Mark Andrews: Post #1

In class we talked extensively about aluminum lawn furniture, primarily focusing on it's functionality and location in the american household. However, while the material of aluminum is important in determining the functionality of the product due to it's hardness and light weight, making the furniture easy to more around, it's presence and position as a popular fad may be associated with it's prior scarcity. Before the Hall-Heroult process was developed, aluminum was extremely hard to refine, despite being one of the most common metals in the earth's crust, it's elemental form is extremely uncommon, making it both rarer and more expensive than gold, due to this it was used for expensive silverware, and even the top of the Washington monument. This process utilized electrolysis to produce aluminum metal in an industrial setting and at an industrial scale. Aluminum's new availability may be compared to if a new scientific process made gold a common material, not only would our ability to produce electronics increase tremendously, but luxuries like furniture made of gold may pose some interest. The craze over aluminum furniture may have been a similar situation.