Finnish chemist · 1760–1852
Johan Gadolin
Johan Gadolin discovered the first rare-earth element. In 1794 he found a new earth, yttria, in a black stone from a Swedish quarry, beginning a story that would add 16 elements to the periodic table.
How Yttrium was found
In 1787 an army lieutenant, Carl Axel Arrhenius, found a heavy black mineral in a feldspar quarry at Ytterby, near Stockholm. Gadolin analysed it in 1794 and found that nearly 40 per cent of it was an unknown earth.
It was named yttria, after the village. Over the next century, chemists showed that Gadolin’s yttria and the related earths from the same mineral contained many elements, including terbium, erbium and ytterbium, all named after Ytterby.
Life and career
Born 1760 · Died 1852
Gadolin was born in Åbo (now Turku), in Finland, which was then part of Sweden, and studied at the academy there and at Uppsala. He became professor of chemistry at Åbo.
He was one of the first Nordic chemists to adopt Lavoisier’s new chemistry and wrote the first Swedish-language textbook on it. The mineral he studied was renamed gadolinite, and gadolinium was named after it.
Discovered in the same era
Other elements identified within ten years of 1794.