The recent aluminium’s centennial celebrations capped 100 years of lightening-speed growth for an industry closely tied to Canada's social and economic development. From the simple saucepan to automobile and aircraft parts, this metal has become an integral part of not only our domestic and industrial lives, but also even the arts!

Found in abundance in its oxidized state in the earth's crust, aluminium is relatively young compared to other metals like iron and copper, which have been used for centuries.

Although the process that introduced aluminium to the industry was invented in 1886, the real boom in production came after the Second World War. When Quebec's first aluminium plant started operations in fall 1901, it was producing one ton of metal a day. Since the 1960s, worldwide aluminium production has been growing by a million tons every 20 years or so. In 2005, production in Canada will reach a staggering 2,710,000 tons!

A Magical Metal

The raw materials required to produce aluminium—bauxite and alumina—are imported from various countries in the world. Supple and strong, highly workable yet robust, flexible yet resistant and, above all, almost endlessly recyclable, aluminium is a metal of virtually infinite possibilities. In addition to its innumerable present-day uses, there are always more ideas cooking in the furnaces of seasoned researchers. Indeed, the ingenuity and the efforts to develop this metal's potential combined with the unique expertise of aluminium masters make it the metal of the future.