazy for illumina. It was very
kind of funny to look back at how it was
a luxury metal in its earliest days.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
It definitely was. And one reason why is because even
though Voler had come up with a method for extracting
pure aluminum, it was really labor intensive. It was really
hard to do, and you didn't get very much from it.
So that made it a very precious metal, especially when,
like you said, you had people like Napoleon the Third
(10:34):
bankrolling investigations into getting more and more aluminum.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
And one of the reasons why I did not know this,
but there's probably people out there who do that there
is an aluminum pyramid capping the Washington Monument that was
put It was installed when the monument was built in
eighteen eighty four. Finished is in part because America was
showing off. Yeah, in eighteen eighty four, it was sill,
(11:00):
a very luxurious good and they had the six pound
aluminum period pyramid placed on the top. And it was
so difficult still at that time to extract aluminum that
that represented one quarter of the annual production of all
the aluminum in the world that was produced that year,
that one six pound pyramid.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, it's pretty funny. Eight inches and six pounds, and
they like, get a load of this. Wait'll they see
this thing? Yes, it's like a bunch of beercans mashed
together exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
That's the funniest part. This is eighteen eighty four. They
paid like seventy five hundred bucks in today's money for it,
which seems kind of cheap to me. But two years later,
we got so good at extracting aluminum we came up
with another process, which we'll talk about in a second,
that that pyramid went from like hero to zero almost overnight.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, but it you know, it also served a purpose
because well everyone knows aluminum is very anti corrosive, so
that's a nice topper for a monument. And it also
served as a lightning rod, so it served a purpose.
But it was for sure a brag, but like you said,
it went kind of to a staple thing very quickly
(12:11):
once some very smart people got to work refining this process.
One was Charles Martin Hall, an Ohian. He's very so
HIGHO and I would say, Paul heral Hero, how would
you pronounce that Herald Herauld?
Speaker 2 (12:30):
I think you might actually say the T in that one.
I'm not sure he.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
H h E R O U L T.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Another Frenchman, they independently in eighteen eighty six, invented this
technique that they have now has been code named after
them as the Herald process, in which you dissolve aluminum
oxide and molten cryolite mineral pass the.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Current through there.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
We've talked about those kind of processes before and leave.
The Frenchman actually filed the patent about a month and
a half before Hall, but Hall proved that he had
come up with it previously, and so they worked it out.
They shared credit. They even ended up dying in the
same year. I guess they really wanted to share everything,
(13:17):
so they said let's just die together as well, and
they both passed away in nineteen fourteen, and that was
at the end of the process. Though I think someone
else came along and really refined it.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, and that was not only not the end, that
was just the beginning. That process is still in use today.
And then, like you said, a third guy, Karl Josef Behar,
would you say Yosef Oh?
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Probably? I think yeah, okay with Yoseph.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Carl Joseph Bear in nineteen eighty seven. The next year
came up with a way to get aluminum oxide, which
was the base form of aluminum that you start out
within the Hall Herald process. Somebody came along and figured
out a better way to get aluminum oxide from box side.
(14:05):
So in the span of a year, essentially we went
from aluminum being a precious metal to having an industrial
process in place that we still use today. That's incredible.
That's why we live in the aluminum age today. I
just think the timing of the whole thing is so amazing.
And I saw it explained in part because people were
(14:26):
so well aware that aluminum was light and strong and conductive.
Those are really desirable properties. They wanted this metal really bad,
so it was a real target in the chemistry world,
which explains why Hall and Herault both came up with
this same process independently. At the same time. But the
fact that you put that together with Bears Discovery, it
(14:48):
just all congealed all at once rather than over the
course of you know, decades and decades. Yeah, I just
find that very interesting.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, it's very cool.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
In fact, Hall in eighteen eighty eight helped out a
company that still around today. Back then it was called
the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, and now it's known as the
Aluminum Company of America ALCOA. I'm sure we have listeners,
plenty of listeners in Pittsburgh that work for alcoa very
big company. And the price of aluminum really went down.
(15:19):
So I mean, if you want something to go from
a luxury to like something that you crush against your
head from a beer, can you go from almost five
dollars a pound in eighteen eighty eight to seventy eight
cents in eighteen ninety three, and then all the way
down to about twenty cents a pound in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, So in today's prices, it's going from six hundred
and sixty five dollars a pound to five dollars and
forty five cents a pound in just a few decades.
That's how how radical and just world changing that process
was and is.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
All Right, I think that is a heck of an intro.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
All right, well, let's take an that break then, I say,
some podcasts might stop there, Yeah, but we're gonna keep going.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
All right, We'll be right back, all right.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
So one of the things, Chuck, that we talked about
was you've mentioned that you melt cryolite. I think it
melts at a thousand degrees celsius, and then you melt aluminum,
so the temperature has to be even hotter than that,
like really really hot, and then you pass a really
strong electrical current through that and to do all this
it's really really energy intensive, as we'll still is. Yeah.
(16:55):
So one of the other things that supported the boom
in aluminum was that the electrical grid and ways of
creating and generating and getting electricity from place to place
was also developing simultaneously in the United States as well.
That really helped a lot.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, big time.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
And in fact, a lot of aluminum plants early on
were built near dams. They were like, let's just you know, this,
really make this efficient instead of camp right next to
that dam over there, so you know, we should probably
go over some of the modern uses of aluminum. Aluminum is,
like we said, has so many great properties, but it
(17:34):
is fairly soft and weak in and of itself. I
mean it makes then we'll talk about foil and beer.
I can't stop talking about beer cans. And it's great
for that stuff. But if you want to use it
in you know, commercial settings, you can make commercial aluminum.
You just have to mix in a little iron, maybe
a little silicon, and it makes it much stronger. And
(17:55):
there are like all kinds of ways that you can alloy.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Is that a word?
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I think it works all right.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
You can alloify aluminum to do things like, you know,
build an airplane, and in fact that the right brothers.
You might be thinking that airplane was made of wood,
and it was, but the engine and I never knew
this was made of ninety two percent aluminum. Because they
needed horsepower. They needed a strong enough engine to get
(18:26):
that little wooden frame off the ground. But they couldn't
make it like out of like you would a car
enginecause it'd be way too heavy. So they needed to
be less than two hundred pounds produce that eight horses.
And German car makers were starting to use aluminum for
their engines and they said you're onto something. They ended
up using eight percent copper to the ninety two percent
(18:47):
aluminum and they got that thing off the ground.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah, they turned to their mechanic, Charlie Taylor, and it
needed to be no more than two hundred pounds and
produce eight horsepower. Like you said, he delivered one from
scratch that weigh one hundred and eighty pounds and produced
twelve horse power. So Charlie Taylor really came through. I know,
we talked about him in the Right Brothers episode we did.
Was that a two parter mm?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
I want to say it was, but I make a
lot of stuff up in my head.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
So, you know, come World War One, not too long after,
they were making full airplanes out of metal. Like aluminum
replaced wood very very quickly, because you had wood and
fabric airplanes obviously, you know, that was the best they
could do at the time, but aluminum is so much
stronger and you could go a lot faster and do
(19:38):
all kinds of things you couldn't do with wood and fabric. Yeah,
and there's even Lyvia found a gentleman at the National
Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian who was like, if
it wasn't for aluminum, we wouldn't have the planes in
spacecraft we have today.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Kind of period.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, and so that really gets across one of the
big prized things about aluminum. It's strong, but it's also light.
It's not quite as strong as steel, but it's much
lighter than steel, I think three times lighter, so its
strength to weight ratio is much better, which means that
it requires a lot less either horsepower in your your
twelve horse power engine or a lot less I guess
(20:15):
solid rocket fuel to get your rocket off of the
ground because you're using aluminum. So that's pretty great. There's
another quality of it that's allowed aluminum to really kind
of help us, as it's conductivity.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, if it was equally as conductive as copper, it
would have fully replaced copper at this point because of
how much easier aluminum is, you know, to get. But
it's about two third is as good as copper, which
is still great, very conductive, but it's a third is heavy,
which is great. That the problem there is you know
(20:51):
you're gonna need aluminum wire. It's about one and a
half times the diameter of copper if you want it
to perform the same.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
So it is, but that's a lot bigger, so they couldn't.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
They tried to for a little while, but they couldn't
just like go in and replace copper and households and
stuff because the wiring is too big. They do use
it for overhead and underground transmission because you reinforce it
with steel and it can be bigger in diameter. It's
not that big of a deal, but I think in
the sixties and seventies they were trying it in houses
(21:23):
because copper was really expensive. I think it worked well,
but the connections ended up where you connect it together
ended up being a fire hazard, so they did away
with that.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, what happens is in where the wiring goes into
like your outlet, your socket right in the back. The
aluminum expands and contracts much more than copper does, so
it loosens over time, and when it gets loose enough,
it'll arc. And an electrical arc is way worse than
just an electrical current because the electricity encounters gas the
(21:55):
atmosphere and it shoots up to like thirty five thousand
degrees farent height and causes fires. So if you have
you buy a house with aluminum wiring, like from the
sixties or seventies. Your insurance company is probably going to
be like, if you want insurance on this house, you're
going to have to totally rewire it.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
And now we can talk about beer cans finally, because
that is what started to happen all the way back
in the late nineteen fifties. You know, the old cans
were made of usually ten sometimes steel, and there was
a very forward thinking company in Hawaii called the Hawaii
Brewing Company, and they tried it out on their Primo
beer and they said, shipping this stuff is a lot better,
(22:34):
it's a lot cheaper.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
We can ship it.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
To the mainland, no problem. But the can linings that
they were using at the time, there was a chemical
reaction going on between the beer and the can. It
ruined the beer, bankrupted the company. But it did not
die there because Cores was right on their heels. They
were already working on the same thing, and they perfected
it just a year later in nineteen fifty nine and
(22:59):
basically said the same thing is like, this is a
lot cheaper, it's easier to and you know, lighter obviously
than glass bottles. It actually helps the beer deprive the
beer of light and oxygen better than bottles, and cores
started the whole thing as far as beer goes, followed
very quickly by Arci Cola on the soft drink side,
(23:20):
and then it was aluminum can City as far as
soft drinks and canned anything goes, basically. But if you
remember when like we were kids, those same aluminum cans
just were felt heavier and thicker. It's because they were.
