Alcoa, Inc. (nyse: AA) is the world's third largest producer of aluminum, behind Rio Tinto Alcan and Rusal.

Among Alcoa's other businesses are fastening systems, building products (Kawneer), Howmet Castings, and electrical distribution systems for cars. The sale of the packaging unit was announced on December 21, 2007 and closed in the first quarter of 2008.

History

In 1886, Charles Martin Hall, a graduate of Ohio's Oberlin College, discovered the process of smelting aluminum, almost simultaneously with Paul Héroult in France. He realized that by passing an electrical current through a bath of cryolite and aluminum oxide, the then semi-rare metal aluminum remained as a byproduct. This discovery, now called the Hall-Héroult process, is still the only process used to make aluminum worldwide.

Probably fewer than ten sites in the United States and Europe produced any aluminum at the time. In 1887, Hall made an agreement to try his process at the Electric Smelting and Aluminum Company plant in Lockport, New York but it was not used and Hall left after one year. On Thanksgiving day 1888, with the help of Alfred E. Hunt, started the Pittsburgh Reduction Company with an experimental smelting plant on Smallman Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1891, the company went into production in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. In 1895 a third site opened at Niagara Falls. By about 1903, after a settlement with Hall's former employer, and while its patents were in force, the company was the only legal supplier of aluminum in the US.

"The Aluminum Company of America" -- became the firm's new name in 1907. The acronym "Alcoa" was coined in 1910, given as a name to two of the locales where major corporate facilities were located (although one of these has since been changed), and in 1999 was adopted as the official corporate name.

Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Justice Department charged Alcoa with illegal monopolization, and demanded that the company be dissolved. Trial began on June 1, 1938.

Four years later, the trial judge dismissed the case. The government appealed.

Two more years passed, and in 1944, the Supreme Court announced that it couldn't assemble a quorum to hear the case so it referred the matter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The following year, the year the world weary of war at last had a chance at peace, was also appropriately enough the year this litigation came to its end. Learned Hand wrote the opinion for the Second Circuit.

Hand wrote that he could consider only the percentage of the market in "virgin aluminum" for which Alcoa accounted. Alcoa had argued that it was in the position of having to compete with scrap. Even if the scrap was aluminum that Alcoa had manufactured in the first instance, it no longer controlled its marketing. But no, Hand defined the relevant market narrowly in accord with the prosecution's theory.