Following up a Topical Words piece on the international spelling of what British English writes as
sulphur, many American subscribers wrote in to ask about another element with two spellings:
aluminium.
The metal was named by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy (who, you may recall, “abominated gravy, and lived in the odium of having discovered sodiumâ€), even though he was unable to isolate it: that took another two decades’ work by others. He derived the name from the mineral called
alumina, which itself had only been named in English by the chemist Joseph Black in 1790. Black took it from the French, who had based it on
alum, a white mineral that had been used since ancient times for dyeing and tanning, among other things. Chemically, this is potassium aluminium sulphate (a name which gives me two further opportunities to parade my British spellings of chemical names).
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. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred
aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in
–ium, like
potassium,
sodium, and
magnesium, all of which had been named by Davy.
