JEWELRY TO JETS: ALUMINUM DESIGN SINCE THE 1850s

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2000 by Sarah Nichols

Today aluminum is equally at home in the aerospace industry and the jewelry artist's studio, and, indeed, the metal plays a significant role in both arenas.

From its inception in the 1850s to the present, the story of aluminum is complex and varied, reflecting the boom and bust of economic cycles and changing patterns of consumption, particularly its use as a strategic metal in wartime. However, aluminum producers had to work hard to find, develop, and maintain different applications for their metal, for in some ways it was looked upon as a solution without a problem. Ultimately, the trick was finding the correct problems to solve.

Aluminum was first introduced to the public at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855 as "silver from clay." [1] Using an improved chemical method to produce the metal, the French chemist Henri Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville (1818-1881) had obtained sufficient quantities to produce aluminum ingots and other small objects for inclusion in the exposition. [2] Sainte-Claire Deville's work was supported financially by the emperor Napoleon III, who, spurred on by intellectual curiosity and the prospect of national glory, recognized that aluminum had great potential that might be harnessed for the benefit of France, particularly on the battlefield. Indeed, in 1860, an imperial eagle made of gilt aluminum was approved for the top of French flagpoles to be carried into battle. It looked no different from the earlier bronze version, but thanks to aluminum's light weight, it weighed nearly three and one-half pounds less. [3] In fact, aluminum had little important military use in the nineteenth century, but twentie th-century warfare would eventually confirm Napoleon III's faith in the metal, in ways he could not have imagined.

One of the earliest surviving aluminum objects is a baby rattle commissioned by the emperor to commemorate the birth of the prince imperial, Eugene Louis Jean Joseph in 1856. [4] Two years later the silversmith Charles Christofle presented Napoleon III with the centerpiece shown in Plate IV, its five cast-aluminum figures of children representing prosperity and the inscription on the silvered-copper alloy and gilt-bronze base paying homage to Napoleon III's support of Sainte-Claire Deville's work. [5] The centerpiece is one of the largest and most elaborate aluminum objects from this early period. Most of the objects made in the late 1850s and early 1860s are small, frequently combining aluminum with more precious materials, especially in jewelry (Pl. V). Although the price of aluminum fell to below that of silver by the early 1860s, it was still expensive to produce, hovering around twelve dollars a pound between 1862 and 1886. In the latter year, Charles Martin Hall (1863-1914), an American, and Paul T. He roult (1863-1914), a Frenchman, independently but almost simultaneously, discovered electrolytic methods for making aluminum cheaply, leading to the establishment of commercially viable aluminum industries in the United States and Europe. The price of the metal fell dramatically from 1890 to 1897, dipping to thirty-six cents a pound in the United States, and production rose equally dramatically, as smelters ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. [6]

But what to do with this new metal? In the search for markets, aluminum was used for a myriad of applications, from kettles to prosthetic legs for dogs, with varying degrees of success. Aluminum violins, for example, never quite caught the public's imagination. In some instances, such as the kettle market, the aluminum producers had to actually take over the manufacturing process, for traditional kettle manufacturers had no idea how to work the new metal to its best advantage.

In order for any material to secure its own identity and vocabulary, it must be considered in its own right, with decisions about applications and designs based on its unique combination of properties and techniques of working. If any individual can be pinpointed as the first proponent of aluminum as a modern material, it would be the Viennese architect and designer Otto Wagner, who advocated straightforward, economical construction and a complete understanding of the purpose of a building or object, down to its smallest details. These principles governed his innovative use of many nontraditional materials, but particularly aluminum. Wagner first incorporated the metal into his designs for the facade of a building in Vienna for the news agency Die Zeit in 1902 (see PI. III). His next major building project to utilize aluminum was the Postal Savings Bank (1904--1906), a landmark of modern architecture, also in Vienna. [7] In it he produced an innovative and harmonious symbiosis of old and new materials, and i n the process situated aluminum in a forward-looking twentieth-century context. For both buildings he supplied furniture designs incorporating aluminum for practical as well as decorative purposes. For instance, strips of aluminum protected the arms and feet of chairs, the two parts most susceptible to damage, while providing decorative articulation and striking color contrasts in otherwise minimal designs (see P1. VII).