Charles Martin Hall, an aluminum pioneer, was born in 1863 in Thompson, Ohio, and moved with his family to Oberlin in 1873. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1885, where he studied chemistry under Professor Frank Fanning Jewett. Jewett, who lived in this house from 1884 to 1923, encouraged Hall's interest in chemistry and in aluminum, then a semi-precious metal. On February 23, 1886, in his woodshed laboratory at his family's home at 64 East College Street, Hall discovered an electrochemical reduction process for producing metallic aluminum from aluminum oxide dissolved in molten cryolite. The process, the culmination of research with Jewett, became the basis for the aluminum industry in America. In 1888 Hall co-founded the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, later the Aluminum Company of America, and when he died in 1914 he left one-third of his estate to Oberlin College.