Aluminium and an Acrostic Poem

The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – will there be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!

Worldwide Trade in Aluminium 2022 $280Billion

Happy Bi-Centenary Aluminium!

Yes, Aluminium, or Aluminum as the Americans choose to call it, was first discovered as a metal and element, in 1824, which for the element third most abundant in the earth’s crust after Silicon and Oxygen, is remarkable! Today Aluminium is ubiquitous in industry and domestically, wiring, aeroplane construction, building construction and tin cans are just a few of the obvious uses and because it can be recycled perfectly, it is estimated that so it is estimated that 75% of all the aluminium ever produced is still in use today.

Aluminium is mainly produced from the ore Bauxite which comes primarily from Australia, China and Guinea and China accounts for nearly 60 percent of global aluminium output. On average 4-5 tons of bauxite are needed to produce 1 ton of aluminium. It takes a lot of electricity to separate out the metal – about 15 MWH per tonne of output. That’s approximately as much as a 100-apartment block consumes in a month. This is why recycling is very desirable – 1 kg of recycled aluminium cans can save up to 8 kg of bauxite, 4 kg of various fluorides and up to 15 KWH of electricity.

Newly refined, Aluminium is a highly reflective silvery metal but one of its useful properties is that it quickly reacts with oxygen to produce a greyish layer of oxide which then protects the metal from further oxidation.

Aluminium is light – one-third the density of steel and so it is ideal for building flying machines – the first great example being the great airships of the 1920s but continuing to this day with most aircraft containing large amounts of aluminium – so as one ad for recycling points out, your drink can today may be your holiday jet tomorrow…

In the first years following its discovery, aluminium was hard to produce and so an expensive commodity, two examples of its use are as the cap of The Washington Monument completed in 1895 (due to its electrical conductivity it makes a great lightning conductor) and the statue in London’s Piccadilly Circus is the first to be cast in aluminium – often misnamed as Eros, it is in fact the Greek god of Requited Love – Anteros.

On a commercial trading note, the price of Aluminium has been affected by President Biden’s announcement of further sanctions against Russia including trading in metals such as aluminium some of which is produced there, following the death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny so even hard commodities can be affected by unexpected events.

Aluminium readily combines with other metals to produce alloys – if your car has alloy wheels for example they are principally aluminium with a small amount of property-altering magnesium. Only one isotope of aluminium is stable – the one we mostly find on Earth, but all other isotopes are radioactive and it is thought that heat from decaying aluminium isotopes helped melt comets in the outer solar system. Aluminium compounds result in the jewels ruby, sapphire, aquamarine and emerald as well as the very hard mineral corundum used for abrasion.

And so to the poem – there are a plethora of poetic forms beginning with A to choose from, Acatalectic, Abecadarian, Aisling, and Aubade, to name but a few. I have chosen an Acrostic where the first letter of each line spells out a word – from the Greek for ‘at the tip of the verse’.

Aluminium

Aluminium your shining
Light was hiding
Under a bushel of chemistry
Mixed so thoroughly
In precious jewels and common sulphates
Never a native metal, but wait
In 1824 your secret was
Unlocked and ever since has
Made our world a lighter brighter place…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

I could not leave the letter A without mentioning Amber, once called “the gold of the North” and traded from its main source The Baltic, all the way to the Mediterranean. So one of the earliest forms of international commodity trading!