The production of aluminum foil via the process of the endless rolling of aluminum sheets cast from moltenaluminum was pioneered at a foil-rolling plant at the foot of the Rhine Falls in the Swiss town of Kreuzlingen in 1910. The plant was owned by the aluminum manufacturing firm J. G. Neher and Sons.
The firm had experimented with sheets of pure aluminum, placing them between two heavy, adjustable rollers and filling the interior of the rollers with boiling water. Sheets were passed continuously through the rollers, which were gradually brought closer and closer together until the desired thickness of foil was achieved. Its earliest uses were as wrappers for various tobacco and confectionery products, and with its effectiveness as a barrier to oxygen and light, inhibiting the growth of bacteria, aluminum foil soon supplanted tin as the preferred metal in the wrapping and preservation of foodstuffs. Processes evolved to include the use of print and color.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, aluminum was considered a precious metal. Despite ranking third on the list of the world's most abundant chemical element after silicon and oxygen, it is not naturally occurring in its pure form and had to be extracted using crude and expensive methods. The discovery of electrolytic reduction in 1886 enabled the isolation and separation of aluminum for the first time, dramatically lowering its cost and leading to the production of pure aluminum in all its forms.
In the 1940s, aluminum became popular in households throughout the United States with the marketing of Reynolds Wrap Aluminum Foil, developed after a company sales executive used aluminum to wrap a Thanksgiving Day turkey.
