Tin Foil and Popular Demand...

It's thin, it's shiny and you wrap your food in it. You can also wrap your head in it if you want to keep out the government's prying eyes. And, if push comes to shove, you can repair your television antenna with it.

But what is it called?

Well, like many Americans, I apply the misnomer of 'tin foil' to the magic metal that rolls off in a sheet and tears with those deadly little teeth on the side of the box. The term has been incorrectly applied to aluminium foil since the 1920's, when aluminium was substituted for tin in foil production. Aluminium was found to be far more useful than tin - it is more flexible and durable as well as being non-reactive with foods. Tin foil was used primarily for non-edible items such as cigarettes and for coating cylinders for recording music. But tin is still easier to say. It slides off the tongue.

Some other interesting facts about Aluminium Foil:

• It is only 99% aluminium. The other 1% is other materials which help the foil resist tearing.



• Regular duty foil is about .0005 inches thick.




• Aluminium foil dipped in water is excellent for polishing steel.




• 1.3 billion lbs of foil were produced in the United States last year - 75% of which was used for packaging of foods and cosmetics. These materials are particularly easy to recycle - in fact, recycling takes considerably less energy than the initial extraction process.




• The Brits say "Aluminium", in North America we call in "Aluminum". We're much more efficient with our syllables.




• The shiny/dull side debate rages on: in the production process, two sheets of foil are rolled together. The sides of the sheets that contact the rollers come out shiny, the sides that contact the other roll of foil are duller (88% vs 80% reflectivity). However, exhaustive research has shown that wrapping food with the shiny side out is not any more effective for heat transferring in the cooking process. In fact, the results are so minute as to require expensive and absurd digital devices to measure (I probably have one in my shed, though, if you want to try).




• Mylar - another substance sometimes mistaken for aluminium foil, is actually PET film (biaxially oriented). And no, this is not the stuff they use to make "Mylar balloons"- that is a metalized nylon material. Another misnomer.

Some other great misnomers that are rarely pointed out in conversation by uppity materials engineers:

• The "lead" in pencils has always been a graphite and clay mixture- it was just believed in the first part of the last century that graphite was a form of lead ore (of course, it isn't).




• We still call it "filming" when we use digital media to capture moving images.




• Most people refer to wind turbines as "windmills", even though there is no milling equipment associated with them any longer.




• "Leaded crystal" is not crystalline at all, but is in fact glass, which has no crystal structure. It does, however, have lead in it.




• "Grape Nuts" are made of neither grapes nor nuts.




• "Rocky Mountain Oysters" are not sea food, and are rarely harvest in the Rocky Mountains. No shucking is involved in eating these delicacies.




• "Horny Toads" are neither promiscuous nor toads. They are perfectly well-behaved lizards.




• "Tear Gas" is not actually a gas, but a light-weight solid (crystalline) substance which is propelled through the air by a gas canister.




• "Panama Hats" originated in Ecuador. They got their name from their use during the construction of the Panama canal.




• The "Big Ten" conference has 11 teams in it.

Some interesting things that are done with aluminium foil:

An article about the effectiveness of aluminum hats at deflecting thought-detection efforts.

An article about a man who covered his friend's WHOLE APARTMENT in foil while he was away for new year's (this takes anal to a new extreme!)

How to make a wi-fi antenna from foil