They've they've refined the process and made it much thinner
over the years. But those old cans, because I was like,
(23:41):
were those ten They weren't. They were aluminum. They were
just a lot heavier back then.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Right. So today aluminum cans are so useful that twenty
percent of the entire global supply goes to making aluminum cans,
which is pretty amazing. And the other thing about it
is it's high recyclable. As we'll see, it has what's
called infinite recyclability, like it doesn't degrade in the recycling process,
(24:08):
and it requires way less energy, time and money to
recycle aluminum cans. So much so that I read that
the can of say like coke or beer or whatever
you're drinking was probably in the exact same form in
a different life sixty days before. Each can has about
(24:29):
a sixty day life cycle from sale to use, to
recycling to reprocessing to repackaging to going back on the
store shelf. Again. Isn't that amazing? But it's not like
they just wash out the same can. It's completely disintegrated,
so it's not the exact same can, but it was
in some way that same can before. It's like that
ship we talked about, and does your body replace itself
(24:51):
if you slowly replace each part of the ship, when
you replace everything, is it's still the same ship? Same
question applies to aluminum cans. It turns out.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, I mean, we might as well finish up on
recycling and just say that we've tried to beat the
recycling drum over the years, and we know that there
are some problems with the recycling process for a lot
of stuff. I know glass is particularly problematic, but aluminum
is one of those that they have really really figured
(25:21):
out how to do it in a great efficient way,
and it's so recyclable and it's very easy to recycle.
Yet only fifty percent of aluminum and it's just cans,
just the cans that people drink. Only fifty percent of
those still are recycled. So just we implore you. We
(25:41):
try not to get on the old high horse, but
if you're not going to recycle anything else, please just
recycle those cans. It's so easy and it really really
makes a big dip.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah. Again, it requires five percent of the carbon emissions
to recycle aluminum pound for pound then it does to
process it and create it initially five percent.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
It's not a scam. It's not just going to some
landfill like. They've really got aluminum recycling down pat so
you can feel good about throwing that can and the
recycling and knowing that some other jerk next to you
will be drinking from almost that same can.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
What two months later.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
You said, yeah, about six, six to eight weeks.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, it's just a wonderful thing. So recycle that aluminum.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
There's a very often cited stat that I think goes
all the way back to two thousand and one. I
couldn't find a more updated one. But we throw away
so many aluminum cans that we could rebuild the entire
US commercial air fleet every three months with that aluminum
just thrown away. And the other thing talking about is recyclability.
(26:47):
If you can just recycle aluminum over and over and
over again, eventually we have enough that we've mined and
processed that we don't have to mine and process it
anymore because it's all getting recycled. So we could stop
to that now, right, No.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Not.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
If we're we're only recycling fifty percent of our cans,
that means we have to we have to supplement the
recycled material with another fifty percent of new cans.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, but about seventy five percent of all aluminum ever
used is still being used.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Okay, yeah, that's true. So sure, I guess twenty.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
There's some missing math in there somewhere.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Well, that's so we're talking cans and then we're talking
all aluminum.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Well, yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yeah, apparently the building industry has a much higher recycling rate.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
That's right, it's good for them.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
You want it? Wow? Do you want to take another break? Yeah,
let's do it. Okay, Well here we are. Everybody taken
another break?
Speaker 3 (28:09):
All right?
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Everyone? Cans are great. We love those cans. But I love,
and I always have loved aluminum foil. I don't know
what it is about it. I think it's the I
think it's the fold ability of foil. I just love it.
I've had a roommate who used to make eat candy
(28:30):
and make little things out of gum wrappers, little little
swords and things and poke people, and I just, I
don't know. I've always loved aluminum foil. I even make
the mistakes sometimes still calling it tinfoil, even though I
don't think it was at all, even around when I
was a kid. Even I'm not picked it up for
my grandmother or something.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Probably, I mean, everybody calls it tinfoil still.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Even Adam Savage on his his Japanese fol oil ball
video called tinfoil yeah, which we'll talk about in a sec.
But in nineteen ten, there was a manufacturer, an aluminum manufacturer,
that said, all right, I can figure out how to
get this aluminum into these big rolled sheets, and we
can package candy in it, we can package tobacco in it,
(29:19):
And before you know it, in nineteen thirteen it hit
the US in the form of life savers, candy rolls,
and other kinds of candy bars. And then it didn't
take long before like the nineteen twenties, when it was
used as you know, the rolls of foil.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
That very useful.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
I still try to not use it because you know,
to you know, cutting, like reducing is the first thing
in reduce, reuse, recycle. So it's not like I'm just
like ripping tinfoil off all the time just to play
with it. But it is a very handy thing to
have in the house.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
If you toss that aluminum foil ball in the recycling,
it doesn't matter. You can play with it all day long.
Heck yeah, because it's infinitely recyclable. I don't know if
we said that or not yet.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
We've a bunch of times, but reducing is still better.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
Sure, that's why it's number one on the list.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
But it's so hard, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
To not play with illuminum boil.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Yeah, to reduce, Yeah, it is. So we can't not
talk about the tinfoil hat too, Like think about it.
No one ever says the aluminum foil hat. They say
foil or tinfoil. Apparently, the Vice magazine traced it back
to a nineteen twenty seven story by al Juics Huxley's
brother Julian. I can't remember what it's called, and I
(30:33):
knew it. It's a great name too. Sorry, everybody, but
he develops this form of mass control. The scientists the
main character, and he uses a cap of metal foil
to prevent that mind control being used on him. And
as far as Vice Magazine's concerned, that's where the whole
thing began.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
Who brother was this?
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Al Juis Huxley. The door is a perception guy.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
I think you added you did the josh Adavowl al Juis.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, I've always done that. I don't think I've ever
said his name other than al Juis Huxley.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Oh, I'm surprised you don't say aluminium because they've added
the valeve for you.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
I refuse to because I'm an American three and three.
I believe red, white and blue chuck.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
That's right, all right, So that happened in what nineteen
twenty seven?
Speaker 2 (31:18):
No, seriously, please call a doctor. My blood is white.
Sometimes it's no, it can't be helped.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
You're fine, You're fine. That was in nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
And then in World War Two there was a propaganda
broadcaster named William Joyce who talked about tinfoil hats protecting
against shrapnel.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
So that was another use.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Right, Yeah, that guy was a Nazi propagandist who was
trying to undermine the British morale. He was a real jerk.
They hung him named lord he ha ha.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
I always want to say lord he haw. Actually I
want to say lord he haw haw because I always
had an extra vowel. But the upshot of all this,
I don't even know if that applies in this case.
But how about to wrap up this section like a
piece of aluminum foil. If you've ever watched Better Call
Saul the original, I guess the first couple of seasons
(32:13):
is brother. What's his brother's name?
Speaker 3 (32:15):
I never seen the show.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Oh okay, Well, Michael McKeon plays his brother very well.
He's a big jerk, but he has an electro magnetic sensitivity,
which they explore in depth, and he wraps himself in
magnetic foil anytime he wants to get out of the house.
But an MIT study in two thousand and five found
that doing that would actually amplify electromagnetic frequencies rather than
(32:38):
prevent them from entering your body or head.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
No goods, then, yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Tim, foil hat does not work, everybody.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
I referenced the Japanese foil ball thing, and it's apparently
one of these internet challenges from like five years ago
that I had never heard of me either, so immediately
went and looked it up. And you know, it's basically
you take a big, you know, crinkly ball of foil
and you start hammering on it until you do it
(33:07):
so much that it ends up. You know, if you
just use the hammer, you can even get it down
to a pretty smoothish.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Aluminum ball.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
I did see others though, that you know, then they
would get out some grinders and some sandpaper and stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
That feels like cheating.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Well, I mean, it depends on what you want to
up with it. They could have stopped and just said,
all right here, this is like really cool. But then
when you like sand it down and use the grinder
and use like polish and stuff, you can literally take
it to the point where it's a very very shiny.
It looks like almost like a solid chrome steel ball,
and it's really cool and fun to see. And I
(33:46):
think I want to try to do it.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
I think you shouldn't. You should post it on Instagram.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Maybe, I mean, if I'm well, I'll post it either way.
I was going to say, if it's a success, but
it's even more fun if I screw it.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Up exactly totally. But that gets across how aluminum can
be decorative. So, like a lot of shiny paper or
shiny materials that are just shiny on one side, they're
coated in aluminum because they figured out a technique to
flash vaporize it in a vacuum and it goes whoop
and coats whatever happens to be in there with it.
