September 2010
Intermediate to advanced
336 pages
10h 44m
English
All these dotcom people, you know what they really want to be doing? They want to be working with wood.
Chicken John Rinaldi
Once, aluminum was a precious metal. The tiny amount known to exist was used only for the most exclusive decoration. In 1884 the builders of the Washington Monument, then the world’s tallest man-made structure, capped it with the world’s largest block of aluminum, which weighed 3 kg (about 6.5 pounds). To the builders, this block symbolized America’s mineral and technological wealth more than gold or platinum. About a year later, two chemists discovered how to use electricity to extract aluminum from bauxite. Aluminum soon was seen as the most common metal on earth.1 By 1900, the ...
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