History+of+vanadium

HISTORY of VANADIUM Vanadium was actually discovered "twice"!

Around 1803, a Spanish chemist, by the name of Andres Manuel del Rio at Mexico City isolated some salts from a material obtained from "brown lead" (now called vanadite), which he found in a mine near Hidalgo, in Northern Mexico. He found that the colors were similar to those of chromium, so he called the element Panchromium ("something which can take or have any color"). He then renamed the element Erythronium ("red") when he saw that most of these salts turned red when heated up. It is said that he withdrew his claim after a Frenchman, Collett-Desotils, disputed this, and it took thirty more years to prove that del Rio was right.

In 1830, Nils Gabriel Sefström (a Swedish chemist) took some iron ore from a Swedish mine and was able to isolate a new oxide. Because of its beautiful multicolored compounds, he named this new element after the goddess Vanadis (a Northern-Germanic divinity of beauty and fertility).

In the same year, another chemist named Friedrich Wöhler came into possession of del Rio's "brown lead" and confirmed that del Rio had made the discovery of vanadium. They kept the name “Vanadium” rather than Rio's suggestion of Erythronium.

We had to wait until 1867 for an English chemist, Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, to produce metallic vanadium from vanadium trichloride (VCl3) and hydrogen gas: this gave vanadium metal and HCl.