That's the process they use it, flash vaporizing aluminum. You've
(34:18):
got to feel like some sort of god on Earth
when you're able to do that, when you press that button,
you know.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Yeah, it's used in all kinds of buildings, kind of
starting with in the nineteen thirties in New York City
with the Empire State Building. Use a lot of aluminum.
It is used a lot in car making. They use
about eighteen percent of all aluminum is used in automaking
(34:44):
these days. And then I mean what else, Like you
mentioned the decorative paper, it's in toys, it's in medicine.
It can be an acid if it's aluminum hydroxide.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah, most over the counter an acids are made to that.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Yeah, it's still used topically, just like they did back
in the old days for burns and wounds and stuff
like that, and it's still in makeup.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Yeah, and it plugs up your pors and your anti.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Persprint, yeah, which we just talked about in What History
of Hygiene? That's right and apparently and I always thought
that that was not good at all, but Lvia pointed
out in that podcast, and you know, we can talk
about it from here too, that it is it has
not been proven decidedly that aluminum is really really bad
(35:31):
for your body and the quantities that you would normally
have aluminum.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, there was a scare back in about twenty eleven
that the aluminum in your anti perseprint was going to
give you breast cancer, and apparently that was just made
up on the internet and studies don't actually support that.
The new one is that aluminum and I shouldn't say new,
because I think it kind of started in the sixties
and seventies that there was some sort of correlation between
(35:55):
the tau protein tangles and plaques that are associated with
Alzheimer's and aluminum consumption. Was it in like mice or
rats that they found this in I think I.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Think it was mice, but they were I think they're
like injecting mice, right, And they ended up saying like
humans are never going to come into contact with this
much aluminum just from you know, being on the Earth
and using aluminum. I think they have found that there's
like aluminum in the drinking water supply of your town,
(36:26):
which has happened and is a real problem. Then if
you have Alzheimer's, that can accelerate it. But I don't
think they have still linked it to like causing full
stop Alzheimer's.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
No, but they have identified it as a neurotoxin because
remember how it's super reactive. It does the same thing
with cells in your body, including your neurons, so it
can really mess your brain up, and it causes double
strand breaks, which messes up your DNA. So when that
cell divides into another one that new cells, DNA is
messed up too, hence tumors too. So there are problems.
(36:58):
That's aluminum, Like you said, it is in the water supply.
It's really in a lot of surprising places, and we
put those things in our body. Again, want to point
out before the twentieth century, this didn't happen. People weren't
like ingesting aluminum. It just didn't exist in that form
on Earth. Right, that's a new thing. But it does
(37:19):
seem that despite it not being used in any biological process,
despite it being very new, and so the human body
has not really encountered this and gotten used to it.
Our kidneys are supposedly very very efficient at flushing aluminum
right out of the body about as fast as it
comes in. Yeah, I mean, that's that's impressive.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
It is, And that's the that's where it stands right now.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
I don't think anyone has like closed the book and said, well,
we're just not going to study this anymore.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
Right, but right now that's where things stand.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
One problem with aluminum is that there have been instances
fairly recently about aluminum hoarding. In the early twenty tens,
the Go Goldman Sax Company, they bought a warehouse complex
outside of Detroit, Michigan, and they stored aluminum for producers
and for banks and for people who traded aluminum. And
(38:13):
they said, you know, at a certain point in the
years that followed, buyers are trying to get a hold
of aluminum, and all of a sudden, what used to
take you know, a month a month and a half
to get was taking a year or more to get
and it was a real problem, and there were people
like beer companies and soft drink companies were saying, what's
going on. This is costing us millions and billions of
dollars waiting on these aluminum delays. And Goldman Sacks was like, Hey,
(38:37):
you know, we don't have enough forklift drivers and trucks
and that's the problem. It's not us telling everyone to
hold on to that aluminum to make a false supply
issue so we can charge more for it. But the
New York Times came along and said, none, that's exactly
what's going on. You're just increasing profits by creating a
false supply.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yeah. What's interesting is the aluminum market. Aluminium as a
commodity is in like the supply is tracked so closely that,
you know, just little instances of hoarding like that, if
it happens like enough times, it can it can affect
like the price pretty easily. The supply can just stop.
People do that. When it's really cheap, they'll do what
(39:18):
Goldman Sex did, it just buy up supply and sit
on it until it goes up in price. Because in
part you're sitting on the supply and then you just
kind of slowly reintroduce it to the market so that
you don't drop that high price while you're still raking
in the dough by selling the aluminum you have. And
to be fair, Goldman Sex was far from the only
investment bank doing this running these kind of warehouses. But
(39:41):
this is the early twenty tens, fresh off of the
financial meltdown that Goldman Sex got bailed out for, so
everybody was they were just pointing out Goldman Sex alone.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Yeah, that's fair, I think. So that's as fair as
you get.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
It's called tit for tat, buddy.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
In this case.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Even just a couple of years ago, in twenty twenty one,
they found aluminum hoarding going on in Vietnam to the
tune of about up to five billion dollars worth of aluminum.
They said, this may be the largest aluminum horde that's
ever been And like you said, people are just you know,
doing the wrong thing. And the prices really fluctuated quickly.
(40:21):
I think there was a low of about fifteen hundred
dollars a ton during the pandemic shutdown, and then they
went to about thirty five hundred dollars a ton, just
a couple of years later.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Yeah, it's very big, very sensitive. The price is very sensitive.
China is a big producer now, and they've figured out
that when they throttle or dial back supply, they can
change the price pretty easily themselves too. So it's a
it's a strange market, especially if we stop mining it.
I want to know what's going to happen to the
price when we just say, okay, we have our aluminum
(40:55):
supply and now we're just circulating it throughout the economy, Like,
is that gonnke? Is that going to make it more
expensive less expensive? I'm curious what will happen to that.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Well, the cynical human in me thinks that they will
then find a way to maximize profits there by doing
something untoward.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Probably you don't have much faith and commodity traders, huh,
I know. So one other reason Chuck to make it
to this circular economic status for aluminum where we've mined
everything that we need and we're just reusing the stock
is because box site mining is really really bad for
the environment. Most mining is, but any kind of strip
(41:41):
mining is really bad because it just completely depletes the
land of everything it needs to keep itself going. Box
site also really pollutes water supplies to with other heavy metals.
And then also because it's so energy intensive, just the
box site mining produces three percent of the world's direct
(42:04):
CO two emissions. Just the mining, not startling, not processing
it into aluminum, just the mining alone does that.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Yeah, that's uh yeah, three percent. I mean three is
a small number, but we were talking about all of
the CO two emissions on planet Earth coming from one
single process.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
That's that's staggering.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Yeah, And so start looking around if you're like, just
ask yourself before you throw something, await, is this aluminum?
If the answers, yes, throw it in recycling, then yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
And you know, world War two there were kids turning
in their gum wrappers for the war effort to get
aluminum recycled, so.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
Be more like World War two kids.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Someone apparently suggested melting down the Washington Monument cap during
that time, but everybody just kind of didn't say anything
about it, just what.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
It did they really?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, somebody did.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
And people are like, how do you even know that?
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Right, that's a really arcane piece of trivia. Yeah, okay,
well that's it for aluminum everybody. And that means, of course,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
I'm gonna call this airplane etiquette. Did you read this
one yet?
Speaker 2 (43:15):
I don't think that I didn't.
Speaker 3 (43:17):
This is fresh offor presses.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
But I'm also gonna call it, am I the a
hole because this is sort of what this person is
asking a little bit with this airplane situation that this
gentleman was on recently, and it is asking for advice.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
And like, did I do the wrong thing?
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Oh boy?
Speaker 1 (43:32):
So I'm gonna read sort of a shorter version. But
needless to say, Frank is really into the show and
very thankful for it. So Frank and his wife were
on a comfort plus flight from our good friends at
Delta recently and they were in the you know, the
(43:52):
aisle seat in the middle seat.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
I believe Frank was on the aisle. He's tall. His
wife took the.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Middle seat and they were bored and seat belted when
a passenger assigned to the windows heat arrived.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
It's a courtesy.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
My wife and I turned our leg sideways so he
would have an easier time sliding past us. But he
said that he doesn't feel comfortable sliding past people like
that and asked us to get up and let him in.
I mentioned there was plenty of room for him to
slide past, since we were in comfort plus, but he
insisted we get up, so we unbuckled, We.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
Got up, and we let him in.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
When we were preparing to land, about ten minutes out,
the same passenger decided they needed to use the restroom.
He asked my wife and I to get up again
to slide out. I was watching a movie at the time,
so I had to pause the movie. Oh my God,
fold the arm that holds the screen back into the seat,
you know. Sometimes they come out of the arm there,
(44:44):
and then fold up my tray holding my drink into
the seat so he could get it out. I did this,
turn my leg sideway so we could slide out, and
this angered him, and he showed his displeasure by sliding
past us angrily and shaking his head in an exaggerated manner.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
So this is where we are so far.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
He returned from the restroom and then asked again if
we would get up this time and let him in.
I mentioned to him that he slid pats us getting
out quite easily, so can't you just do that sliding
back in? He said, no, I feel uncomfortable sliding past,
and he called the flight attendant to come over. And
the flight attendant arrived and was fairly puzzled. I think
(45:25):
he was. The flight attendant was confused as to what
was going on. I knew the situation was beginning to
stress my wife out, and quite frankly me as well.
