Originally Posted by pdurrant
Neither is incorrect. But Aluminium is more correct than Aluminum
The person who named it was Sir Humphrey Davy, and after dithering a bit, he settled on aluminium in 1812. Among chemists throughout the 1800s, the preferred spelling was aluminium. Unfortunately Webster's Dictionary of 1838 gave aluminum, corrected in the 1913 Webster Unabridged Dictionary, which gave Aluminium as the only spelling.
But by 1913 it was too late. Up to about 1890 Aluminium was rare and expensive because it was so difficult to isolate. But from about 1890 onwards, with the introduction of the Bayer process of refining bauxite to alumina, and the Hall-Héroult process of reducing alumina to aluminium, it became widely available and written about. An any American checking the popular Websters dictionary would find it spelled aluminum.
So in the first couple of decades of the 20th Century, aluminum became so much the preferred spelling in America, that the American Chemical Society officially adopted that spelling in 1925.
The other spelling has had the last word though. In 1990, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially standardised on aluminium.
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