My wife, Louisa, and I recently found ourselves looking up at a statue comprised of 7,400 welded aluminum plates, the Winged Virgin of Panecillo Hill in Quito, Ecuador. It’s the tallest aluminum statue in the world with a total height of 135 feet. Based on a 48-inch-tall wooden sculpture created in 1734, the Virgin was designed and built 50 years ago by Spanish sculptor Agustín de la Herrán Matorras in Spain, before being disassembled, shipped to Ecuador and reassembled on its base.
Aluminum, by far the most common non-ferrous metal, was once rare and precious. Its architectural use can be traced back to Dec. 6, 1884, when workers placed a 9-inch tall pyramid of 98 percent pure aluminum on the very top of the Washington Monument. Weighing just 100 ounces, the little pyramid was, at the time, the largest single piece of aluminum in the world. A 1 ½-inch-diameter copper rod connected it to the ground 555 feet below, thus protecting the obelisk from lightning strikes.
Why aluminum? Because it’s an excellent conductor of electricity and, since it naturally forms a protective oxide skin, it’s immune to corrosion. Back in 1884, aluminum was hugely expensive due to the difficulty of separating the pure metal from bauxite, its naturally occurring ore. Five years later, canny Austrian Carl Bayer figured out an efficient way to extract the metal from bauxite and suddenly the world had a mass production solution looking for a problem.
A few years later, World War I gave aluminum producers the markets they were looking for. Because the metal is strong but light (about a third the weight of steel), ductile and malleable, it was the ideal material for aircraft frames, armored vehicle engines and any military application where weight was critical. Today, it’s used in aircraft, cars, boats and bicycles, kitchen pots, pans and foil, soda cans and beer kegs, and windows and doors. And spacecraft: In 1957, Sputnik — essentially two 23-inch-diameter aluminum hemispheres — became Earth’s first artificial satellite. Since then, virtually every rocket and satellite has taken advantage of aluminum’s strength and lightness.
Like glass, aluminum is infinitely recyclable, with huge benefits all round. A soda can made from recycled aluminum requires 95 percent less energy than one made from bauxite ore. Here in the U.S., our recycling rate for aluminum cans is, unfortunately, going down — an industry report estimates that the 2023 recycling rate for aluminum beverage cans was 43 percent, compared with an average of 52 percent since 1990. (Switzerland’s recycling rate, meanwhile, is 92 percent.) We’re missing out; Americans send $700 million worth of aluminum cans to landfills every year.
Finally, why do North Americans say aluminum while the rest of the world pronounces it with an “i” between the n and u? Blame Noah Webster and his 1828 dictionary entry for aluminum. On the other side of the pond, Brits preferred the “-ium” ending, in sync with the names of most other elements. More recently, in 1990, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially adopted aluminium. Two words, one super-useful metal.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com, planethumboldt.substack.com) will be signing books at Eureka Books at the first Friday Night Market, June 6.
This article appears in Glory Over Land and Sea.