• tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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      11 months ago

      Sounds like the British guy who discovered it settled on the spelling without the extra i

      A January 1811 summary of one of Davy’s lectures at the Royal Society mentioned the name aluminium as a possibility. The next year, Davy published a chemistry textbook in which he used the spelling aluminum.

        • psud@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          It was called aluminum for a long time universally. Everyone else changed to aluminium when it was discovered to be an element and was renamed to meet the naming scheme of the time

          America kept the old word. I’m half surprised America doesn’t call gold aurium

            • odium@programming.dev
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              11 months ago

              Im saying that it’s not a typo if the creator of a word spells it a certain way multiple times in a book. They clearly meant to spell it that way when they were writing the book.

    • samus12345@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The term aluminum was created by the man who first identified the existence of the element, British chemist Humphry Davy. Davy originally referred to the element as alumium but ultimately altered the name to aluminum.

      The term aluminium emerged around the same time as Davy’s aluminum. This term seems to have been motivated by a desire to give the element a name that sounded more like classical Latin, which was in line with other known elements at the time whose names ended in –ium, such as magnesium and calcium.

      The American spelling was first.