|
As much as I hate to have to report this, 'aluminium' is the correct spelling.
Though 'aluminum' was proposed as a name for the element, 'aluminium' mirrors 'barium', 'magnesium', 'sodium' and 'strontium', which were all discovered around the same time, and so was the chosen name. An American named Charles Hall decided to market the stuff in the US in the late 1880s, so he formed the company now called Alcoa, and decided the name 'aluminum' had a better ring to it so he called it that. Everybody in the US (and Canada, I guess) used 'aluminum', and the official US name was changed in 1925.
I highly recommend "The Disappearing Spoon" by Sam Kean (from which I got most of the above info), which is a series of fun stories about the history of the chemical elements. It is light reading, but great historical trivia.
|