You probably don't know that 'u' in colour is a more recent British development than the standard US English is based on. US English is more original than the current British one.
Is it? Color was already spelled "colour" in the typical Middle English [1]. AFAIK the US development happened later to make all color-related words consistent (since it was spelled "color" in Latin, and English has lots of Latin-derived words).
You misrepresent the timeline, though. Webster popularised the simplifications in US English in 1828. But this was about six hundred years after colour was borrowed into English from French, not the Latin "color" that Webster preferred.
No, getting rid of the ’u' was Webster's idea. But standardized spelling is such a recent phenomenon that there's probably no definitive fact of the matter as to which spelling is 'original'.
