In 1787 the young Army Lieutenant Karl Axel Arrhenius discovered a strange black rock , much like a lump of coal, in an old quarry near the small Swedish village of Ytterby. The name of this unknown village simply means “town on the outskirts.” That its name only suggests its location suggests that it does not have any striking features.
Arrhenius knew that the rock was too heavy to be coal so he believed he had found an unknown mineral of tungsten , a metal that had been discovered in Spain 4 years earlier. Interestingly, tungsten (which comes from the Swedish tung sten, heavy stone) is the only element that has two names. The second is tungsten (from the German dirty wolf). It was discovered by the brothers Fausto and Juan José Elhuyar at the Vergara Seminary. The first wanted to call it tungsten (a name that triumphed in Germany, Spain and Italy) and the second tungsten (in England and France).
For the analyzes Arrhenius passed the sample to the chemist Johan Gadolin of the University of Åbo, then in Sweden and today Turku, Finland. Gadolin (who has an element named after him, gadolinium, also found at Ytterby) worked with the material fromArrheniusuntil 1794, when it announced that inside it had discovered a new ‘land’ that represented 38% of its total weight. He called it a ‘land’because it could not separate the oxygen it containedby the traditional method of heating intensively with charcoal. He named it yttria, in honor of Ytterby. And although he misspelled it, the name curdled.
Yttria was, in fact, yttrium oxide. The metal itself was isolated by heating it with yitrium chloride with potassium by Friedrich Whöler in 1828 (the same year he synthesized urea, building the decisive bridge that would unite inorganic and organic chemistry).
Themineralfrom which yttrium oxide was extracted was calledgadolinita, which is a silicate of beryllium, iron and ytrium. That it contained beryllium and that Gadolin did not discover it is surprising, but such a failure allowed Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin to obtain it in Paris 4 years later. Today Gadolin’s “new earth” is suspected of being contaminated with many other elements; but we will never know that because his collection was lost when the university was destroyed by fire in 1827.
In 1843 Carl Gustav Mosander, investigating elyttrium oxideIn more detail, he discovered that it was actually made up of three: yttrium oxide, which was white; terbium oxide, which was yellow; and erbium oxide, which was pink. The names of these two new elements are, as can be assumed, variations on the same theme: the city of Ytterby. The fourth element, isolated from those contaminated yttrium samples in 1878, does pay that well-deserved tribute to the city:Yterbio.
