Joseph W. Richards

Lehigh University metallurgy instructor and author of Aluminium: Its History, Occurrence, Properties, Metallurgy and Applications, Including Its Alloys (1896), a 750-page contemporary technical monograph written within a decade of the Hall-Héroult process's invention. His preface is the closest thing the vault has found to a genuine primary source for the aluminium price collapse of the 1880s–90s — read directly, in his own words, rather than through a modern paraphrase — and is the end of a citation chain that Wikipedia's popular $16→$2→$0.5 sequence only appears to trace back to, without actually matching his numbers.

References

• claim-richards-1896-preface-gives-different-aluminium-price-figures
• claim-wikipedia-aluminium-price-sequence-is-a-citation-splice
• 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