Not wanting to cause any more stress issues because we
were landing, I relented, unbuckled and stood up again, and
my wife did the same. So before we get into this,
just may finish this last part, which is what bothers me,
(45:46):
is the h he kept saying he's not comfortable doing so.
He never said why he was uncomfortable, and that he
just insisted that people unbuckle and stand What about my comfort,
life's comfort. What if we weren't comfortable unbuckling and getting
up because you're supposed to remain seat belt at all
(46:06):
times in case of turbulence. But if my wife was
nine months pregnant, But if I was an eighty year
old man with bad knees, what if I had anxiety
about unbuckling? So the wife, I'm sorry. The flight attendant
never said anything. And my question to you guys is
what is the proper etiquette that did a lot of
internet searches couldn't find an answer. Passengers in his twenties.
(46:27):
My wife and I in her mid fifties. We were
in good shape, so it wouldn't a health issue. But
I thought this man was an entitled young man who's
never been told no in his life.
Speaker 3 (46:36):
All right, that's from Frank. So what do you say?
Speaker 2 (46:41):
I mean, Frank, I think yes, you were the a
hole in this in this instance, Oh for sure.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Well here's what I'll say.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Wait, wait, now I have to explain. I can't just
be like, sure, there you go, that's my ja.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
It sounded like you were, dude no, So.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Like the it seems like you were put out because
you're being asked to do something you didn't want to do.
It didn't have anything to do with your comfort level.
And the examples that you came up with for at
that man intruding on your comfort level were just made up,
Like you're not eighty, your wife isn't pregnant. You were
(47:17):
just annoyed. That guy sounded like he had like a
real thing about pushing past people's knees, maybe touching other
people physical contact. Sounds like he was not into that
at all. Some people are not into that to a
clinical degree, and I feel like, whoever's more put out,
(47:39):
you should just refer to them. It just makes things
so much more pleasant than saying no to somebody who's
asking you to do something for them that really is
no skin off of your.
Speaker 4 (47:48):
Back at all.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
So I don't think you are an a hole like necessarily,
but I think in this case, if there was an
a hole, it was it was you. Okay, okay, check,
now I'm done.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Well.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
I agree in that. My philosophy is two parts. One is,
you know, you're all on this plane together, everyone's crammed
in there, and it's just one of those social situations
where I think everyone should just do their best to
just work it all out and.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
Get along while you're done.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
In that short time that you're forced to be rammed
in there together, you know, like just help each other out.
It's just a lot easier, a lot less friction. No
one likes to be on those planes anyway. And then
the second part is I think there's an implicit thing
where if you're an aile seed person. I'm an ile
seed person, you know that you're gonna have to get
(48:43):
up and let people out, Like I like an aisle
seat at a concert and at a sports game, and
you're going to get up and down a lot and
let people in who have to use the bathroom or
get their beer or whatever. And it's the same on
a plane, Like, you know what you're getting into with
an aisle seat. That's if you want it. I love
the aisle seat, but you got a you know what's coming.
Otherwise you could sit by the window, and that's what
(49:05):
you do if you know, Like I'm just I'm going
to sleep. I know, I don't pee on airplanes. I
don't want to be bothered, so I'll just take that
window seat. So that's my thing, is you know what
you're getting into if you're in an aisle seat, you're
gonna have to get up. I think people should always
get up. It's just easier. I don't like sliding my
crutch or my butt past somebody's face what at all ever,
(49:26):
So like it's a reasonable thing I think to say,
you know, would you mind just standing up and letting
me in? And that's what I think.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, there was one another there was one other red
flag that I that caught my attention was when Frank
suggested that this guy was just an entitled young man
who no one had said no to in his life.
That sounds then that you were doing this out of hostility,
not just because you felt like you were being put out,
but because you wanted to be an obstacle in this
(49:57):
man's life, be the person who said no to him.
And again, that's just hostile, and I agree with you.
It flies in the face of just going along and
getting along while we're on this flight together so everybody
can get off and never see each other again.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
Yeah, and we weren't there, so kid may have been
very sarcastic and nodded and acted like sort of a jerk,
but he may have thought that you drew first blood. True,
you know. So that's where we stand. And Frank, you're
certainly not an ahole. You're sound like a sweet guy
who listens to the show and it means a lot
(50:29):
to you.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
So we're not we're not calling you out for that.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
But he literally wrote in and asked, but you did.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Ask, and that's our stances. Just get out, let the
guy out, live and let live. And if you see
that same twenty year old kid asking some old person
who has bad knees like, that's a different situation'suly different.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
We were responding strictly to the to the situation as
it was presented.
Speaker 3 (50:55):
Okay, yeah, all right, boy. We could have a whole
other show where we did this.
Speaker 2 (50:59):
We could think we would routinely get ourselves into trouble though.
Speaker 4 (51:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
Instead, listen to the Ultimate Judge, our friend Judge John.
Speaker 2 (51:07):
Hodgman on what the Max Fun Network?
Speaker 4 (51:11):
That's right?
Speaker 2 (51:11):
Nice, Well, since we shouted out the Max Fun Network
and I already ended the episode, and now listener mails
over if you want to be like Frank. Frank, by
the way, thank you for being brave and putting yourself
out there like that. If you want to put yourself
out there like that, you can give a shot. Maybe
we'll answer it, who knows. Either way. You can give
it a try by sending an email to Stuff podcast
(51:33):
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, we want to remind you we are wrapping
up our tour this year with three shows in Orlando, Florida,
and Nashville, Tennessee and Atlanta. Tickets are on sale now,
isn't that right?
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right? So go to link tree, slash sysk or
our website Stuff youshould know dot com for ticket links,
info and everything you need. We'll see you guys starting
in August.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's lurking around too, which makes this stuff
you should know. Uh, one of the first I think
the first, No, I think we've talked about iron before
the second in our ongoing saga to do an episode
on each element in the periodic table. Oh kill me,
(00:56):
it's like so much fun, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
No, this is a good one.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah, that's it for me. I'm done.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
We'll see about that. But we're talking today about aluminum,
which is pretty much ubiquitous. If you think about it,
you find aluminum everywhere. I don't even need to rattle
off where you find aluminum. You can figure that out yourself.
Because it's just that ubiquitous, right, agreed. So one of
the interesting things about it, though, Chuck, is that as
(01:23):
much as it's like entered into our world or become
like so enmessed with our world, it is a very
very new invention as far as elements go and discovery
and use. Yeah, I mean we've been using copper forever,
iron forever, a bronze even longer than iron. Remember, aluminum
we've been using essentially since the twentieth century.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Is this the aluminum age, Yes, it is an people
call it that, no, but I think we should start
calling it then.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I mean, bronze had an age, and if iron had
an age, stone had an age.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Yeahs a great idea, Chuck, the aluminum age. It's a
wonderful idea. It really gets the point across.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
It does.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
And you mentioned that it's ubiquitous in use these days
for sure, but it's also abundant. And as Libya Livia
pointed this out because she helped us out with this one,
she did a really good job on this one. I
think eight percent of the total mass of the Earth's
(02:26):
crust has aluminum in it. But it's not like from
the beginning we could just go down there and chop
out a bunch of aluminum with a screwdriver and a hammer,
because aluminum had a well, not a problem, it just
had a quality that it's it bonds very easily with
other elements, so that means it's reactive, so that means
(02:47):
it's in the crust. It is, you know, parts of
rock and parts of other things in combination with other
elements and minerals. And it wasn't just like, oh, look
there's aluminum, we can just go like, we had to
figure out how to extract usable aluminum from other things.
Mainly these days and back then something called box site.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, boux site is it's kind of like an umbrella
term for naturally occurring aluminum ores.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Basically, yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
But the problem with aluminum, like a lot of metals
and minerals like show up in nature's ores and we
can extract them. The difficulty is that aluminum is so
reactive it really really meshes with the other mineral or
the other rock or the other metal, and it's really
tough to get apart. Kind of like poor Wilfrid Brimley
(03:41):
in the thing. It's like that ameshed.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Oh man, I'm feeling better now.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
So you've got this box site and we know about it.
We know that there's something useful in it, but we
didn't know how to get it out. And for a
long time people had noticed like, oh, there's all sorts
of stuff you can do with this box site that
we'll call alum which is a kind of aluminum sulfate
made with potassium. People have been using that for about
(04:10):
seven eight thousand years.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Now, Yeah, all sorts of stuff like oh, of course,
the Egyptians they put all kinds of things in makeup,
as we've talked about before. Aluminum or that potassium aluminum
sulfate is one of them used often, and dyes used
for dressing wounds. I think you can also find aluminum
in clay. So yeah, for many thousands of years they
(04:34):
were using aluminum strengthened clay to make harder and stronger pottery.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, you can't break it. It's like an unbreakable comb.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Unbreakable what comb? Like a hair comb?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah, there's a I think it's a brand name even.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Oh really, I've never heard of it.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
It just invites you to break it, and it eventually
does break, by the way, but it's hard to break.
I got so yes, people were using it for a while.
And by the way, as an aside, there's a I
don't want to say famous, but there's a noteworthy artifact
that was discovered in the tomb of a general zoo
Chu who lived in China about seventeen hundred years ago.
