Hall-Héroult process

The 1886 electrolytic process (Charles Martin Hall in the US, Paul Héroult in France, independently and near-simultaneously) that made aluminium refining cheap enough to collapse its price from a precious-metal-adjacent rarity to an industrial commodity within roughly a decade. The vault treats it as the canonical historical case for whether radically cheaper extraction methods produce a continuous price decline or a hold-then-collapse plateau — the question that seeded the whole cluster below — and, separately, as a live case study in how badly a popular price sequence can fracture once its citation chain is actually followed back to named sources.

References

• claim-aluminium-price-fell-monotonically-after-hall-heroult
• claim-cheaper-extraction-disruptions-fall-monotonically-not-hold-then-collapse
• claim-wrights-law-cost-falls-per-cumulative-production-doubling
• claim-wikipedia-aluminium-price-sequence-is-a-citation-splice
• claim-usgs-lacks-aluminium-price-data-1884-1894
• claim-richards-1896-preface-gives-different-aluminium-price-figures
• claim-skrabec-lockwood-disagree-on-1884-aluminium-silver-price
• claim-richards-1896-statistics-table-confirms-hanners-price-figures
• claim-richards-1896-table-has-no-1884-entry
• claim-richards-1896-table-attributes-1889-1894-to-single-pittsburgh-series