The Miracle Metal of the Future
An 1889 report speculates on the dawn of the 'Aluminum Age,' predicting a world transformed by the lightweight, non-tarnishing wonder metal.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
It is a wonderful age of a wonderful age and the inventors are making possible the realization of the dreams of the past. One inventor has an army of them at work, and the result is a demonstration of the utility of aluminum. Nature has hidden this metal in clay, but the chemist has found it, and now we can only hope for its general adoption. This metal will not lose its luster; it is essential for an indefinite period. In any atmosphere, it will maintain a far greater durability than silver, and while salt air actively attacks silver, it has no effect whatever upon aluminum. Gold or platinum will be eventually surpassed in the arts by aluminum, which is a white metal. It can be rolled into a sheet as thin as gold leaf, and they are gold and silver. When it finally comes into general use, and the advent of that era will be retarded only by the present scarcity of the metal for the arts, it will be used for every purpose for which iron, steel, and wood are now used, its adaptability to ship building being very apparent. For steamships the size of the largest Cunarders, with the same tonnage and the same number of exposed feet, the weight of aluminum from keel to the top of the mast, instead of drawing from 24 to 26 feet, would not draw more than 4 or 5. The ships of the future, aluminum, deep-water conventionals will be established.
“It is a wonderful age of a wonderful age and the inventors are making possible the realization of the dreams of the past.”
In 1889, aluminum was still a rare curiosity treated with the reverence we might reserve for modern superconductors. Today, it is the ubiquitous spine of the aerospace industry, proving the 19th-century prediction of an 'Aluminum Age' largely correct, though we have yet to see the extreme weight-reduction miracles once imagined for massive steamships.
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