Aluminum

This is how they write "aluminium" in North America. An American friend was asking me about this curious misspelling and it seems she had never heard the story of how it came about.

The word is an eponym, of course. A Staffordshire iron-founder named Joshua Aluminium invented in 1844 a process for extracting the metal from bauxite, and it was named after him. (Oddly enough, "bauxite" is also eponymous: a Canadian fur-trader called Jean-Emile Baux was the first man to discover the medicinal uses of the ore, and Baux poultices are still widely used in rural Alberta.)

Joshua patented his invention and during the rest of the nineteenth century he and his sons grew extremely rich from the proceeds; Joshua himself was knighted in 1887. By 1914 his grandson, also called Joshua, owned many thousands of acres in Staffordshire and was elevated to the peerage as the first Viscount Aluminium.

As a captain in the Staffordshire Yeomanry he fought at Mons and suffered serious injury, having half his face blown away by a shell. However, he recovered and emigrated to Canada in 1924 after selling his estate.

Later that year two distinguished members of the Edmonton Golf Club were discussing some of the new players and one of them remarked "Of course, Aluminium's only got one eye...". This was overheard by the club steward who totally misunderstood the context and repeated the comment to his wife, a young teacher at Edmonton High. She thought it meant that the usual spelling of "aluminium" was wrong. and from then on taught all her pupils to leave out the second "i". The new spelling soon caught on in Canada and, like all new Canadian ideas, was quickly taken up throughout the United States.

This is just one of the many fascinating tales which are told and re-told wherever metallurgists foregather. In a later post I shall tell the story of the Sheffield chemist Arthur Stainless, whose new type of steel revolutionised the cutlery trade in the 1890s.

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