Education
Julia Hall studied chemistry at Oberlin College, studying with Frank Fanning Jewett. She matriculated in 1881 and graduated in 1885.
Julia Hall studied chemistry at Oberlin College, studying with Frank Fanning Jewett. She matriculated in 1881 and graduated in 1885.
Julia has been under-acknowledged for her involvement with the Hall Process and the founding of the Pittsburgh Reduction Company (later to become Aluminum Company of America). She also had two brothers, Lewis and Charles. As a woman, she was given a diploma rather than a degree.
Her brother Charles also attended Oberlin, matriculating in 1885 and graduating in 1889.
Charles did most of his research in the woodshed of the family home at 64 East College Street in Oberlin Ohio. Julia kept his experimental notes and assisted him with research and writing. The result was a series of patents issued to Charles in 1889 for the electrolytic production of aluminum.
Her careful record-keeping became essential when a French chemist, Paul Héroult, filed a patent application for the same process in the same year. Héroult had filed his patent application a few months earlier than Hall, but Julia was able to prove in court that she and Charles had actually discovered the process first.
Development of the Hall process and its scaling up for industrial use continued over some years, but eventually the work of Charles and Julia Hall brought the cost of aluminum down from $12.00 per pound to $.30 per pound.
She was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New New York