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Modern Marvels – Aluminium

You can tear it with two fingers; you can build space ships with it. In this DVD get all the fascinating info about this endlessly versatile material. •For over a decade, MODERN MARVELS has brought grand stories to life. •The ultimate celebration and investigation of engineering excellence. •From the tip of the Washington Monument to the six-pack in your fridge, aluminum is everywhere! Celebrating ingenuity, invention and imagination brought to life on a grand scale, MODERN MARVELS® tells the fascinating stories of the doers, dreamers and sometime-schemers who created everyday items, technological breakthroughs and man-made wonders. Though ubiquitous, aluminum is not your everyday metal. This episode of MODERN MARVELS® ranges far and wide to uncover the origins and applications of this amazing material. Once considered more precious than gold, aluminum can be stretched, pounded, melted and even turned into foam. Did you know that aluminum is made out of a powder? MODERN MARVELS® takes you to the widest rolling mill in the world where skins for the largest jets are made. Then take off to NASA to see how aluminum is used to make reflective mirrors for telescopes. And what survey of aluminum would be complete without discovering the process of making aluminum foil? And why are aluminum baseball bats better than wood? Fear not, all your pressing aluminum questions are answered in MODERN MARVELS: ALUMINUM

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  1. Doesn’t matter how you spell it…it’s poison, and it’s everywhere! It’s cheap and makes a lott of people a lott of money.

  2. Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in –ium, like potassium, sodium, and magnesium, all of which had been named by Davy.

    The spelling in –um continued in occasional use in Britain for a while, though that in –ium soon predominated. In the USA, the position was more complicated. Noah Webster’s Dictionary of 1828 has only aluminum, though the standard spelling among US chemists throughout most of the nineteenth century was aluminium; it was the preferred version in The Century Dictionary of 1889 and is the only spelling given in the Webster Unabridged Dictionary of 1913. Searches in an archive of American newspapers show a most interesting shift. Up to the 1890s, both spellings appear in rough parity, though with the –ium version slightly the more common, but after about 1895 that reverses quite substantially, with the decade starting in 1900 having the –um spelling about twice as common as the alternative; in the following decade the –ium spelling crashes to a few hundred compared to half a million examples of –um.

  3. Yo guys, check the dictionary- They’re right and you’re jerks

  4. Agree, as the morons can not even spell the name of the element correctly doubt is cast over the veracity of the entire documentary.

  5. They can’t even spell it correctly .. it’s aluminIum