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"Tin foil" is the North American name for "aluminium foil" that's why I put Al in brackets.

• kragen 4y ago
  Tin foil and aluminum foil are two different things, although many North Americans do not know this. Tin foil (once commonplace, now hard to find) is made of tin, while aluminum foil is made out of aluminum, which is a different metal from tin. For many purposes the differences are not very important — both are low-melting-point, white, corrosion-resistant, food-safe metals that can take a high polish — but for solar-collector mirrors the differences in reflectivity and corrosion-resistance matter a lot. This conversation reminds me of a guy on Reddit who learned that old-timey whitewash was lime, so he tried painting things with lime, but it was gardening lime (calcium carbonate) rather than slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), which is what holds whitewash together. As you can imagine, his "whitewash" worked very poorly.
  • noxer 4y ago
    You are wrong on that. It's the same thing just different places use different words. Just like "pencil lead" does not refer to lead. It refers to the thing inside a pencil. The composition of that changed over time but the name didn't. There are plenty other fix terms like "gas" (gasoline) or "tin foil hat" (a hat made out of aluminium foil) which everyone knows what is meant by it despite the word(s) describing something different. Nowhere in this thread anyone but you was taking about foils made out of tin metal.