With as much cultural diversity in the U.S as there is, it's amazing Americans speak English at all.
TBH if it wasn't for the New Englanders, Englandians? Englishings? there is a solid chance Spanish or French would be the main language in the New World.
Well this is what it is like in America. Werid spellings. I don't really care that much about the spellings. Infact, for grey, I tend to spell it both ways. Grey and gray. Because it never bothered me on how to spell gray. And because I'm too lazy to remember which grey is the correct gray where I live. It is also annoying that we still use the imperial system. I perfer metric since it I'd easier and I can't remember some of imperial anyways. It would be easier when the bill was pass about the metric system said it was required to learn it, not optional. But, I guess that will never happen and America will be stuck with feet, inches and yards.
If you want to be pedantic, then technically aluminium is correct. This is what the discoverer of it ultimately named it. It's pretty much always been predominately spelt that way in the UK and everywhere else, with the exception of the US where it was the main way to spell it and preferred by US chemists before being overtaken by aluminum.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has offically standardised on aluminium.
I actually had this question come up repeatedly from my student teachers - who, in turn, were getting the question from their students while they were teaching.
The real reason there's a difference in spelling an pronunciation is depressingly...stupid: it was a typo.
Back in the day (before the mid 1880s), aluminum was a seriously precious metal. Not because it was rare, but because refining it was damn near impossible. As a direct result, its price was through the roof. Accumulations of aluminum in any use were a very effective show of wealth and standing. Napoleon gave his favored guests at banquets aluminum cutlery to dine with; the lesser guests had to make do with gold. The Washington Monument in DC was finished with a pyramidal piece of pure aluminum which would be like capping it in pure platinum today. (If you ever travel back to the 1880s, leave your modern beverages behind; you would've gotten mugged for a Coke can back then.)
Enter Charles Martin Hall, a backyard inventor. In 1881, he started messing around with aluminum refining. Since the stuff was so valuable, there was bound to be money in it. After a bunch of failed attempts (a couple of which almost burned down the shed he used for his experiments), he figured out the secret: dissolve alumina (aluminum oxide, the common form found in the aluminum ores bauxite and corundum) in cryolite (an aluminum halide) and run a current through it. The aluminum falls out on its own. Bingo, one ticket to riches.
Except Hall was, well, broke. Being an unsuccessful inventor didn't pay well, so while he knew how to refine aluminum, he didn't have the capital to actually put the process into practice. So, he starting running all over the country, giving demonstrations of his process in an attempt to find people to back him. The problem was that when he ran off his handbills for his talks, the metal was spelled wrong.
Reasons differ depending on who you ask. One story is that he made a typo on his own. Another is that the printer screwed up and dropped an I. The third is that one of them used Humphry Davy's misspelling that was in the Webster's Dictionary at the time. Whatever the reason, rather than following convention, the misspelling was popularized.
Ultimately, Hall found financial backing from Alfred E. Hunt. In 1886, when Hall filed his patent paperwork, he used the spelling aluminium. Unfortunately for Hall, someone else filed the same discovery half a world away at almost the exact same time: Paul Heroult, in France. Since nobody could say who was definitively first, they compromised and called it the Hall-Heroult Process.
Hall and Hunt went into business, forming the Reduction Company of Pittsburgh. Since that sounded like crap, they renamed it to the Aluminum Company of America, which was later shortened to a name we almost all know today: Alcoa. The price of aluminum crashed in a hurry, enabling its use in a wide variety of industries and applications, making it the super-useful metal we all know and love today.
And that's how Deputy Dog saved Christmas we ended up with aluminum and aluminium on the same planet. Technically, "aluminium" is the correct one, being recognized by IUPAC. (It was also the name recognized by ACS until 1925.) However, both are considered acceptable spellings.
So, that being the case, how the hell did we end up with all the non-"ium" elements? Well, that's actually easy to answer.
The "-ium" suffix didn't become an official thing until 1947, when IUPAC took control of the official naming of elements. Prior to that, everybody essentially followed the Roman pattern, which was to end all the names in "um." Before that came the Greeks, and they just named things whatever they jolly well pleased. These "ancient elements," as they're called, ended up with a ton of names because, well, they weren't exactly hard to find, so everybody who found it on their section of Earth gave it whatever name they wanted. The Romans called it "ferrum," but the Anglo-Saxons called it "iron." Aurum became gold. And basically, the name used most commonly in trade is the one that stuck.