(05:17):
And it's a belt and it's made of aluminum, and
it's what you would refer to as an out of
place artifact or oop art, which is something that kind
of bucks our understanding of history and time like that
should not exist because this was the third century CE,
and it.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Wasn't Lomo control in you know, the Old West or
something like that exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
That would be that would be a very significant out
of place artifact. This one's pretty significant, so much so
that they're like, we think this is an archaeological prank,
like a joke. Like somebody was like, this is really
going to blow their minds, and it did. But most
people are like, this is so inexplicable, there's no way
that it's real.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Oh that's awesome, yeah, but still an explicit Yes.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
That's one of the things that makes it awesome.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
But the upside of my whole point was we knew
that there was something useful in there, and as far
as the chemistry world goes, it's not enough to just
know it's there. They have to isolate it. They're just
fanatics about it. And they said that about doing that
in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
Right, Yeah, there was one chemist in particular name Antwin Lovoisier.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Yeah, very nice.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, obviously French, and he was like, hey, you know
this aluminum oxide or I think you were calling ilumina
at that point, you know, we can probably extract this
stuff wasn't able to. But not too long after an
eighteen and oh eight there was a British chemist name
Sir Humphrey Davy who and he actually named named it. Well,
(06:50):
we'll get to the naming thing in a second. It
goes through some stages. It was to him it was illuminium,
and then he wrote a book of elements elemental in
chemistry I'm sorry, Chemical Philosophy four years after that, and
at that point it was spelled aluminum. But then later on,
(07:11):
like four years later in the Quarterly Review, there were
a bunch of British chemists who were just like, I
don't like the ring of aluminum. It doesn't sound British enough,
so they went with aluminium with an extra eye, and
that was basically what people called it for a long time,
except for Americans who were like, you know what, we're
(07:32):
using both of these terms. We really like aluminum. It's
in the dictionary, It's in Webster's dictionary.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Is aluminum? Can we just settle this?
Speaker 1 (07:40):
And in nineteen twenty five, finally the American Chemical Society said, yes,
we were going to say it's aluminum. And so Americans
and Canadians are the only people who call it that's
for some reason.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah, everybody else calls it aluminium. Yeah, they stuck with it,
They really did. They really stuck with it for sure.
So that Humphrey Davy, going back to him, probably one
of the reasons he came up with different spellings was
because he was fresh off of his self experimentation with
nitrous oxide. He was the guy who called the O
excellent airbag, remember him. So he was the one who
(08:15):
said there is an elemental useful metal here in this
cruddy or and he described it before anyone had ever
even isolated it. But in the world of chemistry, you
wouldn't call Sir Humphrey Davy the discoverer of aluminum in chemistry,
to discover something, you have to have isolated it in
(08:36):
its pure form, and there was an early attempt to
do that. I think there was a guy named Hans
Christian Ursted who in eighteen twenty five came very close,
but he had an impure isolated aluminum, and then very
triumphantly Friedrich Vohler or Vuler i think, came up with
pure aluminum two years after that.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Yeah, it's the old chemistry tradition that in order to
be named the discoverer, you have to extract it and
then roll up in a ball and hit someone with it.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
That's right, that's the tradition.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
But it was really expensive to do so for the
first And it's kind of funny to think about now
because they've gotten so good at making aluminum. It's obviously
used in so many different things and it's fairly inexpensive,
but back then it was a luxury item. So aluminum
at first was known as the Medal of Kings, and
(09:34):
Napoleon loved it and he was like, just think of
what we could do with this stuff in the military.
Like it's fairly strong, it's very light, I think, you know,
the lightness was such a huge attractive quality for aluminum
still is. And he was like, we need this stuff,
and here I even want to eat off of it.
So make some cutlery for me, and I'll just keep
(09:57):
very select sets of this stuff for me and my
very special guests, and everyone else will just dine on
silver with silver spoons and will use this aluminum. And
they were just going crazy for illumina. It was very
kind of funny to look back at how it was
a luxury metal in its earliest days.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
It definitely was. And one reason why is because even
though Voler had come up with a method for extracting
pure aluminum, it was really labor intensive. It was really
hard to do, and you didn't get very much from it.
So that made it a very precious metal, especially when,
like you said, you had people like Napoleon the Third
(10:34):
bankrolling investigations into getting more and more aluminum.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
And one of the reasons why I did not know this,
but there's probably people out there who do that there
is an aluminum pyramid capping the Washington Monument that was
put It was installed when the monument was built in
eighteen eighty four. Finished is in part because America was
showing off. Yeah, in eighteen eighty four, it was sill,
(11:00):
a very luxurious good and they had the six pound
aluminum period pyramid placed on the top. And it was
so difficult still at that time to extract aluminum that
that represented one quarter of the annual production of all
the aluminum in the world that was produced that year,
that one six pound pyramid.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, it's pretty funny. Eight inches and six pounds, and
they like, get a load of this. Wait'll they see
this thing? Yes, it's like a bunch of beercans mashed
together exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
That's the funniest part. This is eighteen eighty four. They
paid like seventy five hundred bucks in today's money for it,
which seems kind of cheap to me. But two years later,
we got so good at extracting aluminum we came up
with another process, which we'll talk about in a second,
that that pyramid went from like hero to zero almost overnight.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, but it you know, it also served a purpose
because well everyone knows aluminum is very anti corrosive, so
that's a nice topper for a monument. And it also
served as a lightning rod, so it served a purpose.
But it was for sure a brag, but like you said,
it went kind of to a staple thing very quickly
(12:11):
once some very smart people got to work refining this process.
One was Charles Martin Hall, an Ohian. He's very so
HIGHO and I would say, Paul heral Hero, how would
you pronounce that Herald Herauld?
Speaker 2 (12:30):
I think you might actually say the T in that one.
I'm not sure he.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
H h E R O U L T.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Another Frenchman, they independently in eighteen eighty six, invented this
technique that they have now has been code named after
them as the Herald process, in which you dissolve aluminum
oxide and molten cryolite mineral pass the.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Current through there.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
We've talked about those kind of processes before and leave.
The Frenchman actually filed the patent about a month and
a half before Hall, but Hall proved that he had
come up with it previously, and so they worked it out.
They shared credit. They even ended up dying in the
same year. I guess they really wanted to share everything,
(13:17):
so they said let's just die together as well, and
they both passed away in nineteen fourteen, and that was
at the end of the process. Though I think someone
else came along and really refined it.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, and that was not only not the end, that
was just the beginning. That process is still in use today.
And then, like you said, a third guy, Karl Josef Behar,
would you say Yosef Oh?
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Probably? I think yeah, okay with Yoseph.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Carl Joseph Bear in nineteen eighty seven. The next year
came up with a way to get aluminum oxide, which
was the base form of aluminum that you start out
within the Hall Herald process. Somebody came along and figured
out a better way to get aluminum oxide from box side.
(14:05):
So in the span of a year, essentially we went
from aluminum being a precious metal to having an industrial
process in place that we still use today. That's incredible.
That's why we live in the aluminum age today. I
just think the timing of the whole thing is so amazing.
And I saw it explained in part because people were
(14:26):
so well aware that aluminum was light and strong and conductive.
Those are really desirable properties. They wanted this metal really bad,
so it was a real target in the chemistry world,
which explains why Hall and Herault both came up with
this same process independently. At the same time. But the
fact that you put that together with Bears Discovery, it
(14:48):
just all congealed all at once rather than over the
course of you know, decades and decades. Yeah, I just
find that very interesting.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, it's very cool.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
In fact, Hall in eighteen eighty eight helped out a
company that still around today. Back then it was called
the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, and now it's known as the
Aluminum Company of America ALCOA. I'm sure we have listeners,
plenty of listeners in Pittsburgh that work for alcoa very
big company. And the price of aluminum really went down.
(15:19):
So I mean, if you want something to go from
a luxury to like something that you crush against your
head from a beer, can you go from almost five
dollars a pound in eighteen eighty eight to seventy eight
cents in eighteen ninety three, and then all the way
down to about twenty cents a pound in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, So in today's prices, it's going from six hundred
and sixty five dollars a pound to five dollars and
forty five cents a pound in just a few decades.
That's how how radical and just world changing that process
was and is.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
All Right, I think that is a heck of an intro.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
All right, well, let's take an that break then, I say,
some podcasts might stop there, Yeah, but we're gonna keep going.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
All right, We'll be right back, all right.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
So one of the things, Chuck, that we talked about
was you've mentioned that you melt cryolite. I think it
melts at a thousand degrees celsius, and then you melt aluminum,
so the temperature has to be even hotter than that,
like really really hot, and then you pass a really
strong electrical current through that and to do all this
it's really really energy intensive, as we'll still is. Yeah.
(16:55):
So one of the other things that supported the boom
in aluminum was that the electrical grid and ways of
creating and generating and getting electricity from place to place
was also developing simultaneously in the United States as well.
That really helped a lot.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, big time.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
And in fact, a lot of aluminum plants early on
were built near dams. They were like, let's just you know, this,
really make this efficient instead of camp right next to
that dam over there, so you know, we should probably
go over some of the modern uses of aluminum. Aluminum is,
like we said, has so many great properties, but it
(17:34):
is fairly soft and weak in and of itself. I
mean it makes then we'll talk about foil and beer.
