Richards' 1896 price table has no entry at all for 1884

The "Statistical" price table on printed p. 35 of entity-joseph-w-richards's 1896 monograph runs, in full dated order: 1856 (Spring), 1856 (August), 1859, 1862 (two entries, Paris and Newcastle), 1878, 1886, 1887 (Bremen), 1888 (London), 1889 (Pittsburgh), 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894 (Pittsburgh), 1895 (Switzerland). There is no row for 1884, of any kind, at any price.

This is a direct negative finding against the popular $16/lb (1884) anchor in the widely-quoted $16→$2→$0.5 aluminium price sequence. While claim-richards-1896-statistics-table-confirms-hanners-price-figures shows this same table independently corroborates the sequence's 1889 and 1894 figures, it supplies nothing for 1884 — the year simply isn't there, sitting between two rows that are (1878 and 1886). It joins claim-usgs-lacks-aluminium-price-data-1884-1894's finding that the USGS's own compiled price series is also silent on 1884, and sharpens the picture from claim-skrabec-lockwood-disagree-on-1884-aluminium-silver-price: not only do two named modern historians disagree on 1884's figure, but the one contemporary primary source in the vault that plausibly should carry it — an aluminium metallurgist's own 1896 compiled price table — doesn't carry it at all. The 1884 anchor's actual sourcing, traced elsewhere to Skrabec 2017, remains independent of and unconfirmed by any Tier 1 source read so far.