Elementymology & Elements Multidict

memory peg	Shiny steel-gray metal melting point 1522 °C; 2772 °F boiling point 3338 °C; 6040 °F density 4.47 g/cc; 278.99 pounds/cubic foot
1794 Johan Gadolin, Finland
Ytterby, village in Sweden (just as Ytterbium, Erbium, and Terbium!) named by Anders Gustaf Ekeberg

The chemist Lieutenant Carl Axel Arrhenius (1757-1824), student of the Swedish chemist Berzelius, found in 1787 in the dumps of the Ytterby quarry (for information and illustrations of Ytterby's quarry and a location map see the Rare Earths page) an interesting find, an exceptionally heavy piece of black broken rock. He named it ytterbite after the location with the standard suffix -ite added to indicate a mineral. This stone was sent to, among others, Johan Gadolin (1760-1852), professor at Åbo University.
Gadolin found that the "black stone of Ytterby" was composed of 38% of a new "earth type" ("earths" are compounds of elements, usually oxides). He concluded his analysis in 1794 and named this new earth ytterbia (note). His analysis was confirmed three years (1797) later when Anders Gustaf Ekeberg (1767-1813) analysed a larger sample. Ekeberg shortened the name to yttria. In the decades after Antoine Lavoisier developed the new chemistry built on the concept that earths could be reduced to their elements, the discovery of a new earth (with name ending in "a") was regarded as equivalent to discovering the element within. Thus the element reducible from the earth yttria would be Yttrium.

However, yttria was in fact it was a mixture of a number of metal oxides. In 1843, Carl Gustav Mosander (1797-1858) separated yttria into three parts, one of which kept the original name:

1. Yttria (with a colorless salt and colorless oxyde),
2. Erbia (yellow oxyde, colorless salt), and
3. Terbia (rose oxyde, red salt).
   (Later Erbia and Terbia were interchanged).

In more than a century of research, ten new elements were found in Gadolin's yttria (see table above). To commemorate Johan Gadolin, the mineral was renamed by Martin Klaproth into gadolinite.

Until the 1920s the chemical symbol Yt was used (note).

Peter van der Krogt in Ytterby, Summer 2009.

Click here for more photos

A Chronological list of discovery of the rare earths and their names and information and illustrations of Ytterby's quarry and a location map is on the Rare Earths page.

• Mary Elvira Weeks, Discovery of the Elements, comp. rev. by Heny M. Leicester (Easton, Pa.: Journal of Chemical Education, 1968), pp. 667-699.
• Seltene Erden. Gmelins Handbuch der anorganische Chemie, 8. Aufl.; System-Nummer 39 (1938).
• Lauri Niinistö, "Discovery and Separation of Rare Earths". In Rare Earths, ed. Regino Sáez Puche & Paul A. Caro, 25-42. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1997.
• Peter B. Dean, and Kirsti I. Dean, "Sir Johan Gadolin of Turku: The Grandfather of Gadolinium." (on-line PDF file).