Now, IUPAC can only approve names - it doesn't assign them - which means the whole "-ium" suffix standard is only a recommendation. But good luck getting your element name approved if they don't like it. Most scientists just bow to the convention, take whatever name they want and glue -ium to the end of it, which is how we end up with all kinds of weird crap like Protactinum (which is a stand-in for "precursor of actinium" since their original name was voted down by IUPAC) and Luteium which had no fewer than four names before that one was approved. Personally, I liked "celtium" but nobody asked me.)
As for the whole meter/metre debate:
Yeah, that one's just stubbornness. The whole "metre" thing is because the French insist on slapping their language on everything that holds still long enough, and they spell it metre. America did it phonetically and ended up with meter (like the device, which sounds exactly like the unit).
Curiously, though, "theatre" versus "theater" actually does denote a difference, namely...
...that one is movies/cinema and the other is live action. Technically, if you ask the average dictionary, you're going to get the "there's no difference except where you are on the planet," but if you ask anyone involved in film or live action, you're going to get a very different answer. "Theatre," being the traditional spelling, is the mark for live-action playhouses, while "theater" - itself an Americanized spelling - is used for the place showing an American invention: long-film format movies. (I say "long film" because the preceding French technology to do the same thing was a short loop. This is why scenes like the Roundhay Garden Scene are so short and looped; that was the best the tech had until Edison Labs turned out long-film.
All of the different spellings and pronunciations discussed here, well, I'm surprised that nobody's brought up Canada, where we tend to use both, but leaning towards the UK way of spelling things, such as the colour grey. Well, it's more of a shade, really. Although, I've said both Aluminium and Aluminum before. I tend to hear Aluminum more than Aluminium, though.
But the Metric system is standard here, and I don't even understand the Imperial system at all. Including with temperature. I mostly prefer SI units, give or, well, just give 273.
But the Metric system is standard here, and I don't even understand the Imperial system at all. Including with temperature. I mostly prefer SI units, give or, well, just give 273.
In Canada, distance, temperature, and volume are all metric, but height and weight is Imperial. We are more likely to say 6 feet tall instead of 1.83 meters or 200 pounds instead of 91 kilograms.
But the Metric system is standard here, and I don't even understand the Imperial system at all. Including with temperature. I mostly prefer SI units, give or, well, just give 273.
In Canada, distance, temperature, and volume are all metric, but height and weight is Imperial. We are more likely to say 6 feet tall instead of 1.83 meters or 200 pounds instead of 91 kilograms.
So what's the deal with stones for weight though
*glares at Great Britain and gives upside down eyebrow raise to Australia*
But the Metric system is standard here, and I don't even understand the Imperial system at all. Including with temperature. I mostly prefer SI units, give or, well, just give 273.
In Canada, distance, temperature, and volume are all metric, but height and weight is Imperial. We are more likely to say 6 feet tall instead of 1.83 meters or 200 pounds instead of 91 kilograms.
So what's the deal with stones for weight though
*glares at Great Britain and gives upside down eyebrow raise to Australia*
History strikes again, my favorite Dutch dude.
Once upon a time, stones were used to determine the weights of trade goods. If you had stones of a fixed weight, you could use them in a balance to figure out how much grain, hay, wool, or whatever someone was trying to sell you. Standardization wasn't much of a thing, but the Romans took a whack at it and got the furthest of any group in that field.
In the 1300s, the Brits came through and applied standards and rules, setting specific weights for stones for particular purposes. Stones for weighing beef were eight modern pounds, while those for, say, wax were 12. Some commodities had multiple stone weights. They applied rules, not sense.
Meanwhile, the Scots - who, historically, don't give a flying ducky about what the British want - came up with their own measurement. A stone was 16 pounds, period. That's 16 Scottish pounds, mind, which works out to 17 pounds 8 ounces in Imperial measurements.
And in Ireland which, at the time, didn't have to care what the Brits had to say either, set their own single-stone weight at 14 pounds.
