English chemist and physicist · 1766–1828
William Hyde Wollaston
William Hyde Wollaston found palladium and rhodium in the residues of platinum ore, and became rich from his secret method for making platinum workable. He announced one of his elements in a highly unusual way: by putting it on sale.
- Elements credited
- 2
- Discoveries
- 1803
- Co-discoverers
- 0
- Where
- England
The work
Wollaston and his partner Smithson Tennant bought a large stock of South American platinum ore and divided the work of analysing it. Wollaston took the part that dissolved in aqua regia. In 1802 he extracted a new white metal and named it palladium, after the asteroid Pallas, found that year.
Rather than publish, he anonymously advertised “palladium, or new silver” for sale at a London shop in 1803. Chemists suspected a fraud, and Richard Chenevix even declared it an alloy. Wollaston only revealed he was the discoverer in 1805. Meanwhile he had found a second metal whose salts were rose-red, and named it rhodium, from the Greek for rose.
Rhodium and Palladium side by side
Life and career
Wollaston was born in East Dereham, Norfolk, one of 17 children, and trained as a physician at Cambridge. He gave up medicine around 1800 to devote himself to research.
He worked out how to make pure platinum malleable using powder metallurgy and supplied it for laboratory vessels for decades. He also noticed the dark lines in the Sun’s spectrum before Fraunhofer and invented the camera lucida, a drawing aid.
Also known for
- Malleable platinum by powder metallurgy
- The camera lucida
- First observation of dark lines in the solar spectrum