(Aluminum and aluminum alloys in the form of ingots, casti...)
Aluminum and aluminum alloys in the form of ingots, castings, bars, plates, sheets, tubes, wire and all forms of structural shapes .. (1897) 284 pages
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Businessman engineer metallurgist
Hunt was born at East Douglas, Massachussets, in 1855, the son of Leander B. and Mary Hannah(Hanchett) Hunt. He was descended from William Hunt, who in 1635 came from Salisbury, England, and settled with the first colony at Concord, Massachussets. Alfred's paternal grandfather was the founder of the Hunt Axe & Edge Tool Works of East Douglas, with which Leander Hunt was connected.
Alfred was educated at the Roxbury high school and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he was graduated in 1876 in the department of metallurgy and mining engineering. During part of his senior year at the Institute he did analytic and metallurgical work for the Bay State Steel Company.
After graduating became chemist and assistant manager of the openhearth plant of that company at South Boston, in which position he assisted in the erection of the second open-hearth furnace in America. He also went to Michigan for this company to investigate newly discovered iron-ore deposits there, and his reports on the iron fields of northern Michigan and Wisconsin had an important bearing on the development of ores in that region. In 1877 he moved to Nashua, N. H. , where as manager and chemist he superintended the steel department of the Nashua Iron & Steel Company until 1881. He then went to Pittsburgh, Pa. , as superintendent and metallurgical chemist with Park Brothers & Company, managing the open-hearth and heavy-forging department of their Black Diamond Steel Company.
In 1883 he resigned and with George H. Clapp, also of Park Brothers, established a chemical and metallurgical laboratory, and acted as consulting engineer for many of the mills about Pittsburgh. In their laboratory was done all of the chemical work for the newly established Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory which they later bought, enlarged, and combined. This testing laboratory is regarded as the pioneer establishment of its class. It was equipped for the complete chemical and physical testing of materials, its experts performed the inspection of construction and manufacturing work, served in the capacity of consulting engineers, and acted as expert witnesses in litigation. As a consultant Hunt had the process for the reduction of aluminum developed by Charles Martin Hall brought to his attention, and was quick to see its merits. He was instrumental in the organization of a company which purchased the control of the Hall patents and under the name of the Pittsburgh Reduction Company erected the first works for the reduction of aluminum ore by the Hall process. The process proved successful and the price of aluminum, which previous to this time had sold for fifteen dollars a pound, dropped to a level low enough to make it commercially practicable.
Hunt was active in the militia in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and later in Pennsylvania, where he organized and commanded Battery B, at one time one of the most efficient volunteer military organizations in the United States. At the outbreak of the war with Spain, the battery was the earliest to volunteer, and Captain Hunt put aside his important business interests to lead his command. His health was undermined at Chickamauga, and at Porto Rico he contracted malaria which affected his heart, causing his death, at Philadelphia, in less than a year.
He is best known for founding the company that would eventually become Alcoa, the world's largest producer and distributor of aluminum. From the American Society of Civil Engineers he received the Norman gold medal for a paper entitled "A Proposed Method of Testing Structural Steel, " presented at the International Engineering Congress of the Columbian Exposition in 1893 and published that year in the Transactions of the society (Vol. XXX).
(Aluminum and aluminum alloys in the form of ingots, casti...)
Hunt was a member of various American and British technical societies.
On October 29, 1878, he married Maria T. McQuesten, of Nashua, N. H. , daughter of Joseph and Elizabeth (Lund) McQuesten. They had one son.
