Alcoa Corporation (an acronym for Aluminum Company of America) is an American industrial corporation. It is the world's eighth-largest producer of aluminum, with corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Alcoa conducts operations in 10 countries. Alcoa is a major producer of primary aluminum, fabricated aluminum, and alumina combined, through its active and growing participation in all major aspects of the industry: technology, mining, refining, smelting, fabricating, and recycling.
In 1886, Charles Martin Hall, a graduate of Oberlin College, discovered the process of smelting aluminum, almost simultaneously with Paul Héroult in France. He realized that by passing an electric 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, along with the Bayer process, are the dominant processes for production of aluminum from bauxite ore.