The Origin of Aluminum
Evan Zabawski | TLT From the Editor November 2010
Different spellings can be confounding.
Its original name is lost to history, its second made it well known, and its third was the first to become official.
While describing the potential sources of aluminum in a used oil analysis report (oddly enough to the staff of an aluminum rolling mill), I was inspired to write this column. After describing some possible sources as a wear metal, I asked if anyone knew what another source could be and was quickly answered by fingers pointing at the window in the training room toward the rolling mills.
This particular facility takes rolls of aluminum and cold-rolls them into varied widths and thicknesses depending on the customer’s end use. Some of the rolls are quite thin and are destined to become aluminum foil, slighter thicker rolls are used for beverage cans, thicker yet become hood panels for automobiles, and the thickest rolls could become nameplates for appliances. While the compression from rolling varied thicknesses is not likely to generate significant airborne particulate, certainly the trimming to desired widths could.
Conceding that valid point, I returned to the question to finish illustrating my point. I showed a slide showing the composition of the earth’s crust; the top three elements being oxygen (49.5%), silicon (25.7%) and aluminum (7. 5%). I explained that seeing silicon and aluminum in a 3:1 ratio often indicates the presence of dirt, while lone silicon simply indicates dust contamination. Without waiting to be asked the difference between dust and dirt, I offered that dust is largely from sand in the form of silicon dioxide, the most abundant mineral on earth. Dirt, or soil, is often in the form of aluminum silicate from kaolinite, another very common mineral in many parts of the world.
I then stated that since the spectrographic analysis employed in used oil analysis only reports individual elements, and not compounds, it becomes imperative to look for these correlations. Then someone spoke up and asked if silicon and silicone were the same thing and just different pronunciations like aluminum (a-loo-minum) and aluminium (al-ew-min-ee-um). They are not; silicon is an element and silicone is a polymer. However, this question reminded me of the debate over aluminum and aluminium.
The 13th element of the periodic table was proven to exist by British scientist Sir Humphry Davy in 1808, and originally named alumium (al-ew-me-um). Alum is a Latin word meaning “bitter salt,” and Davy had previously used the –ium suffix for his earlier discoveries: sodium, potassium and calcium. He continued using that convention for his later discoveries: barium, magnesium and strontium. In 1812 Davy revised alumium to aluminum for his book
Chemical Philosophy, but that wasn’t as final as one would suspect. It was immediately criticized in the review for his book, with the more classical sounding aluminium suggested instead.
North America adopted the second spelling, aluminum, and it became a permanent fixture after the mid-1880s when Charles Martin Hall, one of the founders of Alcoa, invented an inexpensive way of extracting aluminum from its compounds. It is claimed this is largely due to a misspelling in a handbill advertisement for his method, though some profess it was purposely chosen for having one less syllable and also for being easier to pronounce.
In 1926 the American Chemical Society officially decided on aluminium, and in 1990 the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry made it the international standard. Habits’ being hard to change after a century of usage, aluminum was listed as an accepted variant in 1993.
As strange as the variants might sound to our ears, it becomes a little hazy to settle on which pronunciation is really the correct one. Its original name is lost to history, its second made it well known, and its third was the first to become official. Let’s call it a draw.
When silicon levels are elevated on a used oil analysis report, the presence of aluminum can help differentiate between dust and dirt. If phosphorus were also present, this would indicate either an antiwear or extreme pressure additive chemistry. Correlation with zinc indicates antiwear, while extreme pressure oils may correlate against sulfur, or is it sulphur?
Evan Zabawski, CLS, is manager of training and education services for The Fluid Life Corp. in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. You can reach him at evan@fluidlife.com.