Curses, foiled again!
Aluminum is a metal we encounter many times per day, which might raise an interesting question: why is it called “aluminium” in England and “aluminum” in the US?
It’s not just a matter of an idiosyncratic pronunciation of “aluminum.” In England and the US the spelling shifts to match the pronunciation. It all goes back to the early 1800s an an English chemist named Sir Humphry Davy. Davy named the metal, and based the name on the mineral “alumina,” which was named in 1790 by Joseph Black. Black based that name on the common mineral “alum”, which has been known since antiquity.
Davy wasn’t very consistent in his naming of the new metal. His first attempt was “alumium,” in 1807. Then he changed it to “aluminum.” Then in 1812 he changed it yet again, to “aluminium.” What he was apparently trying to do was to make the new name sound more like other elements such as sodium, magnesium, or potassium.
The situation stayed confusing for years; in England people were using the “-um” and “-ium” endings interchangeably, with “-ium” slowly gaining favor. In the US, the 1928 Webster’s Dictionary included only the “-um” version, which was in common use, but the “-ium” ending was used by US chemists throughout the 1800s. By the 1913 edition, Webster’s Dictionary included only the “-ium” version. US publications for non-scientists (newspapers, mostly) tended to use one or the other spelling sort of at random in the 1800s, although the “-ium” version was a bit more popular. At the turn of the 20th century, the “-um” version suddenly enjoyed an upturn and became the more common spelling. By 1915 the “-ium” version was starting to disappear in the US.
It’s really all Davy’s fault; if he’d simply stuck with his first idea (“alumium”) there wouldn’t have been any confusion. Maybe that’s why there’s a nonsense poem about Davy including these lines:
“Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy,
And lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.”
By the way, although aluminum is now widely available and pretty inexpensive, but the way it was extracted from ore until about 1855 was so difficult that the metal was considered rare, exotic, and more expensive than gold. Emperor Napoleon III had a set of aluminum tableware made; it was used only for state dinners because it was so impressive and valuable.
