> > Some sympathy for your comment there but how many US cars are made of
> > aluminium ? Or Aloooominum as you perversely call it.
>
> Why do you Brits put the extra 'i' in aluminum?
Because we can spell.
Most of the rest of the world does too. It is the US spelling that is odd. The only other element ending "-inum" is "Platinum".
Whereas for "-inium" there are Actinium, Gadolinium, ProtoActinium, Einsteinium in addition to Aluminium. (I grant you that Einsteinium is not read the same way)
AFAIK American spelling has not culled the "i" out of these other elements.
Bullshit revisionist history. The terms alumium and aluminum were proposed by Davy but Aluminum never entered common use until around the 1900's when US writers started dropping the "i". Obviously they could not spell!
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Crude Aluminium was first made in Denmark by Oersted in 1825 using a method pioneered by Sir Humphrey Davy. Davy proposed naming the metal Alumium in 1807, then later Aluminum. By 1812 IUPAC had adopted the agreed Latinate name for Aluminium which was chosen to fit better with his other discoveries of Sodium and Potassium. Initially Aluminium metal was so very difficult to make and refine that it was a precious metal exhibited at trade shows.
The American Society for Chemistry formally dropped the "i" in 1925. Don't take my word for it.
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Prior to 1926 Aluminium was the officially accepted spelling in the USA.
Nope. The original word was Aluminum and was changed a few years=20 later.
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"Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812."
Did you actually read the reference that you posted? It clearly supports my version of events - from further down the page:
"Noah Webster=92s Dictionary of 1828 has only aluminum, though the standard spelling among US chemists throughout most of the nineteenth century was aluminium; "
"It=92s clear that the shift in the USA from =96ium to =96um took place progressively over a period starting in about 1895, when the metal began to be widely available and the word started to be needed in popular writing. It is easy to imagine journalists turning for confirmation to Webster=92s Dictionary, still the most influential work at that time, and adopting its spelling. "
The root cause is a spelling error in Websters US 1928 dictionary. That was compiled 16 years after the name of the element had been internationally standardised by IUPAC. American chemists used the correct spelling right up until the 1890's. The corrupted spelling only became dominant in the USA at the turn of the last century.
Note here that the free metal was so difficult to make that it had only ever been isolated in metallic form after the name standardisation had already occurred. It was undoubtedly called aluminium by then.
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