For a long time, nobody agreed, and nobody cared. We do what we do, and you do what you do. Until you come over here to trade, then we do it our way.
Then in comes (dramatic music intro, please) the Weights and Measures Act of 1824. This singularly boring piece of legislation essentially ended the argument once and for all, setting values for all the units in use for trade so that nobody (primarily the British) would get ripped off anymore. Did this fix the stone issue once and for all? God, no. It nominally fixed a stone weight because it stated that a bale of wool should weigh as much as 20 stones, each weighing 14 pounds. But for some bizarre reason, it didn't bother to codify that as a stone weight. There were still a bunch of stone weights that, while no longer official, were still in common use in trade. This resulted in (MUSIC, PLEASE!) the Weights and Measures Act of 1835 which was essentially written to answer all of the Lost-style questions left by the Act of 1824. It established that three units would be used from here on out: the pound, the kilogram, and the stone. Moreover, it established the relationship between all of them. The Irish stone was adopted for its value, and became the standard of 14 pounds.
Now, this worked for a good long while until, in 1965, the Brits decided everybody had gotten too comfortable and decided "hey, we're going metric!" This should have been the end of the stone but, nope, it lived on more or less for nostalgia reasons. That and the Scots said absolutely not, no, you've ruined everything else but we're keeping this. The occasions where stones are still used as a unit of measure are unofficial and, largely, archaic and/or nostalgic.
Is this the end of the issue? Nope. And this is where @Kouji_San is going to spit out his coffee. See, it turns out that one of the last holdouts in using the stone measurement is...the Netherlands! Yes! Those crazy, funloving Dutch dudes decided that the metric system shouldn't stand in the way of a wacky tradition and kept the stone as a unit. But they did the sensible thing and made it equal to a kilogram. So while the Dutch Stone is a unit, it's essentially the appendix of units.
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
First of all, you owe me a coffee! But, aren't them Brits still using a combination of pounds and stones for body weight? I assume informally as it was banned for commercial use. However, I do keep hearing them talk about stones and pounds instead of Kg
The only instances of the Imperial system I see on a regular basis here is on the roads. For some reason we still have yards, miles, etc. Just switch to metres and kilometres already! So much neater.
Comments
TBH if it wasn't for the New Englanders, Englandians? Englishings? there is a solid chance Spanish or French would be the main language in the New World.
No Americans Never Did Nothing Ever.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has offically standardised on aluminium.
And that's standardised not standardized!
Here, everyone's talking about "Aluminum" or "Aluminium" but has no one considered the superior version, "Alimnum"
You all disgust me...
Troll Face or Troul Faice
The real reason there's a difference in spelling an pronunciation is depressingly...stupid: it was a typo.
Enter Charles Martin Hall, a backyard inventor. In 1881, he started messing around with aluminum refining. Since the stuff was so valuable, there was bound to be money in it. After a bunch of failed attempts (a couple of which almost burned down the shed he used for his experiments), he figured out the secret: dissolve alumina (aluminum oxide, the common form found in the aluminum ores bauxite and corundum) in cryolite (an aluminum halide) and run a current through it. The aluminum falls out on its own. Bingo, one ticket to riches.
Except Hall was, well, broke. Being an unsuccessful inventor didn't pay well, so while he knew how to refine aluminum, he didn't have the capital to actually put the process into practice. So, he starting running all over the country, giving demonstrations of his process in an attempt to find people to back him. The problem was that when he ran off his handbills for his talks, the metal was spelled wrong.
Reasons differ depending on who you ask. One story is that he made a typo on his own. Another is that the printer screwed up and dropped an I. The third is that one of them used Humphry Davy's misspelling that was in the Webster's Dictionary at the time. Whatever the reason, rather than following convention, the misspelling was popularized.
Ultimately, Hall found financial backing from Alfred E. Hunt. In 1886, when Hall filed his patent paperwork, he used the spelling aluminium. Unfortunately for Hall, someone else filed the same discovery half a world away at almost the exact same time: Paul Heroult, in France. Since nobody could say who was definitively first, they compromised and called it the Hall-Heroult Process.
