Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) - WearEver Cookware can trace its origins back to 1888 when Charles Martin Hall, a young inventor from Oberlin, Ohio discovered an inexpensive way to smelt aluminum by perfecting the electrochemical reduction process that extracted aluminum from bauxite ore. Seeking to fund his continued exploration of this new process Hall eventually partnered with Alfred E. Hunt, a metallurgist in charge of the Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory, raising $20,000 with the help of investors and eventually forming the Pittsburgh Reduction Company which would later come to be known as ALCOA.