Posted
on December 13, 2013
Charles
Dickens is well known as the author who wrote such famous novels as Great
Expectations, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield.
However, he wrote lots more than novels, including plays, short stories, and
non-fiction.
One
bit of Dickens's writing I discovered recently is Household Words:
A Weekly Journal. The journal, which was published for almost a
decade, was edited by Dickens, but he wrote a great deal of it, too.
Here
is what he published on this date in 1856:
“What do you think of a metal as white as silver, as unalterable as gold, as easily melted as copper, as tough as iron; which is malleable, ductile, and with the singular quality of being lighter than glass? Such a metal does exist, and that in considerable quantities on the surface of the globe.”
Do
you know what metal Dickens is describing?
It
turns out that it's (drumroll, please) aluminum.
Although
aluminum is the third most abundant element in the earth's crust, it
is the most recently discovered element in common use, and it wasn't
until 1854 that people learned how to produce items with it!
(Remember, people started using iron, gold, silver, and copper
thousands of years ago, compared to a mere 160 years ago for
aluminum!)
Dickens
went on to say that aluminum may become more and more useful in
households, because of its light weight. He wrote: “It may probably
send tin to the right-about-face, drive copper saucepans into penal
servitude, and blow up German-silver sky-high into nothing.
Henceforth, respectable babies will be born with aluminium spoons in
their mouths.”
(German
silver is a mix of metals: copper, nickel, and often zinc. It used to
be used a lot more in the past than it is now. And Dickens's guess
about aluminum bumping tin and copper into less use is right-on as
well. Spoons, like other Western cutlery, are generally made from
stainless steel, nowadays, BUT we still say that rich kids are born
with silver—not aluminum—spoons in their mouths!)
Aluminium
or aluminum?
I
don't know if you noticed that my Dickens quote said aluminium,
while I've been saying aluminum? The metallic element is spelled differently, with an extra “i,” in addition to being
pronounced differently, in Britain and other English-speaking locales
than it is in Canada and the U.S. Dickens lived in England,
therefore he used aluminium; I live in the U.S., thus my spell
check program and I use aluminum.
By
the way, Dickens thought the metal's name was too much of a mouthful,
and he suggested that a shorter name be adopted if the metal were to
have any success in being used. I'm glad to see that we North
Americans, at least, took his advice and made the name one syllable
shorter!
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