Sir Humphrey Davy, its discoverer, called it Aluminum when he published his work Chemical Philosophy in 1812.
Some anonymous dilettante (anonymous to this day!) thought, upon reviewing said book, it sounded better (more classical) with the extra I and syllable.
Everybody calls Aluminum's oxide Alumina, not Aluminia.
Nobody else seems to feel the need to rename Platinum Platinium, or Molybdenum Molybdenium, or Tantalum Tantalium.
We Americans too often like to mock other cultures for being different, and our basis is usually wrong when we do. Maybe mocking our pronunciation and spelling isn't a habit you want to hold on to.
Depends where you live. The article is on bbc.co.uk and Aluminium is the usual spelling used in the UK.
From Wikipedia:
"Two variants of the metal's name are in current use, aluminium and aluminum (besides the obsolete alumium). The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) adopted aluminium as the standard international name for the element in 1990 but, three years later, recognized aluminum as an acceptable variant. Hence their periodic table includes both. IUPAC prefers the use of aluminium in its internal publications, although nearly as many IUPAC publications use the spelling aluminum.
Most countries use the spelling aluminium. In the United States and Canada, the spelling aluminum predominates. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary prefers aluminum, whereas the Australian Macquarie Dictionary prefers aluminium. In 1926, the American Chemical Society officially decided to use aluminum in its publications; American dictionaries typically label the spelling aluminium as "chiefly British"." [1]
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 the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: "Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and 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."[67][68]
Davy settled on aluminum by the time he published his 1812 book Chemical Philosophy
To be fair he didn't know what he wanted to call it. "In 1808, Humphry Davy identified the existence of a metal base of alum, which he at first termed alumium...", so whoever the dilettante was can't blame them to too much, for wanted to have a standard spelling for it.
> We should respect the name which the discoverer gave to it.
Why?
I have a feeling if Americans said "aluminium" and Brits said "aluminum", you wouldn't be saying this. I see no reason why the discoverer's naming deserves any special status.
> I see no reason why the discoverer's naming deserves any special status.
At its most basic, this is one of the main currencies of science. Remember what happened with apatosaurus / brontosaurus?
This is a practice that most people will agree without persuasion is "fair", that certain people care about a great deal, and that costs society nothing. What's wrong with it?
As a mark of respect, I agree. However languages don't work that way. I've changed my stance over the years to whatever works in the name of communication. Language is fluid so our attitude needs to be fluid too.
There is no real discoverer. Its like crediting Columbus with discovering America? Or Al Gore with inventing the internet?
Wolfram story is probably a decent analogy. Some Swede described an ore in a book and named it after himself, then a sample of his ore that was contaminated with wolframite (named by german Agricola, yes, by that famous Agricola) had an acid extraction run on it, that resulted in what we'd now call impure raw tungstic acid. A lot of people thought that acid was pretty interesting but it took some Spanish dudes to reduce the acid to a completely worthless metal. Then two centuries later one American dude came up with a way of purification and heat treatment such that it finally made a decent wire for electric light bulb (no, not the guy you're thinking of, a plant scale engineer decades after the inventor) and then General Electric (at that time an American company unlike now) tried to patent the whole process. Such that in the 1920s, or whatever it was, you'd have a chemical element where its only industrial production was patented, which sounds crazy in 2013 but wasn't all that unusual about a century ago. And that patent got overturned if I recall correctly (no I'm not that old, just from memory)
The point of this ramble about Schelium metal lightbulbs is given some research there IS NO DISCOVERER. Other than the victor writes the histories and such, which is trivially interesting from a sociological perspective but has no actual hard science meaning.
Sir Humphrey Davy first used the word aluminia but Charles Marting Hall was the first person to come up with an inexpensive way to produce aluminum, which is what brought the metal in to wide spread commercial use.[1]
The IUPAC standard name is aluminium, aluminum is listed as a variant (but only at the insistence of Americans I'd bet). What we mock is the pretentiousness of claims like "more legitimacy". Insecure, much?
Sir Humphrey Davy, its discoverer, called it Aluminum when he published his work Chemical Philosophy in 1812.
Some anonymous dilettante (anonymous to this day!) thought, upon reviewing said book, it sounded better (more classical) with the extra I and syllable.
Everybody calls Aluminum's oxide Alumina, not Aluminia.
Nobody else seems to feel the need to rename Platinum Platinium, or Molybdenum Molybdenium, or Tantalum Tantalium.
We Americans too often like to mock other cultures for being different, and our basis is usually wrong when we do. Maybe mocking our pronunciation and spelling isn't a habit you want to hold on to.