Precious Metal and a Naming Dispute

For a few decades aluminium was valued above gold precisely because it was so hard to isolate. Napoleon III is said to have reserved aluminium cutlery for his most honoured guests, and the capstone of the Washington Monument was cast in aluminium in 1884 as a display of a semiprecious metal. The abrupt collapse of its price after 1886 turned it into the commonplace material of foil and aircraft within a generation, a rare case of a metal falling from luxury to ubiquity.

The element also carries a lasting naming dispute: Humphry Davy first proposed alumium, then aluminum, before aluminium was standardised, and American usage retains the older aluminum. Napoleon III's interest was not merely ceremonial: he funded Henri Sainte-Claire Deville's research into aluminium production in the hope of lightening military equipment, and Deville's improved chemical process, unveiled at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, put bars of the metal on public display as a scientific marvel before electrolysis made it cheap. The spelling dispute was formally settled only in 1990, when the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry adopted aluminium as the standard international name while recognising aluminum as an acceptable variant, cementing a difference in usage that still divides British and American English today.