Hey, nerd fan.
Welcome to Uno Dos of Trace.
I am Trace.
Today, aluminum versus aluminium.
Which is the better one, and what is the bloody difference?
3, 2, 1, questions.
I started thinking about this because during the last Apple
announcement that was pretty recently,
Jony Ives' voice came out.
And he said,
Structural aluminium bands.
And I started thinking, why is it
that Jony Ives says aluminium and all of us say aluminum?
Are they the same thing?
What's going on?
So I tweeted about it, actually, and I tweeted aluminimum,
and then everybody made fun of me-- but you know what?
Now there's a video, so take that, grammar jerks.
Aluminum is the 13th element.
It's a metal, it's not magnetic, it's nontoxic,
it's lightweight, and it's strong.
Sounds like somebody else I know.
Sorry.
And it is the third most common element on our planet
after oxygen and silicon.
And it's the most common metal.
It comprises 8% of all the soil and rocks on planet Earth.
Yeah, aluminum is everywhere.
It's been used for almost 7,000 years
because it exists in regular clay.
So potters in Persia, they were using aluminum
in this clay to make strong containers back in 5000 BCE.
But they didn't know that, of course.
It wasn't isolated from bauxite and from minerals
until the 19th century.
And here's where we get the problemo-- aluminum
versus aluminium.
Because whoever discovers an element gets to name it.
And this one's a doozy, and here's the breakdown.
In North America-- that is, the United States and Canada,
everyone pretty much says aluminum.
But everywhere else, people say aluminium.
And it's that extra i that trips you up.
It's not just a pronunciation thing,
it's actually two separate words.
It's basically the fault of a handful
of nerds, an anonymous jerk, and capitalism's success.
America!
Aluminum comes from alum.
Alum is a chemical class that refers
to anything that is a hydrated double salt.
Basically it's a molecule that holds a metal iron
in a cage of water molecules.
They're crystal and they're super useful.
There are lots of different alums,
but we're not here to talk about that.
The perp here is aluminum sulfate.
And in 1887, a chemist named Sir Humphrey Davy
isolated a bit of the element number 13 from alum.
They knew it was there, they just
had to figure out how to get it out of there.
And he named it--
you're gonna love this--
alumium.
[LAUGHS] You're not crazy.
That is neither aluminum nor aluminium.
But Davy, he's a weirdo, OK?
Alumium sort of sounds OK next to things like potassium
and sodium, calcium and magnesium,
which Davy would also isolate a name.
But when he published his book in 1812
called Elements of Chemical Philosophy, Davy, Davy,
Humphry, Davy.
He changed the name.
He changed it to aluminum.
So it was alumium, and then he made it aluminum.
This is 1812.
This is where a lot of the stories stop,
and it took me a while to find this.
But that same year in 1812, someone reviewed Davy's book--
an anonymous writer in a British political literature journal
called The Quarterly Review.
And they wrote about his book that they
hated the name aluminum.
They hated it.
They said, we're going to take the liberty of writing the word
aluminium, because it sounds more classical.
Oh my God, that's so great.
You really cannot get more bitchy than an anonymous-maybe
scientist writing in a quarterly literature journal that he
hates the name that you picked for the element that you found.
That is just the best and I love it so much.
The pronunciations were both in literature
and they were interchangeable for a long time
until Noah Webster put aluminum in the American Webster's
Dictionary.
He put the dic in dictionary as well, by the way.
We will talk about him another time.
Then the Europeans, they adopted the aluminium version.
So that's where the split starts.
But the thing that really drove the spike
into the middle of the word, driving the i out of the United
States version forever, is journalism and capitalism.
See, at the time, aluminum was super rare.
Napoleon III was said to actually bring aluminum cutlery
out when he had fancy guests, leaving the gold and silver
for the monsieur Tout-le-monde--
French version of average Joe.
I love idioms, it's a thing.
Aluminum was so rare, that the largest pyramid of it ever made
in the 1880s topped the Washington Monument.
It was 2.8 kilos and 23 centimeters tall.
And before it was installed, it was
displayed at Tiffany's jewelry store
in New York, because again, super rare, fancy-ass metal.
It cost $225 to buy it from the foundry in Philadelphia--
that's about $5,500 today--
but aluminum peaked at 230 dollars per kilo.
And the reason journalists started writing about it is
because something would change the cost of aluminum,
which would cause the price to go from that peak down
to $0.20.
An American chemist named Charles Martin Hall,
and separately a French scientist
named Paul Heroult discovered how
to pull vast quantities of aluminum out of solution
using electricity and electrodes.
It was the first time it was ever done,
so when a super-rare expensive metal suddenly
is everywhere and floods the market,
journalists are going to write about it
and capitalists are going to sell it.
So now aluminum is everywhere, it's spreading far
and wide, US production is huge--
this one's for you, Davy!
USA!
Aluminum!
And that's how we ended up with aluminum versus aluminium.
And then that was further solidified when the American
Chemical Society decided to switch
from aluminum to aluminium in 1925, officially cementing--
casting?
All aluminum for the future in the US as the one
without the other i.
And that's the whole story of how we ended up
with aluminum versus aluminium.
Almost.
This isn't the only element with two names.
There's also tungsten, which is known as wolfram.
And for more on that, check the Easter egg.
Regardless of which word you prefer for the element,
I love the idea that two scientists both discovered it
and purified it at the same time in the capitalistic sense,
and Davy and other scientists were all
working together to try and make this element real.
They didn't even have the periodic table.
They knew there was a hole in the amount of knowledge
that they had and they were just trying to fill it.
And since so many people were working on at the same time,
once they discovered it, things got messy.
Because science, just like life, is super weird and messy,
and I just love that.
Thanks for joining me here, nerd fam.
Y'all are the best.
Thanks for tuning in and helping me tell these amazing stories.
You can find me on Patreon, you can find me
on Twitter and Instagram and everywhere else.
Check out more videos here on the channel.
There'll be another one next week.
I love you all, I'll see you next time.