In the spirit of Thanksgiving, a little bit of American vs British English discussion.
A couple of days ago Kat Day wrote a blog post about the
spelling of sulfur/sulphur, which started a conversation that eventually landed on the aluminum/aluminium
controversy. I became aware when Stuart Cantrill brought me into the conversation
on the basis of a Nature Chemistry thesis that Brett Thornton and I wrote recently
on element suffixes. The aluminum/aluminium issue was mentioned in passing, but was one of many
tangential anecdotes that were truncated due to limited space. A little web
searching by others yielded a couple of articles by Grammarphobia and World Wide Words on the topic.
Brett and I (but mostly Brett) did some more research and think there’s more
here than the common knowledge. Here are some thoughts and speculation. Consider this a working hypothesis as there are pieces of the puzzle we are still chasing down.
First, the "Latin-sounding" argument is probably
the reverse, as we noted in the thesis. Aluminum is too Latin-like, which was the complaint, not the reverse. We are not 100%
sure about this as the Quarterly Review was a literary journal, and early 19th
century English can be magniloquent. It was however, a literary argument
similar to Ampere wanting to rename fluorine phtorine. Either way, Humphry Davy's
original nomenclature clearly didn't stick, since everyone used
aluminium. Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue credits Webster with pushing the aluminum spelling in America. That's
plausible since Webster was big on simplifications; however, most of these
were routinely ignored. As soon as he died in 1843, his heirs promptly
removed many of his "simplified" words from his eponymous
dictionary.
The 1870 edition of Webster's dictionary has neither aluminum or aluminium.
The 1913 edition has both. We haven't been able to check all the intervening
editions, but we believe the 1844 version, the last by Webster himself,
has aluminum. If Webster was basing his words on Davy's chemistry texts,
which is not an unreasonable assumption, he would have found the word
"aluminum", which was promptly expunged after Webster died because no one was using it (just like other Webster spellings such as ‘tung’
for ‘tongue’). So the problem with crediting Webster is that no one
paid any attention to aluminum before Webster died. If it wasn't Webster
who changed the spelling, who did?
Wikipedia had a juicy, unreferenced
tidbit in the entry for Charles Martin Hall of the Hall-Heroult Process fame.
They credit Hall for misspelling aluminium on a "handbill
publicizing his aluminum refinement process",
and subsequently this spelling took off in the US. There is more on this in a book called "Boron Group."
It adds that Hall used the -ium suffix on all his patent applications and
the supposed handbill was from 1892. Hall's company (now Alcoa) was named the "Pittsburg
Reduction Company" in 1888. It was changed to "Aluminum Company
of America" in 1907, so clearly aluminum had supplanted aluminium by then. The archives have a lot of referrals
to aluminum for the 1880s (before the 1892 handbill), exactly when
Al went from curiosity to a practical metal, which is also when the nomenclature might have changed. Our
hunch is that this was Hall's doing, perhaps unintentionally, but his 1889
patent says aluminium throughout. Why didn't he use the aluminum
spelling that was also in use?
The Washington Monument cap, was cast from Al in 1884 just
before Hall's work. The corresponding patent from William Frishmuth for refining Al from 1884 used aluminium just like Hall's patent. This suggests
that the accepted spelling in the 1880s was probably aluminium, so it seems pretty conclusive that Webster's use of aluminum in the 1820s didn't stick.
Of course ACS changed to aluminum in 1925, and IUPAC took the other route in 1990.
