In the nineteenth century, Napoleon the Third's most honoured guests are served with aluminium cutlery, while the other guests must make do with gold and silver.
The anecdote is surprising today: this metal we now throw away without a thought was, for a time, one of the most precious in the world.
the price of aluminium in 1884, on par with silver
That same year, the United States chooses aluminium, not gold, to cap the top of the Washington Monument: a precious metal to crown the tallest structure in the world. The official story fits in one word: rarity.
The story of Napoleon the Third's cutlery, often retold, is not backed by any first-rate source: it may have been embellished over time. Caution, then, on the details of the dinner.
The economic fact, however, is solid: the price of the Washington Monument's cap, documented and archived, confirms that in 1884 aluminium was worth as much as silver. The story embellishes, the numbers hold.
Aluminium was never rare in the Earth's crust: it is one of the most abundant metals on the planet, found in bauxite worldwide.
Its nineteenth-century rarity was not geological: it came down to a single obstacle, the absence of a process able to extract it cheaply.
In 1886, within months of each other, Paul Héroult in France and Charles Martin Hall in the United States each discover, independently, the same electrolysis process. The price of aluminium drops by eighty percent.
Ordinarily, what passes from hand to hand reinforces an object's value. Here, it is the opposite: what gets passed on is not a rare piece, it is a method, reproducible identically by anyone with the necessary electricity.
Once the process is public, no hand, however skilled, can recreate the original rarity.
Thousands of aluminium objects then adorn the tables of European and American high society. None will break, none will be lost.
The aluminium objects of the nineteenth century did not burn, sink, or vanish. They prove, by their very existence, that a thing can survive perfectly intact and still lose all its value.
Survival is only proof of value if the rarity it protects is real. Here, it protected only a manufacturing secret, not a scarcity of the world.
The general public remembers the anecdote of a metal once more precious than gold. But today's market values aluminium for the exact opposite: its abundance, its lightness, its recyclability, a few euros per kilo.
The price has flipped meaning. The lesson, though, remains: the gap between price and value does not always favour the old.