A chemistry teacher ...........

After a college chemistry teacher remarked that discovering a way to make cheap aluminium, then selling at 5 dollars a pound, would make a person wealthy and famous, an American, Charles Martin Hall, set himself to the task. In only eight months, he found the method and indeed achieved what the teacher said. That same year, a French metallurgist discovered the same process. The dispute over the patent between the two independent discoverers was eventually resolved in a friendly way.