I can't stop talking about beer cans. And it's great
for that stuff. But if you want to use it
in you know, commercial settings, you can make commercial aluminum.
You just have to mix in a little iron, maybe
a little silicon, and it makes it much stronger. And
(17:55):
there are like all kinds of ways that you can alloy.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Is that a word?
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I think it works all right.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
You can alloify aluminum to do things like, you know,
build an airplane, and in fact that the right brothers.
You might be thinking that airplane was made of wood,
and it was, but the engine and I never knew
this was made of ninety two percent aluminum. Because they
needed horsepower. They needed a strong enough engine to get
(18:26):
that little wooden frame off the ground. But they couldn't
make it like out of like you would a car
enginecause it'd be way too heavy. So they needed to
be less than two hundred pounds produce that eight horses.
And German car makers were starting to use aluminum for
their engines and they said you're onto something. They ended
up using eight percent copper to the ninety two percent
(18:47):
aluminum and they got that thing off the ground.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah, they turned to their mechanic, Charlie Taylor, and it
needed to be no more than two hundred pounds and
produce eight horsepower. Like you said, he delivered one from
scratch that weigh one hundred and eighty pounds and produced
twelve horse power. So Charlie Taylor really came through. I know,
we talked about him in the Right Brothers episode we did.
Was that a two parter mm?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
I want to say it was, but I make a
lot of stuff up in my head.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
So, you know, come World War One, not too long after,
they were making full airplanes out of metal. Like aluminum
replaced wood very very quickly, because you had wood and
fabric airplanes obviously, you know, that was the best they
could do at the time, but aluminum is so much
stronger and you could go a lot faster and do
(19:38):
all kinds of things you couldn't do with wood and fabric. Yeah,
and there's even Lyvia found a gentleman at the National
Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian who was like, if
it wasn't for aluminum, we wouldn't have the planes in
spacecraft we have today.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Kind of period.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, and so that really gets across one of the
big prized things about aluminum. It's strong, but it's also light.
It's not quite as strong as steel, but it's much
lighter than steel, I think three times lighter, so its
strength to weight ratio is much better, which means that
it requires a lot less either horsepower in your your
twelve horse power engine or a lot less I guess
(20:15):
solid rocket fuel to get your rocket off of the
ground because you're using aluminum. So that's pretty great. There's
another quality of it that's allowed aluminum to really kind
of help us, as it's conductivity.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, if it was equally as conductive as copper, it
would have fully replaced copper at this point because of
how much easier aluminum is, you know, to get. But
it's about two third is as good as copper, which
is still great, very conductive, but it's a third is heavy,
which is great. That the problem there is you know
(20:51):
you're gonna need aluminum wire. It's about one and a
half times the diameter of copper if you want it
to perform the same.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
So it is, but that's a lot bigger, so they couldn't.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
They tried to for a little while, but they couldn't
just like go in and replace copper and households and
stuff because the wiring is too big. They do use
it for overhead and underground transmission because you reinforce it
with steel and it can be bigger in diameter. It's
not that big of a deal, but I think in
the sixties and seventies they were trying it in houses
(21:23):
because copper was really expensive. I think it worked well,
but the connections ended up where you connect it together
ended up being a fire hazard, so they did away
with that.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah, what happens is in where the wiring goes into
like your outlet, your socket right in the back. The
aluminum expands and contracts much more than copper does, so
it loosens over time, and when it gets loose enough,
it'll arc. And an electrical arc is way worse than
just an electrical current because the electricity encounters gas the
(21:55):
atmosphere and it shoots up to like thirty five thousand
degrees farent height and causes fires. So if you have
you buy a house with aluminum wiring, like from the
sixties or seventies. Your insurance company is probably going to
be like, if you want insurance on this house, you're
going to have to totally rewire it.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
And now we can talk about beer cans finally, because
that is what started to happen all the way back
in the late nineteen fifties. You know, the old cans
were made of usually ten sometimes steel, and there was
a very forward thinking company in Hawaii called the Hawaii
Brewing Company, and they tried it out on their Primo
beer and they said, shipping this stuff is a lot better,
(22:34):
it's a lot cheaper.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
We can ship it.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
To the mainland, no problem. But the can linings that
they were using at the time, there was a chemical
reaction going on between the beer and the can. It
ruined the beer, bankrupted the company. But it did not
die there because Cores was right on their heels. They
were already working on the same thing, and they perfected
it just a year later in nineteen fifty nine and
(22:59):
basically said the same thing is like, this is a
lot cheaper, it's easier to and you know, lighter obviously
than glass bottles. It actually helps the beer deprive the
beer of light and oxygen better than bottles, and cores
started the whole thing as far as beer goes, followed
very quickly by Arci Cola on the soft drink side,
(23:20):
and then it was aluminum can City as far as
soft drinks and canned anything goes, basically. But if you
remember when like we were kids, those same aluminum cans
just were felt heavier and thicker. It's because they were.
They've they've refined the process and made it much thinner
over the years. But those old cans, because I was like,
(23:41):
were those ten They weren't. They were aluminum. They were
just a lot heavier back then.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Right. So today aluminum cans are so useful that twenty
percent of the entire global supply goes to making aluminum cans,
which is pretty amazing. And the other thing about it
is it's high recyclable. As we'll see, it has what's
called infinite recyclability, like it doesn't degrade in the recycling process,
(24:08):
and it requires way less energy, time and money to
recycle aluminum cans. So much so that I read that
the can of say like coke or beer or whatever
you're drinking was probably in the exact same form in
a different life sixty days before. Each can has about
(24:29):
a sixty day life cycle from sale to use, to
recycling to reprocessing to repackaging to going back on the
store shelf. Again. Isn't that amazing? But it's not like
they just wash out the same can. It's completely disintegrated,
so it's not the exact same can, but it was
in some way that same can before. It's like that
ship we talked about, and does your body replace itself
(24:51):
if you slowly replace each part of the ship, when
you replace everything, is it's still the same ship? Same
question applies to aluminum cans. It turns out.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, I mean, we might as well finish up on
recycling and just say that we've tried to beat the
recycling drum over the years, and we know that there
are some problems with the recycling process for a lot
of stuff. I know glass is particularly problematic, but aluminum
is one of those that they have really really figured
(25:21):
out how to do it in a great efficient way,
and it's so recyclable and it's very easy to recycle.
Yet only fifty percent of aluminum and it's just cans,
just the cans that people drink. Only fifty percent of
those still are recycled. So just we implore you. We
(25:41):
try not to get on the old high horse, but
if you're not going to recycle anything else, please just
recycle those cans. It's so easy and it really really
makes a big dip.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah. Again, it requires five percent of the carbon emissions
to recycle aluminum pound for pound then it does to
process it and create it initially five percent.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
It's not a scam. It's not just going to some
landfill like. They've really got aluminum recycling down pat so
you can feel good about throwing that can and the
recycling and knowing that some other jerk next to you
will be drinking from almost that same can.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
What two months later.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
You said, yeah, about six, six to eight weeks.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, it's just a wonderful thing. So recycle that aluminum.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
There's a very often cited stat that I think goes
all the way back to two thousand and one. I
couldn't find a more updated one. But we throw away
so many aluminum cans that we could rebuild the entire
US commercial air fleet every three months with that aluminum
just thrown away. And the other thing talking about is recyclability.
(26:47):
If you can just recycle aluminum over and over and
over again, eventually we have enough that we've mined and
processed that we don't have to mine and process it
anymore because it's all getting recycled. So we could stop
to that now, right, No.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Not.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
If we're we're only recycling fifty percent of our cans,
that means we have to we have to supplement the
recycled material with another fifty percent of new cans.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, but about seventy five percent of all aluminum ever
used is still being used.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Okay, yeah, that's true. So sure, I guess twenty.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
There's some missing math in there somewhere.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Well, that's so we're talking cans and then we're talking
all aluminum.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Well, yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yeah, apparently the building industry has a much higher recycling rate.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
That's right, it's good for them.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
You want it? Wow? Do you want to take another break? Yeah,
let's do it. Okay, Well here we are. Everybody taken
another break?
Speaker 3 (28:09):
All right?
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Everyone? Cans are great. We love those cans. But I love,
and I always have loved aluminum foil. I don't know
what it is about it. I think it's the I
think it's the fold ability of foil. I just love it.
I've had a roommate who used to make eat candy
(28:30):
and make little things out of gum wrappers, little little
swords and things and poke people, and I just, I
don't know. I've always loved aluminum foil. I even make
the mistakes sometimes still calling it tinfoil, even though I
don't think it was at all, even around when I
was a kid. Even I'm not picked it up for
my grandmother or something.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Probably, I mean, everybody calls it tinfoil still.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Even Adam Savage on his his Japanese fol oil ball
video called tinfoil yeah, which we'll talk about in a sec.
But in nineteen ten, there was a manufacturer, an aluminum manufacturer,
that said, all right, I can figure out how to
get this aluminum into these big rolled sheets, and we
can package candy in it, we can package tobacco in it,
(29:19):
And before you know it, in nineteen thirteen it hit
the US in the form of life savers, candy rolls,
and other kinds of candy bars. And then it didn't
take long before like the nineteen twenties, when it was
used as you know, the rolls of foil.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
That very useful.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
I still try to not use it because you know,
to you know, cutting, like reducing is the first thing
in reduce, reuse, recycle. So it's not like I'm just
like ripping tinfoil off all the time just to play
with it. But it is a very handy thing to
have in the house.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
If you toss that aluminum foil ball in the recycling,
it doesn't matter. You can play with it all day long.
