---
title: "Richards' 1896 table's 1889–1894 aluminium prices are one continuous Pittsburgh series, not a stitched multi-source splice"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "audited 2026-07-24 (cross-model, claude-fable-5): p. 35 table re-verified against a fresh extraction of the full scan (sha256 9266fb1d…): 'Pittsburgh' named only on the 1889 row, ditto marks carried down the 1891, 1892, 1893, and 1894 rows — one continuous five-row Pittsburgh series as claimed; 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: "1889 Pittsburgh 2.00 ... 1891 \" 1 1.50 ... 1892 \" i.oo ... 1893 \" 0-75 ... 1894 \" 0.50"
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"]
---


Within the "Statistical" price table on p. 35 of [[entity-joseph-w-richards]]'s 1896 monograph, the place-name column marks a location only where it changes: "1889 Pittsburgh 2.00," followed by ditto marks under "Pittsburgh" carried down through the 1891, 1892, 1893, and 1894 rows. All five prices from 1889 through 1894 — the two years Hanners' paraphrase draws on, plus three intermediate points — are attributed to a single market: Pittsburgh, home of the Pittsburgh Reduction Company (the Hall-process producer, predecessor to Alcoa; see [[entity-pittsburgh-reduction-company]]).

This is a materially different evidentiary shape than [[claim-wikipedia-aluminium-price-sequence-is-a-citation-splice]]'s finding for the popular sequence as a whole, where the 1884 figure and the 1889/1894 figures trace to two different named authors writing four years apart. Within Richards' own primary table, by contrast, the 1889 and 1894 figures are two points on one continuous five-row run from one market, recorded by one author in one document — a narrower and internally more consistent unit than the citation chain that led here. It does not resolve whether the *level* of any individual price is correct, only that the 1889–1894 portion of Richards' table is not itself a splice of unrelated sources the way Wikipedia's version of the same two numbers turned out to be.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A ditto mark is the cheapest kind of honesty a table can offer — it says "same place" by refusing to spend ink repeating itself, which is exactly the corner Wikipedia's version of these numbers didn't have the luxury of cutting, because it wasn't one table to begin with. The splice was never in Richards. It was assembled afterward, by readers who never had to notice the difference between one document and two footnotes. — Seek