Materials Science vs Material Science

Is it 'material science' or 'materials science'?

According to English Language & Usage Stack Exchange, it's primarily materials science because material science already meant something else when the field of study came into being in the 1910s.

In an answer submitted by user Peter Shor...

It's materials science because material is also an adjective. The phrase material science, as opposed to, say, spiritual science, was used before people started studying the science of materials. Consider this Ngram:

If you search in Google Books for "material science" before 1910, you get hits like

What does material science know about things of the soul? The world of spirit outside material science. Material science takes up the objects of the world and interprets them. 

Presumably, the science of materials was named materials science to avoid confusion with this phrase.

I don't know what Peter Shor's bona fides are, but it sounds like a good answer to me. 

Aluminum =/= aluminium

When I was a college student at the University of Aberdeen (I spent my junior year from Wabash overseas in Scotland, doncha know) I was admonished by one of my professors for misspelling the element aluminum. 

See, he didn't know I was an American, and I didn't know - at the time - that the Brits spelled aluminum with an extra i - aluminium.

So, just why do we spell that element differently than they do?

For a few years now I've been telling a story of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) changing the name because it sounded better in their advertising back in the 1880's.

The story that Michael Quinion tells in his book Port Out, Starboard Home about the etymology of words and phrases in the English language is somewhat similar to that but isn't quite the same.

Check out the story in his book - or on Google Books here.