The earliest citation given in the
Oxford English Dictionary for any word used as a name for this element is
alumium, which British chemist and inventor
Humphry Davy employed in 1808 for the metal he was trying to isolate electrolytically from the mineral
alumina. The citation is from his journal
Philosophical Transactions: "Had I been so fortunate as..to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium."
[29]
By 1812, Davy had settled on
aluminum. He wrote in the journal
Chemical Philosophy: "As yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state."
[30] But the same year, an anonymous contributor to the
Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, objected to
aluminum and proposed the name
aluminium, "for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound."
[31]
The
-ium suffix had the advantage of conforming to the precedent set in other newly discovered elements of the time: potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, and
strontium (all of which Davy had isolated himself). Nevertheless,
-um spellings for elements were not unknown at the time, as for example
platinum, known to Europeans since the sixteenth century,
molybdenum, discovered in 1778, and
tantalum, discovered in 1802.
Americans adopted
-ium to fit the standard form of the periodic table of elements, for most of the nineteenth century, with
aluminium appearing in
Webster's Dictionary of 1828. In 1892, however, Charles Martin Hall used the
-um spelling in an advertising handbill for his new electrolytic method of producing the metal, despite his constant use of the
-ium spelling in all the patents
[26] he filed between 1886 and 1903.
[32] It has consequently been suggested that the spelling reflects an easier to pronounce word with one fewer syllable, or that the spelling on the flier was a mistake. Hall's domination of production of the metal ensured that the spelling
aluminum became the standard in North America; the
Webster Unabridged Dictionary of 1913, though, continued to use the
-ium version.
In 1926, the
American Chemical Society officially decided to use
aluminum in its publications; American dictionaries typically label the spelling
aluminium as a British variant.
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