French Emperor Napoleon III reserved a special set of aluminum cutlery for only his most honored dinner guests.
Ordinary guests had to settle for gold utensils.
In the mid-1800s, aluminum was rarer and more coveted than gold.
As a result, aluminum bullion bars were included among France’s national treasures, and aluminum jewelry became a status symbol of the French aristocracy.
Aluminum—element 13 on the periodic table—is abundant in nature, but it’s typically bound up in complex chemical compounds rather than found in its pure metallic form.
Extracting pure aluminum from these compounds was an extremely costly and complex process, making it…
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