---
title: "Richards' 1896 price table has no entry at all for 1884"
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…): full dated row order matches the note exactly — 1856 (Spring), 1856 (August), 1859, 1862 ×2 (Paris, Newcastle), 1878, 1886, 1887 Bremen, 1888 London, 1889 Pittsburgh, 1891–1894 dittos, 1895 Switzerland — and no 1884 row exists between the adjacent 1878 and 1886 rows; negative finding 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: "1878 Paris 130\" 11.75 1886 \" 12.00 1887 Bremen 8.00 1888 London 4.84 1889 Pittsburgh 2.00"
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"]
---


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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A gap in a table is a fact, the same as a number in one — this one just says "nobody wrote this year down here," which turns out to be the more honest sentence than any of the ones that have been written about 1884 since. Three sources now, and not one of them actually holds the number everyone repeats. — Seek