edHed by
JOHN W. WOTlZ Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Illinois 82901
Julia 6. Hall and Aluminum M a r t h a M. Trescott 406 E. Green, Apt. 101 Urbana, Illinois 61801 The establishment of the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, the forerunner of ALCOA (the Aluminum Company of America), has long been attributed to the inventive efforts of Charles Martin Hall. Hall developed a process for the electrolytic reduction of alumina in a molten bath of cryolite to vield aluminum metal, thus solving the decades-old search for way to produce the metal cheaply. The process was patented in 1889, three years after he first produced the metal by this method (1). . not alwavs known is that much of the -~~~~ , - ,~ ~ i a tis invention and innovation which culminated in the forination of Pittshureh Reduction in 1888 owed a -meat deal to the activities of Julia Brainerd Hall, an older sister of Charles. Like Charles, Julia had graduated from Oherlin, with the date of her matriculation, 1881 and his, 1885. Like Charles, Julia took chemistry a t Oherlin, also in her junior year and also under Professor Franklin F. Jewett. In fact, overall a t Oberlin, Julia completed slightly more credits in science than Charles, even though she was officially enrolled in what was called the "Literary Course," an outgrowth of the earlier "Ladies' Course." While Charles received a degree for his four year course of study, Julia received a diploma (2). In childhood, Julia was Charles's closest companion and confidante, a role which she continued to play in the adulthood of this shy, seclusive man. Neither Charles nor Julia ever married. Yet,upon graduation, Julia assumed the responsibilities of raising her two younger sisters and of directingother household tasks, as her mother was ailing and in 1885 died. Charles used the Oherlin home as his base of operations, primarily before 1887, and set up his laboratory in the woodshed. next to the kitchen. Julia's headquarters. Being in t h v hrme. ,Iul~i~ was often presenl i n Charleh's Iah, helping out ~ and conwlring with him on icientific u,ith t h rxrwrimt~nts and technical matters. She served also as a scientifically astute, well-educated, and competent eye witness for Charles's experiments and for the letters and papers he wrote concerning t,he aluminum invention. She also acted in this capacity for certain of his other inventive ideas (3):Theseand other such activities resulted in the issuance of a family of natents to Charles Hall on Anril 2.1889 for the oroduction of k~ectrol~tic aluminum. This inventive activity since 1882 was non-random and nlanned hv Julia and Charles. with an eve toward potential markets from the beginning of serious work on the invention. Just as todav. with R & D teams, invention ~n the nin~lrcntl!century was d s o a tmln effort. Hesidcs ~ISS..IIIIL' in the lab and dfcrtng her technical ad\icr and expertise, Julia faithfully and minutely recorded the steps in the invention ~rocess-that is. the results of a ziven day's work, along with'technical details and the date and evidence which could substantiate the date. She also contacted family and friends who might have leads on financial hacking or finances themselves; she advised Charles on difficult questions
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such as to whom he might wish to sell his process. She acted as an information center, relaying information to and from Charles about people p~tentialfy&rested in the process. On occasion, she advised him what he should write to the Scientific American for their "free" advice on patents, a service apparently offered to inventors of the times by the journal. She dated his papers and letters pertaining to the invention and made sure that the copies he sent were clearly legible, and she acted as a censor of important names, dates and other facts in the letters Charles wrote her, in case the letters fell into the wrone hands. including relatives. She also advised Charles not to leave her letters ly& around for the same reasons. Finallv. .she comoosed a "Historv of C. M. Hall's Aluminum Invention," a six-page document, as her 1887 eye-witness account for the important Hall-HBroult patent interference case. And her testimony served to clinch Hall's victory in this case. She was the necessary, and perhaps would have been sufficient, witness to win this case for Hall. Since Hall had filed his patent application on duly 9, 1886, and Hgroult in May, Hall had to establish without a doubt that he had reduced his invention to practice before May and in particular before April 23.1886. the date on which the Frenchman H6roult's French , ~~, patent had heen granted. The witnesses were Charles himself, Julia. Charles's father and two of Charles's ~rofessors.one of whom was Jewett. Only dulia could positivk~yidentify as an eye witness the production of aluminum, verifying the identity of the product, produced on February 23,1886. Julia was the ~
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(a) dunius D. Edwards, "The Immortal Woodshed," New York, D d d , Mead and Company, I965 and also by Edwards, "A Captain in Industry," 1957; (b) Charles C. Carr, "Alcoa, An American Enterprise," 1952. (c) This essay is ahstraeted from a longer forthcoming paper with complete hihlbgraphy. (dl For an abstract of the oral presentation befnre the Society for the History of Technology, Octoher 19,1975, cf. Deborah Shapley, "History of American Teehnolom-A Fresh Bicentennial Look," Science, 190,763 (November 21, 1975). W e are especially indehted to Mrs. Gertrude .lacobs of the Oberlin College Alumni Office for providing us with alumni necrology on the Hall family and also with transcripts of college arurses for hoth Charles and Julia. :'This is not onlv home out in Lhe letters hut also in the documents
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Cf. Charles M. Hall vs. P . L. V. HBroult, In Interference in the United States Patent Office, Ortoher 24, 1887, .DD. . 5-8 for Julia's testimony and pp. 5-6 ibr cummentaryon February 10,1886. "Edwards, Ref la, p. 226. Fmm ALCOA we obtained ALCOAstock ledgers for Julia B. Hall, 1909-25, and her sisters Edie and Louie. 190%1919 and 1909-25, respectively, along with a table of "Dividends Paid on Common Stock," 1895-1943, all supplied by Mrs. Anna G. Lydon. ""The Perkin Medal, Remarks in Acknowledgment hy Mr. Hall," Industrial andEngineprini: Chemistry, I l l , 146-148 (1911). Edwards had Julia Hall's account typed, almy with the letters from Charles to Julia and others, and transmitted to company historian Charles Carr in 1936, according to the tile from ALCOA's archives.
