Swedish chemist and metallurgist · 1745–1818
Johan Gottlieb Gahn
Johan Gottlieb Gahn isolated metallic manganese in 1774. He was a mining engineer at the Falun copper mine and a close friend of Carl Wilhelm Scheele.
How Manganese was found
Scheele had shown that pyrolusite, a black mineral used in glassmaking, contained an unknown metal, but he could not free it. Gahn packed pyrolusite into a crucible lined with charcoal and heated it strongly. The carbon stripped away the oxygen and left a button of metal.
The metal was named manganese, after the magnesia region of Greece, which gave its name to several black and white minerals.
Life and career
Born 1745 · Died 1818
Gahn was born in Voxna, Hälsingland, studied at Uppsala, and worked for most of his life at Falun, where he improved copper smelting and other industrial processes.
He and Scheele showed that phosphorus is a component of bone, which led to bones replacing urine as its source. He built up a large mineral collection and was famous for his skill with the blowpipe.
Discovered in the same era
Other elements identified within ten years of 1774.