Po-tay-to, po-tah-to, aluminium, aluminum

I have never understood the dichotomy between the English spelling of aluminium and the American and (usually) Canadian spelling of aluminum.

As a transplanted Brit, I still find it hard to say aluminum here in Canada. It has always seemed self-evident to me that the "correct" spelling and pronunciation should be aluminium, as in sodium, magnesium, calcium, etc. Most of the world uses aluminium (or the Romanized aluminio). Even the Wikipedia article on the subject redirects from aluminum to aluminium. There can be no real excuse for aluminum, can there?

But then I got to thinking about platinum, molybdenum, tantalum, and figured I should do some research. Which means, of course, Wikipedia.

The truth, as ever, is not so simple. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) adopted aluminium as the standard international name for the element in 1990 but, just three years later, recognized aluminum as an acceptable variant. The IUPAC periodic table now includes both spellings, and its internal publications use the two with nearly equal frequency.

It turns out that the British chemist Humphrey Davy, who first isolated and named the element, actually initially called it alumium in a Royal Society of London journal in 1808. He then settled on aluminum in his "Chemical Philosophy" book of 1812. Aluminium only made its appearance later that same year, when an anonymous review of Davy's book in a British political-literary journal called the Quarterly Review journal, suggested that aluminium had a more "classical sound". It became the default spelling in Britain thereafter, and it seems that Davy himself did not object to it.

It could be argued, however, that aluminum may actually be more "correct" in that it was originally isolated from the mineral oxide alumina, in the same way as lanthanum is isolated from the oxide lanthana, whereas magnesium, cerium and thorium are isolated from their respective oxides magnesia, ceria and thoria.

Either way, the American preference for aluminum dates from Webster's Dictionary of 1828, as do so many American spellings, and it became well and truly standardized after (American) Charles Martin Hall chose the aluminum spelling for his new electrolytic method of producing the metal in 1892 (despite having used aluminium for all his patents between 1886 and 1903!)