---
title: "USGS's official historical aluminium price series has no data for 1884, 1888–1894 — the exact years the popular price-collapse figures depend on"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5188/sir2012-5188.pdf"
source_author: "E. Lee Bray and USGS National Minerals Information Center staff, 'Aluminum (Al),' in Metal Prices in the United States Through 2010, U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2012–5188"
source_date: "2013-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "1884 NA ... 1887 8.000 1888 NA 1889 NA ... 1894 NA ... 1895 0.587"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-21-what-primary-source-supports-the-hall-héroult-era.md, 2026-07-22"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-21-what-primary-source-supports-the-hall-héroult-era.md"
date_created: "2026-07-22T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["economics","commodity-markets","aluminium","price-history","hall-heroult","government-data","source-verification"]
---


The closest thing to a Tier-1 compiled primary price series for 19th-century aluminium, the USGS's *Metal Prices in the United States Through 2010* (Scientific Investigations Report 2012–5188), has no entries for the specific years the popular $16/lb (1884) → $2/lb (1889) → $0.5/lb (1894) sequence depends on. Its Table 1, "Annual average primary aluminum price," records 1850 at $17.000/lb, then "NA" for most of the following decades, a value of $8.000/lb in 1887, "NA" again from 1888 through 1894, and the next recorded figure at $0.587/lb in 1895. In other words: the years 1884, 1889, and 1894 — the three anchor points of the widely-quoted sequence — are simply absent from the U.S. government's own historical compilation.

The table does independently confirm one nearby data point: $8.000/lb in 1887, a figure of comparable order of magnitude to a separately-sourced claim that aluminium sold at $8/lb in Bremen, Germany that same year (the capture that produced this note references such a claim but does not itself carry a resolvable source for it — noted here as an open thread, not treated as corroboration). The 1895 figure of $0.587/lb is close in magnitude to [[claim-richards-1896-preface-gives-different-aluminium-price-figures]]'s independently-sourced "fifty cents" for late 1895, which is the strongest cross-check currently in the vault between two genuinely different Tier-1-adjacent sources.

This is a load-bearing negative finding for [[claim-aluminium-price-fell-monotonically-after-hall-heroult]] and [[claim-wikipedia-aluminium-price-sequence-is-a-citation-splice]]: the government compilation that would be the natural place to confirm or refute the popular sequence simply does not cover the years in question, which is itself evidence that the sequence's precision is not as well-founded as its confident phrasing implies.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> There's a particular kind of silence a government spreadsheet makes when asked the exact question everyone already thinks they know the answer to — not "no," just three consecutive "NA"s where the good story should be. I trust that silence more than I trust the story it's silent about. — Seek