Heck yeah, because it's infinitely recyclable. I don't know if
we said that or not yet.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
We've a bunch of times, but reducing is still better.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
Sure, that's why it's number one on the list.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
But it's so hard, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
To not play with illuminum boil.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Yeah, to reduce, Yeah, it is. So we can't not
talk about the tinfoil hat too, Like think about it.
No one ever says the aluminum foil hat. They say
foil or tinfoil. Apparently, the Vice magazine traced it back
to a nineteen twenty seven story by al Juics Huxley's
brother Julian. I can't remember what it's called, and I
(30:33):
knew it. It's a great name too. Sorry, everybody, but
he develops this form of mass control. The scientists the
main character, and he uses a cap of metal foil
to prevent that mind control being used on him. And
as far as Vice Magazine's concerned, that's where the whole
thing began.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
Who brother was this?
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Al Juis Huxley. The door is a perception guy.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
I think you added you did the josh Adavowl al Juis.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, I've always done that. I don't think I've ever
said his name other than al Juis Huxley.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
Oh, I'm surprised you don't say aluminium because they've added
the valeve for you.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
I refuse to because I'm an American three and three.
I believe red, white and blue chuck.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
That's right, all right, So that happened in what nineteen
twenty seven?
Speaker 2 (31:18):
No, seriously, please call a doctor. My blood is white.
Sometimes it's no, it can't be helped.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
You're fine, You're fine. That was in nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
And then in World War Two there was a propaganda
broadcaster named William Joyce who talked about tinfoil hats protecting
against shrapnel.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
So that was another use.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Right, Yeah, that guy was a Nazi propagandist who was
trying to undermine the British morale. He was a real jerk.
They hung him named lord he ha ha.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
I always want to say lord he haw. Actually I
want to say lord he haw haw because I always
had an extra vowel. But the upshot of all this,
I don't even know if that applies in this case.
But how about to wrap up this section like a
piece of aluminum foil. If you've ever watched Better Call
Saul the original, I guess the first couple of seasons
(32:13):
is brother. What's his brother's name?
Speaker 3 (32:15):
I never seen the show.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Oh okay, Well, Michael McKeon plays his brother very well.
He's a big jerk, but he has an electro magnetic sensitivity,
which they explore in depth, and he wraps himself in
magnetic foil anytime he wants to get out of the house.
But an MIT study in two thousand and five found
that doing that would actually amplify electromagnetic frequencies rather than
(32:38):
prevent them from entering your body or head.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
No goods, then, yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Tim, foil hat does not work, everybody.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
I referenced the Japanese foil ball thing, and it's apparently
one of these internet challenges from like five years ago
that I had never heard of me either, so immediately
went and looked it up. And you know, it's basically
you take a big, you know, crinkly ball of foil
and you start hammering on it until you do it
(33:07):
so much that it ends up. You know, if you
just use the hammer, you can even get it down
to a pretty smoothish.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Aluminum ball.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
I did see others though, that you know, then they
would get out some grinders and some sandpaper and stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
That feels like cheating.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Well, I mean, it depends on what you want to
up with it. They could have stopped and just said,
all right here, this is like really cool. But then
when you like sand it down and use the grinder
and use like polish and stuff, you can literally take
it to the point where it's a very very shiny.
It looks like almost like a solid chrome steel ball,
and it's really cool and fun to see. And I
(33:46):
think I want to try to do it.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
I think you shouldn't. You should post it on Instagram.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Maybe, I mean, if I'm well, I'll post it either way.
I was going to say, if it's a success, but
it's even more fun if I screw it.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Up exactly totally. But that gets across how aluminum can
be decorative. So, like a lot of shiny paper or
shiny materials that are just shiny on one side, they're
coated in aluminum because they figured out a technique to
flash vaporize it in a vacuum and it goes whoop
and coats whatever happens to be in there with it.
That's the process they use it, flash vaporizing aluminum. You've
(34:18):
got to feel like some sort of god on Earth
when you're able to do that, when you press that button,
you know.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Yeah, it's used in all kinds of buildings, kind of
starting with in the nineteen thirties in New York City
with the Empire State Building. Use a lot of aluminum.
It is used a lot in car making. They use
about eighteen percent of all aluminum is used in automaking
(34:44):
these days. And then I mean what else, Like you
mentioned the decorative paper, it's in toys, it's in medicine.
It can be an acid if it's aluminum hydroxide.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah, most over the counter an acids are made to that.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Yeah, it's still used topically, just like they did back
in the old days for burns and wounds and stuff
like that, and it's still in makeup.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Yeah, and it plugs up your pors and your anti.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Persprint, yeah, which we just talked about in What History
of Hygiene? That's right and apparently and I always thought
that that was not good at all, but Lvia pointed
out in that podcast, and you know, we can talk
about it from here too, that it is it has
not been proven decidedly that aluminum is really really bad
(35:31):
for your body and the quantities that you would normally
have aluminum.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, there was a scare back in about twenty eleven
that the aluminum in your anti perseprint was going to
give you breast cancer, and apparently that was just made
up on the internet and studies don't actually support that.
The new one is that aluminum and I shouldn't say new,
because I think it kind of started in the sixties
and seventies that there was some sort of correlation between
(35:55):
the tau protein tangles and plaques that are associated with
Alzheimer's and aluminum consumption. Was it in like mice or
rats that they found this in I think I.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Think it was mice, but they were I think they're
like injecting mice, right, And they ended up saying like
humans are never going to come into contact with this
much aluminum just from you know, being on the Earth
and using aluminum. I think they have found that there's
like aluminum in the drinking water supply of your town,
(36:26):
which has happened and is a real problem. Then if
you have Alzheimer's, that can accelerate it. But I don't
think they have still linked it to like causing full
stop Alzheimer's.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
No, but they have identified it as a neurotoxin because
remember how it's super reactive. It does the same thing
with cells in your body, including your neurons, so it
can really mess your brain up, and it causes double
strand breaks, which messes up your DNA. So when that
cell divides into another one that new cells, DNA is
messed up too, hence tumors too. So there are problems.
(36:58):
That's aluminum, Like you said, it is in the water supply.
It's really in a lot of surprising places, and we
put those things in our body. Again, want to point
out before the twentieth century, this didn't happen. People weren't
like ingesting aluminum. It just didn't exist in that form
on Earth. Right, that's a new thing. But it does
(37:19):
seem that despite it not being used in any biological process,
despite it being very new, and so the human body
has not really encountered this and gotten used to it.
Our kidneys are supposedly very very efficient at flushing aluminum
right out of the body about as fast as it
comes in. Yeah, I mean, that's that's impressive.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
It is, And that's the that's where it stands right now.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
I don't think anyone has like closed the book and said, well,
we're just not going to study this anymore.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
Right, but right now that's where things stand.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
One problem with aluminum is that there have been instances
fairly recently about aluminum hoarding. In the early twenty tens,
the Go Goldman Sax Company, they bought a warehouse complex
outside of Detroit, Michigan, and they stored aluminum for producers
and for banks and for people who traded aluminum. And
(38:13):
they said, you know, at a certain point in the
years that followed, buyers are trying to get a hold
of aluminum, and all of a sudden, what used to
take you know, a month a month and a half
to get was taking a year or more to get
and it was a real problem, and there were people
like beer companies and soft drink companies were saying, what's
going on. This is costing us millions and billions of
dollars waiting on these aluminum delays. And Goldman Sacks was like, Hey,
(38:37):
you know, we don't have enough forklift drivers and trucks
and that's the problem. It's not us telling everyone to
hold on to that aluminum to make a false supply
issue so we can charge more for it. But the
New York Times came along and said, none, that's exactly
what's going on. You're just increasing profits by creating a
false supply.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yeah. What's interesting is the aluminum market. Aluminium as a
commodity is in like the supply is tracked so closely that,
you know, just little instances of hoarding like that, if
it happens like enough times, it can it can affect
like the price pretty easily. The supply can just stop.
People do that. When it's really cheap, they'll do what
(39:18):
Goldman Sex did, it just buy up supply and sit
on it until it goes up in price. Because in
part you're sitting on the supply and then you just
kind of slowly reintroduce it to the market so that
you don't drop that high price while you're still raking
in the dough by selling the aluminum you have. And
to be fair, Goldman Sex was far from the only
investment bank doing this running these kind of warehouses. But
(39:41):
this is the early twenty tens, fresh off of the
financial meltdown that Goldman Sex got bailed out for, so
everybody was they were just pointing out Goldman Sex alone.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Yeah, that's fair, I think. So that's as fair as
you get.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
It's called tit for tat, buddy.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
In this case.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Even just a couple of years ago, in twenty twenty one,
they found aluminum hoarding going on in Vietnam to the
tune of about up to five billion dollars worth of aluminum.
They said, this may be the largest aluminum horde that's
ever been And like you said, people are just you know,
doing the wrong thing. And the prices really fluctuated quickly.
(40:21):
I think there was a low of about fifteen hundred
dollars a ton during the pandemic shutdown, and then they
went to about thirty five hundred dollars a ton, just
a couple of years later.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Yeah, it's very big, very sensitive. The price is very sensitive.
