Science: Aluminum from Alunite

Last week President Charles Benjamin Bohn of Detroit’s Bohn Aluminum & Brass Corp. announced that his company, after five years of research, had discovered a method, technically ingenious and commercially feasible, for producing virgin aluminum from alunite. Alunite is a whitish ore containing potassium aluminum sulphate.

Let alone reveal the method, President Bohn would not even name the researchers who developed it. But he was eager to tell how he had started to build a $50,000 “pilot plant” in Detroit to iron out minor production kinks, and how he would later erect a big producing plant in Utah, which has the most extensive alunite deposits in the U. S. The Utah plant, said President Bohn, would bring his investment in the alunite process close to $10,000,000. That was an impressive figure, and observers saw no reason to question it.

Aluminum is one of the most abundant metals in Earth’s crust, yet it can be produced profitably from only one ore, reddish-brown bauxite, and it is produced in the U. S. by only one company, Aluminum Co. of America, which holds U. S. patents on the only profitable process. Aluminum Co. sells aluminum pig to independent fabricators but has its own fabricating subsidiaries to compete with them. Thus although most of the pistons in Ford cars are of Mr. Bohn’s Bohnalite some are of Aluminum Co.’s Lynite. Mr. Bohn is not vitally disturbed by Aluminum Co.’s control of the virgin metal because most of his castings can be made from scrap aluminum, which has a free market. But it is a favorite charge of such independents as Bohn that Aluminum Co.’s domination has caused some big consumers (notably General Motors) to keep their aluminum consumption at an irreducible minimum. Mr. Bohn pointed out last week that if his new process breaks Aluminum Co.’s longstanding control of the raw metal, damage to that company will probably be offset by more widespread use of aluminum, since manufacturers will have the reassurance of two sources instead of one.