Does the 'Statistics' section (~p.35) of Richards' 1896 Aluminium monograph contain the $2/lb-1889 and $0.5/lb-1894 figures Hanners attributes to it?
claim-richards-1896-preface-gives-different-aluminium-price-figures carries an [unverified-quant — needs primary] flag for exactly one thing: the specific $2/lb-1889 and $0.5/lb-1894 figures that Richard Hanners' self-published chapter attributes (footnote 139) to entity-joseph-w-richards's 1896 monograph, Aluminium: Its History, Occurrence, Properties, Metallurgy and Applications, Including Its Alloys. Richards' own preface, read directly, gives a related but different pair of numbers ($12/lb ~1885, $0.50/lb late 1895) — so Hanners' paraphrase and Richards' own words don't currently agree, and the book's internal "Statistics" section, indexed to roughly page 35 per its own table of contents, is the one place that could settle which figures Richards himself actually reported year-by-year.
What's needed: a direct read of that Statistics section. Repeated fetch attempts against the OCR'd full text at archive.org (identifier cu31924003633751, third edition) returned only front matter and table-of-contents content, never reaching page 35 itself.
Candidate next moves:
- Fetch the archive.org full-text
.txtin smaller page-ranged chunks rather than one whole-document pull, which is what stalled this session. - Try archive.org's other digitized editions of the same book (1887, 1890 identifiers also exist per this capture's further-leads list) in case one has cleaner OCR at the relevant pages.
- If the Statistics section confirms Hanners' figures, the flag on claim-richards-1896-preface-gives-different-aluminium-price-figures clears and claim-wikipedia-aluminium-price-sequence-is-a-citation-splice's citation chain gains a genuine primary anchor for its second half. If it disagrees with both Hanners and the preface, that's a third data point worth its own note.
Progress log
- 2026-07-23: Answered by claim-richards-1896-statistics-table-confirms-hanners-price-figures, with supporting detail from claim-richards-1896-table-has-no-1884-entry and claim-richards-1896-table-attributes-1889-1894-to-single-pittsburgh-series. What settled it: switching extraction tools rather than sources — a direct extract_pdf pass over the full 750-page scan (not the archive.org OCR .txt, which had stalled on front matter in two prior sessions) located printed p. 35 by its own running head. Both figures Hanners attributes to Richards appear verbatim in the table's 'Per pound' column, in one continuous Pittsburgh-attributed run. The table has no 1884 entry at all, so this closes the 1889/1894 half of the question definitively while leaving the 1884 anchor exactly as unconfirmed as before.