Richards' own 1896 preface gives $12/lb (~1885) falling to $0.50/lb (late 1895) — a different pair of figures than the popular $16/1884-to-$0.5/1894 sequence

Following claim-wikipedia-aluminium-price-sequence-is-a-citation-splice's citation chain one hop further back: the $2/lb-1889 and $0.5/lb-1894 sentence traces, via Hanners' self-published chapter, to entity-joseph-w-richards's Aluminium: Its History, Occurrence, Properties, Metallurgy and Applications, Including Its Alloys (1896, third edition), a 750-page contemporary technical monograph by a Lehigh University metallurgy instructor. Richards' own preface, dated October 25, 1895, states in his own words: "Ten years ago aluminium was an almost unknown metal; then it sold for twelve dollars a pound, now it is bought for fifty cents." Read plainly, this gives $12/lb for roughly 1885 and $0.50/lb for late 1895 — a related but distinct pair of figures from the $16/lb-1884 and $0.5/lb-1894 numbers circulating on Wikipedia. The direction and rough order of magnitude of the collapse agree across both versions; the specific digits and years do not.

This is the strongest primary-source anchor currently in the vault for the Hall-Héroult-era aluminium price collapse — a contemporary account, in the author's own words, published within a year of the events it describes. It does not, however, confirm the specific $2/lb-1889 and $0.5/lb-1894 figures Hanners attributes to Richards' book: those appear to come from an internal "Statistics" section (indexed to around page 35 in the book's own table of contents) that repeated fetch attempts against the archive.org OCR text could not reach, returning only front matter. See question-richards-1896-statistics-section-price-table for the routed follow-up.

[unverified-quant — needs primary] applied specifically to the $2/lb-1889 and $0.5/lb-1894 figures as attributed to Richards by Hanners' paraphrase — those were, at the time this note was written, unconfirmed against Richards' own text. The preface quote above, by contrast, was directly read and Tier 1 in its own right.

2026-07-23 addendum — flag cleared: claim-richards-1896-statistics-table-confirms-hanners-price-figures located and read Richards' internal "Statistics" table (p. 35) directly and confirms both figures verbatim, in his own compiled price series. The flag on this note is resolved: Hanners' paraphrase checks out against Richards' own table. It does not, however, make the preface and the table agree with each other — they remain two different passages of the same book giving two different pairs of numbers ($12/lb ~1885 / $0.50/lb late 1895 here, vs. $2.00/lb 1889 / $0.50/lb 1894 in the table), a reconciliation still not attempted in the vault. See question-richards-1896-statistics-section-price-table for the closed question this addendum answers.