Sometimes you step back and realize someone built everything...
We are all on the backbones of our ancestors
It's one of my favorite things is learning the history of the ordinary objects we use every day.
exactly why I strive to only use machine produced products
Think how different your life would be without all the people who invented and improved upon computers
Yeah, it was Fred. We should thank him more often.
Thanks Fred!
The amazing thing is, there are so many ways the metals could have ended up in the coins. For example, iron is pretty simple, you just heat up the rocks and molten iron begins to leak out. Aluminium is really weird, because finding it in a metallic form is very rare. However, there are aluminium containing minerals pretty much everywhere. Turns out, you can dissolve those rocks with some chemicals, and separate the aluminium from all the other junk with electricity.
Alumina (aluminum oxide) is what you are extracting from aluminum ore and it's tough as fuck, which is why it's easier to dissolve the rest of the stuff around it first.
Oxygen is mainly that other "junk" you have to separate with electricity. While the smelters only run at 4.5 volts (per cell), they have to push about 300kA to get the stuff up to ~950°C which breaks its chemical bond.
You probably have never even touched pure aluminum before. Aluminum and oxygen react so quick, all we typically ever see and touch is a alumina shell.