first human being to whom Hall had fully disclosed his ideas about the invention on February 10,188fi, a date which Julia fully documented in court (4). Yet Julia received little real recognition for her informational, managerial, and entrepreneurial contrihutions here. Charles went on to become extremely wealthy, with $170,000 annual income from ALCOA stock alone a t the time of his death in 1914. Julia a t that time until her death in 1925 ave r a ~ e dahout $8.000 income from her stock ( 5 ) .And not even ('h;irlts crrditrd htr in his 191 1 acceptance sperch for thr chrrished I'erkin Medal, when he wid of family involvrments in tht. invmtion nnd inno\,nriuns leading to theestahlishmrnt of Pittshurrh Rrduction ('ompnnv 161.Not even J u h ' s 1887 account was referenced as such h i Hall's biographer Junins D. Edwards nor by Charles C. Carr, ALCOA company historian, although hoth authors evidently used it and hoth knew about it (7).It is apparent that the team of Charles and Julia Hall brought to the market cheap aluminum.
existence like that of other onium ions."Wnce the positive fragment B was produced Whitmore then realized that three events could occur. B could combine with a negative ion in the medium to give the normal product; or if A carried a hydrogen atom this may he lost and an unsaturated structure will result. Finally if B has a "greater attraction for electrons than A, two electrons will he transferred from the latter, leaving it with ~ realized that this shift of the an open ~ e x t e t . "Whitmore electron oair included the atom or .. srouo . which it holds. The net resul; being a riwranged product. Whitmore has left fur usn desrripti~mof how hcarriwd at thr mechanistic explaoation for thr course of intramolecular rearmnremenrs i n a letter dated November 13. 191%'written to ~ e o r g Wheland e of the University of chicago on the publication of the first edition of his classic work, The Theory of Resonance. After writing that he, Whitmore, had looked a t all previous explanations for rearrangement and was not satisfied by any of them he states4 Then one day it dawned on me that many rearrangements like the pinacolone rearrangement involvin~an initial molecule in which two adjacent carbon atoms are in practically an identical state of intermediate oxidation whereas the final product finds that these two carbon atoms with one in a hieher state of oaidntion and the other
Rearrangements Martin D. Saltzman Providence College Providence, Rhode Island 02918 It is a most curious quirk of chemical history that an explanatim tor intramdtvular rearrangrmrnts did not appmr until 19:l.L. a full decade und n halfafter G . N. Lewisclarified the nature of the chemical bond. In that year Frank C. Whitmore (1887-1947) presented a beautifully succinct and detailed pathway using the octet concept of Lewis to show the common basis of many intramolecular rearrangements discovered during the 19th and early 20th centuries. In explaining these rearrangements Whitmore also introduced the electronic interoretation of the carhonium ion as an oDen sextet. The carlxciitiun had long bwn inferred in organic reacttons but never adeauntelvdescr~hedhefore 1932. Frank C . Whitmore was a monhmenial figure in the development in the United States of modern organic chemistrv. The explanation of intramolecular rearrangement was just one of many significant contributions.' In the August 5,1932 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society Whitmore described the course of intramolecular rearrangements as; "When a molecule containing system A is hrought into a reaction which results in the removal of X from its attachment to R , then, regardless of the mechanism of the process, X keeps a comolete octet of electrons and leaves with only a sextet of e l k c t r o n ~ . ~
.. .. .. .. .. ..
:A:B:X:
---.
:;4':iic .. .. + :jj:..
Later he was to write; "In the case of such a carhoninm ion the plus sign inicntvs thr shortage ot'a pnir ofelectrons helow that needed for a comr,letr ~ ~ vIt tmust . Iw emohasired that because of this unstable structure the carhoni"m ion has no
other less. In other words, it dawned onme that many of these intramolecular rearrangements were a special case of disproportionation of dismutation. In pinacol two atoms of intermediate oxidation were not in different molecules hut were in the same molecule. Conse quently, one oxidized the other. In other words, one gave a pair of electrons to the other. In order for pinacol to rearrange, acid is necessary for which purpose \!'hitmore saw was to confe~ . . . a n atom
into a condition in which it was eleetron-hungrycaused it to seek the missine electrons either from the environment-remote
Thus Whitmore was able by this master stroke of postulating the transitory existence of a species with six electrons produce a rationale to explain the multitude of molecular rearraneements as well as such orocesses as isomerization and polymerization. "Even such simple processes as the formatior. of a tertiarv. hutvl . halide from isohutvl alcohol will he found to follow the same course as the pinacolone rearrangement."2 'Frank C. Whitmnre obtained his doctorate at Harvard in 1914 working with C. L. Jackson and E.P. Kohler. He successively held witions at Williams College, Rice Institute, University of Minnesota, Northwestern, and finally the Pennsylvania State University where he was Dean of the School of Chemistry and Physics from 1929 until his untimely death in 1947. During the period at Penn State he directed the dissertations of 118 students and produced well over 100 papers and several monographs. 'Whitmore, F. C., J . Amer. Chem. Soc., 54,3274(1932). :'Whitmore. F. C.. Chem. & Enr. News.. 76.166611948). . ' I n m ~ n l > cgrateful i Dean \\'h~tmcm'.cls~~; Fr:rnk..lr and Harq E. whourrc n,.sr hdplul i n the rrirnrrh lend~nfit~ethn.tril,urr tuthrlr iwlwr 'I'he letter i < urrd wth r h w prrnlt.atm>.
Volume 54. Number 1. January 1977 / 25
