India, Sept. 28 -- History offers an unusual lesson in the changing fortunes of aluminium. Legend says that when Emperor Napoleon III hosted state banquets in nineteenth-century France, his most distinguished guests were served with aluminium cutlery, while others dined with gold. At the time, aluminium was considered rarer and more precious than gold because extracting it from ore was both difficult and prohibitively expensive. That changed forever with the invention of the Hall-Heroult electrolytic process in 1886 and the Bayer process for refining bauxite in 1888. These twin breakthroughs transformed aluminium from a royal luxury into one of the world's most indispensable industrial metals.

Few materials have become as integral to mod...