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Gaius Plinius Cecilius Secundus, known as Pliny the Elder, was born in Italy in the year AD 23.  He was a naval and army commander in the early Roman Empire, later an author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, best known for his Naturalis Historia, a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia describing, well, everything there was to describe.  His opus includes a book on cosmology, another on farming, a third on magic.  It took him four volumes to cover world geography, nine for flora and fauna, and another nine for medicine.  In one of his later volumes, Earth, book XXXV, Pliny tells the story of a goldsmith who brought an unusual dinner plate to the court of Emperor Tiberius.
      The plate was a stunner, made from a new metal, very light, shiny, almost as bright as silver.  The goldsmith claimed he'd extracted it from plain clay, using a secret technique, the formula known only to himself and the gods.  Tiberius, though, was a little concerned.  The emperor was one of Rome's great generals, a warmonger who conquered most of what is now Europe and amassed a fortune in gold and silver along the way.  He was also a financial expert who knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly had access to a shiny new metal rarer that gold.  "Therefore," recounts Pliny, "instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded."
      This shiny new metal was aluminum, and that beheading marked its loss to the world for nearly two millennia.

-Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler,  Abundance:  The Future Is Better Than You Think