Aluminum is the most abundant metal in our earths crust, but it’s found as a mineral, bauxite, rather than shiny chunks of metallic aluminum. This is because aluminum is a reactive metal, which I demonstrate in this video by reacting it with copper ions which also produces flammable hydrogen gas. Bauxite was plentiful but hard to refine, until an electrochemical process was simultaneously discovered by two twenty year old chemists an ocean apart in 1886. They found that by melting bauxite into a