ALUMINUM BOAT CONSTRUCTION

Aluminum is at once as white as silver, as incorrodible as gold, as tenacious as iron, as fusible as copper, and as light as glass.  It is easily worked; it is widely spread in nature, alumina forming the bases of most rocks; it is three times lighter than iron; in short, it seems to have been created expressly to furnish materials for our projectile!   

                                                   – Jules Verne, Planning a spacecraft to be fired from a cannon to the moon.  In From the Earth to the Moon (1865, 1890)