[Sca-cooks] Aluminum

[margaret]

> --- Betsy Marshall <betsy at softwareinnovation.com> wrote:
>
>> "I seem to recall"(tm) once hearing of Napoleon at a dinner party giving
>> the honored guests their place settings of Aluminum, while the regulars
>> had to make do with the usual gold forks and spoons- something about the
>> complicated chemical extraction process making it actually more
>> expensive than the gold set.
>> Pyro
>
>
> It's my understanding that Aluminum, in it's metallic state, was first 
> achieved by Hans Oersted in
> 1825...some 4 years after Napoleon's death.
>
> William de Grandfort

The question might be more properly which Napoleon?  Napoleon I was dead 
before aluminum was extracted experimentally.  Nappy II was a non-entity. 
Napoleon III reigned from 1852 through 1871, when he was deposed at the 
close of the Franco-Prussian War.  Since the first practical extraction and 
production process was developed in 1857 by Henri Etienne Saint-Claire 
Deville (a French guy, funny huh), I would suspect the Napoleon mentioned 
above was Napoleon III.

Bear