China is a big producer now, and they've figured out
that when they throttle or dial back supply, they can
change the price pretty easily themselves too. So it's a
it's a strange market, especially if we stop mining it.
I want to know what's going to happen to the
price when we just say, okay, we have our aluminum
(40:55):
supply and now we're just circulating it throughout the economy, Like,
is that gonnke? Is that going to make it more
expensive less expensive? I'm curious what will happen to that.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Well, the cynical human in me thinks that they will
then find a way to maximize profits there by doing
something untoward.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Probably you don't have much faith and commodity traders, huh,
I know. So one other reason Chuck to make it
to this circular economic status for aluminum where we've mined
everything that we need and we're just reusing the stock
is because box site mining is really really bad for
the environment. Most mining is, but any kind of strip
(41:41):
mining is really bad because it just completely depletes the
land of everything it needs to keep itself going. Box
site also really pollutes water supplies to with other heavy metals.
And then also because it's so energy intensive, just the
box site mining produces three percent of the world's direct
(42:04):
CO two emissions. Just the mining, not startling, not processing
it into aluminum, just the mining alone does that.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Yeah, that's uh yeah, three percent. I mean three is
a small number, but we were talking about all of
the CO two emissions on planet Earth coming from one
single process.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
That's that's staggering.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Yeah, And so start looking around if you're like, just
ask yourself before you throw something, await, is this aluminum?
If the answers, yes, throw it in recycling, then yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
And you know, world War two there were kids turning
in their gum wrappers for the war effort to get
aluminum recycled, so.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
Be more like World War two kids.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Someone apparently suggested melting down the Washington Monument cap during
that time, but everybody just kind of didn't say anything
about it, just what.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
It did they really?
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, somebody did.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
And people are like, how do you even know that?
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Right, that's a really arcane piece of trivia. Yeah, okay,
well that's it for aluminum everybody. And that means, of course,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
I'm gonna call this airplane etiquette. Did you read this
one yet?
Speaker 2 (43:15):
I don't think that I didn't.
Speaker 3 (43:17):
This is fresh offor presses.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
But I'm also gonna call it, am I the a
hole because this is sort of what this person is
asking a little bit with this airplane situation that this
gentleman was on recently, and it is asking for advice.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
And like, did I do the wrong thing?
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Oh boy?
Speaker 1 (43:32):
So I'm gonna read sort of a shorter version. But
needless to say, Frank is really into the show and
very thankful for it. So Frank and his wife were
on a comfort plus flight from our good friends at
Delta recently and they were in the you know, the
(43:52):
aisle seat in the middle seat.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
I believe Frank was on the aisle. He's tall. His
wife took the.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Middle seat and they were bored and seat belted when
a passenger assigned to the windows heat arrived.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
It's a courtesy.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
My wife and I turned our leg sideways so he
would have an easier time sliding past us. But he
said that he doesn't feel comfortable sliding past people like
that and asked us to get up and let him in.
I mentioned there was plenty of room for him to
slide past, since we were in comfort plus, but he
insisted we get up, so we unbuckled, We.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
Got up, and we let him in.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
When we were preparing to land, about ten minutes out,
the same passenger decided they needed to use the restroom.
He asked my wife and I to get up again
to slide out. I was watching a movie at the time,
so I had to pause the movie. Oh my God,
fold the arm that holds the screen back into the seat,
you know. Sometimes they come out of the arm there,
(44:44):
and then fold up my tray holding my drink into
the seat so he could get it out. I did this,
turn my leg sideway so we could slide out, and
this angered him, and he showed his displeasure by sliding
past us angrily and shaking his head in an exaggerated manner.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
So this is where we are so far.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
He returned from the restroom and then asked again if
we would get up this time and let him in.
I mentioned to him that he slid pats us getting
out quite easily, so can't you just do that sliding
back in? He said, no, I feel uncomfortable sliding past,
and he called the flight attendant to come over. And
the flight attendant arrived and was fairly puzzled. I think
(45:25):
he was. The flight attendant was confused as to what
was going on. I knew the situation was beginning to
stress my wife out, and quite frankly me as well.
Not wanting to cause any more stress issues because we
were landing, I relented, unbuckled and stood up again, and
my wife did the same. So before we get into this,
just may finish this last part, which is what bothers me,
(45:46):
is the h he kept saying he's not comfortable doing so.
He never said why he was uncomfortable, and that he
just insisted that people unbuckle and stand What about my comfort,
life's comfort. What if we weren't comfortable unbuckling and getting
up because you're supposed to remain seat belt at all
(46:06):
times in case of turbulence. But if my wife was
nine months pregnant, But if I was an eighty year
old man with bad knees, what if I had anxiety
about unbuckling? So the wife, I'm sorry. The flight attendant
never said anything. And my question to you guys is
what is the proper etiquette that did a lot of
internet searches couldn't find an answer. Passengers in his twenties.
(46:27):
My wife and I in her mid fifties. We were
in good shape, so it wouldn't a health issue. But
I thought this man was an entitled young man who's
never been told no in his life.
Speaker 3 (46:36):
All right, that's from Frank. So what do you say?
Speaker 2 (46:41):
I mean, Frank, I think yes, you were the a
hole in this in this instance, Oh for sure.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Well here's what I'll say.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Wait, wait, now I have to explain. I can't just
be like, sure, there you go, that's my ja.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
It sounded like you were, dude no, So.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Like the it seems like you were put out because
you're being asked to do something you didn't want to do.
It didn't have anything to do with your comfort level.
And the examples that you came up with for at
that man intruding on your comfort level were just made up,
Like you're not eighty, your wife isn't pregnant. You were
(47:17):
just annoyed. That guy sounded like he had like a
real thing about pushing past people's knees, maybe touching other
people physical contact. Sounds like he was not into that
at all. Some people are not into that to a
clinical degree, and I feel like, whoever's more put out,
(47:39):
you should just refer to them. It just makes things
so much more pleasant than saying no to somebody who's
asking you to do something for them that really is
no skin off of your.
Speaker 4 (47:48):
Back at all.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
So I don't think you are an a hole like necessarily,
but I think in this case, if there was an
a hole, it was it was you. Okay, okay, check,
now I'm done.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Well.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
I agree in that. My philosophy is two parts. One is,
you know, you're all on this plane together, everyone's crammed
in there, and it's just one of those social situations
where I think everyone should just do their best to
just work it all out and.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
Get along while you're done.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
In that short time that you're forced to be rammed
in there together, you know, like just help each other out.
It's just a lot easier, a lot less friction. No
one likes to be on those planes anyway. And then
the second part is I think there's an implicit thing
where if you're an aile seed person. I'm an ile
seed person, you know that you're gonna have to get
(48:43):
up and let people out, Like I like an aisle
seat at a concert and at a sports game, and
you're going to get up and down a lot and
let people in who have to use the bathroom or
get their beer or whatever. And it's the same on
a plane, Like, you know what you're getting into with
an aisle seat. That's if you want it. I love
the aisle seat, but you got a you know what's coming.
Otherwise you could sit by the window, and that's what
(49:05):
you do if you know, Like I'm just I'm going
to sleep. I know, I don't pee on airplanes. I
don't want to be bothered, so I'll just take that
window seat. So that's my thing, is you know what
you're getting into if you're in an aisle seat, you're
gonna have to get up. I think people should always
get up. It's just easier. I don't like sliding my
crutch or my butt past somebody's face what at all ever,
(49:26):
So like it's a reasonable thing I think to say,
you know, would you mind just standing up and letting
me in? And that's what I think.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, there was one another there was one other red
flag that I that caught my attention was when Frank
suggested that this guy was just an entitled young man
who no one had said no to in his life.
That sounds then that you were doing this out of hostility,
not just because you felt like you were being put out,
but because you wanted to be an obstacle in this
(49:57):
man's life, be the person who said no to him.
And again, that's just hostile, and I agree with you.
It flies in the face of just going along and
getting along while we're on this flight together so everybody
can get off and never see each other again.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
Yeah, and we weren't there, so kid may have been
very sarcastic and nodded and acted like sort of a jerk,
but he may have thought that you drew first blood. True,
you know. So that's where we stand. And Frank, you're
certainly not an ahole. You're sound like a sweet guy
who listens to the show and it means a lot
(50:29):
to you.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
So we're not we're not calling you out for that.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
But he literally wrote in and asked, but you did.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Ask, and that's our stances. Just get out, let the
guy out, live and let live. And if you see
that same twenty year old kid asking some old person
who has bad knees like, that's a different situation'suly different.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
We were responding strictly to the to the situation as
it was presented.
Speaker 3 (50:55):
Okay, yeah, all right, boy. We could have a whole
other show where we did this.
Speaker 2 (50:59):
We could think we would routinely get ourselves into trouble though.
Speaker 4 (51:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
Instead, listen to the Ultimate Judge, our friend Judge John.
Speaker 2 (51:07):
Hodgman on what the Max Fun Network?
Speaker 4 (51:11):
That's right?
Speaker 2 (51:11):
Nice, Well, since we shouted out the Max Fun Network
and I already ended the episode, and now listener mails
over if you want to be like Frank. Frank, by
the way, thank you for being brave and putting yourself
out there like that. If you want to put yourself
out there like that, you can give a shot. Maybe
we'll answer it, who knows. Either way. You can give
it a try by sending an email to Stuff podcast
(51:33):
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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