May 2, 1925.
Xindai City.
After decades of development, this former Portuguese colonial outpost located in the Zambezi River Delta had become an emerging city on the East African eastern coast.
Xindai City's most famous industry was electrolytic aluminum. It was East Africa's "Aluminum Capital," and with electrolytic aluminum as its core industry, Xindai's industrial development had advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years.
As a basic metal that had entered industrial production relatively late and carried a high threshold for development, aluminum possessed extremely broad market prospects, giving Xindai City's economic development considerable resilience.
Although as early as 1839, the German chemist Elo von Raoul had successfully extracted aluminum from bauxite through the Hydrogen Reduction Method, the cost of extracting aluminum this way was too high for it to be widely adopted on a large scale.
It was not until electrolytic aluminum technology emerged at the end of the nineteenth century that large-scale industrial aluminum production became possible. Yet at the time, electrolytic aluminum technology faced an enormous problem: its demand for electricity was simply too great.
In the previous century, electricity had undoubtedly been a relatively scarce resource. Only industrialized nations of that era, or countries like East Africa that were willing to invest enormous financial and material resources as well as technical personnel, possessed the foundations to develop an electrolytic aluminum industry.
Nineteenth-century East Africa was clearly not an industrialized nation, but rather a semi-industrialized nation akin to Russia.
However, East Africa already possessed the conditions to develop an electrolytic aluminum industry at the time. On one hand, its power industry was already relatively advanced; during the same period, only the United States and Germany could stand shoulder to shoulder with it. Thus, East Africa had surplus electricity available for developing electrolytic aluminum.
On the other