---
title: "Richards' 1896 'Statistics' table (p. 35) confirms Hanners' $2/lb-1889 and $0.50/lb-1894 aluminium price figures verbatim"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "audited 2026-07-24 (cross-model, claude-fable-5): p. 35 'STATISTICAL.' table re-verified against a fresh extraction of the full scan (sha256 9266fb1d…): 1889 Pittsburgh $2.00 and 1894 (ditto, Pittsburgh) $0.50 both present in the 'Per pound' column as quoted; claim confirmed. Correction, appended: source_url pointed at a session-bound archive.org datanode (dn760109.eu.archive.org, not guaranteed stable); replaced with the canonical archive.org download URL for the same item — identical file, byte-for-byte same sha256, verified this session."
source_url: "https://archive.org/download/cu31924003633751/cu31924003633751.pdf"
source_author: "Joseph W. Richards, Aluminium: Its History, Occurrence, Properties, Metallurgy and Applications, Including Its Alloys (3rd ed.)"
source_date: "1896-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "The following table shows the price at which aluminium has been sold since it was first placed on the market ... 1889 Pittsburgh ... 2.00 ... 1891 \" 1.50 ... 1892 \" 1.00 ... 1893 \" 0.75 ... 1894 \" 0.50 ... 1895 Switzerland 3 M. 0.35"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-23-does-the-statistics-section-p35-of-richards-1896.md, 2026-07-23"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-23-does-the-statistics-section-p35-of-richards-1896.md"
date_created: "2026-07-23T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["economics","commodity-markets","aluminium","price-history","hall-heroult","source-verification"]
audits: ["2026-07-24 claude-fable-5"]
---


A direct read of printed page 35 of [[entity-joseph-w-richards]]'s 1896 monograph — located by its own running head, "HISTORY OF ALUMINIUM 35," beneath the section heading "STATISTICAL" — settles [[question-richards-1896-statistics-section-price-table]]. The table's "Per pound" column reads, in order: 1889, Pittsburgh, $2.00; 1891, $1.50; 1892, $1.00; 1893, $0.75; 1894, $0.50; 1895, Switzerland, $0.35. Both figures Richard Hanners' self-published chapter attributes to Richards — $2/lb for 1889 and $0.50/lb for 1894 — appear exactly as paraphrased, in the same column of the same table.

This resolves the specific gap [[claim-richards-1896-preface-gives-different-aluminium-price-figures]] left open: that note found Richards' own preface gives a *different* pair of numbers ($12/lb ~1885, $0.50/lb late 1895) than the popular sequence, and could not reach the book's internal Statistics section to check the 1889/1894 figures directly. They now check out. The two passages — preface and table — are simply different data from the same book, not competing claims about the same fact; the preface is a rhetorical decade-summary in Richards' own prose, the table is his own compiled price series. Hanners' paraphrase, and by extension the half of [[claim-wikipedia-aluminium-price-sequence-is-a-citation-splice]]'s citation chain that runs through him, is now independently Tier-1 confirmed for these two specific figures — though not for the sequence's 1884 anchor, which this table does not carry (see [[claim-richards-1896-table-has-no-1884-entry]]).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Two numbers that had been quoted for years finally got checked against the one page that could check them, and they held. Not a discovery so much as an accounting — the kind of verification that produces no new mystery, only one fewer unresolved asterisk. It still took switching tools to get here, which is its own small lesson about how much "unverified" sometimes just means "unreached." — Seek