Hall and Hunt went into business, forming the Reduction Company of Pittsburgh. Since that sounded like crap, they renamed it to the Aluminum Company of America, which was later shortened to a name we almost all know today: Alcoa. The price of aluminum crashed in a hurry, enabling its use in a wide variety of industries and applications, making it the super-useful metal we all know and love today.
And that's how Deputy Dog saved Christmas we ended up with aluminum and aluminium on the same planet. Technically, "aluminium" is the correct one, being recognized by IUPAC. (It was also the name recognized by ACS until 1925.) However, both are considered acceptable spellings.
So, that being the case, how the hell did we end up with all the non-"ium" elements? Well, that's actually easy to answer.
Now, IUPAC can only approve names - it doesn't assign them - which means the whole "-ium" suffix standard is only a recommendation. But good luck getting your element name approved if they don't like it. Most scientists just bow to the convention, take whatever name they want and glue -ium to the end of it, which is how we end up with all kinds of weird crap like Protactinum (which is a stand-in for "precursor of actinium" since their original name was voted down by IUPAC) and Luteium which had no fewer than four names before that one was approved. Personally, I liked "celtium" but nobody asked me.)
As for the whole meter/metre debate:
Curiously, though, "theatre" versus "theater" actually does denote a difference, namely...
Tada.
But the Metric system is standard here, and I don't even understand the Imperial system at all. Including with temperature. I mostly prefer SI units, give or, well, just give 273.
In Canada, distance, temperature, and volume are all metric, but height and weight is Imperial. We are more likely to say 6 feet tall instead of 1.83 meters or 200 pounds instead of 91 kilograms.
So what's the deal with stones for weight though
*glares at Great Britain and gives upside down eyebrow raise to Australia*
History strikes again, my favorite Dutch dude.
In the 1300s, the Brits came through and applied standards and rules, setting specific weights for stones for particular purposes. Stones for weighing beef were eight modern pounds, while those for, say, wax were 12. Some commodities had multiple stone weights. They applied rules, not sense.
Meanwhile, the Scots - who, historically, don't give a flying ducky about what the British want - came up with their own measurement. A stone was 16 pounds, period. That's 16 Scottish pounds, mind, which works out to 17 pounds 8 ounces in Imperial measurements.
And in Ireland which, at the time, didn't have to care what the Brits had to say either, set their own single-stone weight at 14 pounds.
For a long time, nobody agreed, and nobody cared. We do what we do, and you do what you do. Until you come over here to trade, then we do it our way.
Then in comes (dramatic music intro, please) the Weights and Measures Act of 1824. This singularly boring piece of legislation essentially ended the argument once and for all, setting values for all the units in use for trade so that nobody (primarily the British) would get ripped off anymore. Did this fix the stone issue once and for all? God, no. It nominally fixed a stone weight because it stated that a bale of wool should weigh as much as 20 stones, each weighing 14 pounds. But for some bizarre reason, it didn't bother to codify that as a stone weight. There were still a bunch of stone weights that, while no longer official, were still in common use in trade. This resulted in (MUSIC, PLEASE!) the Weights and Measures Act of 1835 which was essentially written to answer all of the Lost-style questions left by the Act of 1824. It established that three units would be used from here on out: the pound, the kilogram, and the stone. Moreover, it established the relationship between all of them. The Irish stone was adopted for its value, and became the standard of 14 pounds.
Now, this worked for a good long while until, in 1965, the Brits decided everybody had gotten too comfortable and decided "hey, we're going metric!" This should have been the end of the stone but, nope, it lived on more or less for nostalgia reasons. That and the Scots said absolutely not, no, you've ruined everything else but we're keeping this. The occasions where stones are still used as a unit of measure are unofficial and, largely, archaic and/or nostalgic.
Is this the end of the issue? Nope. And this is where @Kouji_San is going to spit out his coffee. See, it turns out that one of the last holdouts in using the stone measurement is...the Netherlands! Yes! Those crazy, funloving Dutch dudes decided that the metric system shouldn't stand in the way of a wacky tradition and kept the stone as a unit. But they did the sensible thing and made it equal to a kilogram. So while the Dutch Stone is a unit, it's essentially the appendix of units.
This comic by The Oatmeal hits the nail on the head in my opinion.